Moral Development and Racial Education: How We Socialize White Children and Construct White Fragility

Abstract

How do even well-meaning white people end up unable to have productive conversations about race? Or, put differently, how do even progressive white people fall victim to what Robin DiAngelo calls, “white fragility,” or the inability to endure any racial stress? In this chapter, I argue that, at least part of the answer is that we educate our children in ways that cultivate precisely this emotional response to being confronted with our own complicity in racism. In particular, I combine recent literature on the failures of color-blind education with a neo-Aristotelian analysis of moral training to argue that many white progressives socialize their children about race through color-blind racism in ways that cultivate bad habits, epistemic vices, and improper emotions. A major consequence of this is the construction of white fragility as the default emotional response for whites who are confronted about their own role in racism. In this way, white fragility should not simply be conceived of as an intellectual or cognitive confusion, but rather a constructed emotion.