White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

ACTIVITY: Locating White Fragility in Citizen

For many Black Americans, the concepts at the core of White Fragility are part of their everyday lives. In this activity, students will unpack the concept of white fragility in a prominent Black poet’s work by finding examples, creating a collage or other visual representation, writing a dialog, and analyzing a vignette.

• Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric is a genre-bending meditation on race and racism in 21st century America. Rankine, a Black woman and academic, has been awarded numerous honors and fellowships, including from the Academy of American Poets and the National Endowment for the Arts. Throughout Citizen, Rankine provides semi-autobiographical references to her experience of racial microaggressions, especially in academic and professional settings.
•  At this link, listen to Rankine read one such semi-autobiographical excerpt from Citizen that opens with a description of an inadvertent microaggression, from one of her (presumably white) colleagues. The poem is divided into 5 sections, each featuring a vignette. At the start of a series of vignettes, she writes:

“You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there.