Note to the reader : If white fragility is something you face regularly and are well versed with the subject matter, please make sure you’re either comfortable reading about it, are well regulated before you engage with this material, or consider this might not be of value altogether for you specifically at this time.

It took one time. One fucking time — the first one at that — standing in my Arab identity in a public space (Instagram), for an immediate backlash in the form of a 5 paragraphs-long melodramatic lament and for the security of a strong, able, six foot white cis-het middle-class dude to crumble. I know, shocking.

On Friday, I reposted on my account a reel from Us army vet-turned-activist Greg J. Stoker — whose words gave me support in a moment when I found myself in need of community — and added to his in the caption, which would later catch the eye of and shatter our dude’s world.

I had just seen a music mate’s post on Fb about how if we agreed with how Trump treated Zelensky in the White House, we would have been on Hitler’s side in WWII France (that’s at least the gist of his own melodramatic white dude’s lament).

I saw red. I would see more posts along those lines that evening — a congregation of liberals for whom the line had finally been crossed, coming together in support of a zionist millionaire whose feelings got hurt. People who never expressed anything political once in their entire social media life, that’s what it took to tip the scales in favor of standing for justice ? Not a 17th months-long genocide ? To be sure, I don’t condone the abusive behavior of the tech broligarchy’s puppets in charge, and I stand for the people of Ukraine (save for the war criminals who went to torture, assassinate, rape and maim children alongside Israelis) whose land the West is turning into a colony to exploit their resources.

I was fuming. So I took to good old Instagram and said as much. That as an Arab I was offended, that the West had done so good a job at propaganda to foster anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment while elevating the zionist narrative that it went completely over those liberals’ heads that they were denying the existence of Palestinians, oh the hypocrisy, etc, etc.

Cut to yesterday — 6 whole days later — when I receive my dude’s text.

He tells me how important our music collaboration is to him, how he’s saying everything he is saying because he cares, etc. Nevertheless : he has something on his chest he wishes to share that has been on his mind keeping him awake at night for the entire past week. He stumbled upon my post and it shook him with stupor. He is White and a Westerner he announces, and he felt targeted by the “violence” of my “radical wording”. He found himself “swallowed whole by my anger”, his “mere existence” the object of my wrath. Let’s not be reduced to fixed identities or constrain anyone by assigning them to a certain group, he enjoins.

I took a deep breath and reminded him that my message wasn’t about him, and that I never said that the people I call out where white, or that all white people do that — it’s literally a White Westerner talking in the video. He acknowledges it’s about a specific behavior, but still, even if he knows it wasn’t about him, it felt about him. Don’t I see, when we use “global terms”, people like him can be touched and feel excluded, when really they share the same values as mine like human dignity and respect.

And what in what I wrote does he deem to be a “global term”, I ask ? And I did ask, but he didn’t answer. Is it Arab ? Perhaps. Probably ? Who knows. Mystery.

It created a wall between us and he can’t see how we can create together if it remains.

Keeping my cool but barely, I went on to break down what could be considered violence in my post. Calling the liberals hypocrites ? Is it calling Trump, Vance and Rubio tech broligarchy puppets ? Can that really be violence when they have all the actual power and it does not impact their reputation or their lives ? Do you identify to this group so you’d feel targeted by the so-called violence ? The only moment I considered violence was when I talked about the war criminals, but I refrained and only mentioned two of the long list of horrors they exact on the daily, so if anything I was restrained. For the rest, I talk about violence, I don’t commit it.

And there lies the problems : in classic whiteness fashion, he made his comfort my problem and is asking I do this emotional labor for him.

But let’s look at another few elements of this magnificent display, this textbook case of wh.wh..whhhYyte fragility 👻

• Policing my tone and my words : expecting me to express myself in a way deemed palatable and appropriate, to prioritize his feelings and cater to his standards and emotional comfort.

• The double standard : others can express solidarity freely, but Arabs face consequences for speaking up.

• Unchecked privilege : my claiming my Arab identity meant in this instance I wasn’t claiming my whiteness — how dare I, when whiteness embraced me — which sent him a mirror that forced him to contemplate his own whiteness. A lot of white people who haven’t done any deconstruction work — which I had to do myself, and is an ever on-going process — aren’t used to that and resent it (thereby so do they you). What they don’t realize is they can afford to avoid it. They can afford to think of themselves as simply human and pretend to be color-blind, because in a racist system, white is the norm, neutral and universal. But they don’t grant racialized people the same privilege of ignoring their race. We didn’t choose for race to be a foundation of our modern society but here we are. That might feel icky when you it dawns on you that you’re profiting from it, my dude, but it’s not my job to make you feel good about it.

• “I’m not the bad guy” rethoric : just like a standing ovation at the Oscars for a Palestinian director’s speech during a Trump presidency, the bravery of the non-deconstructed liberal (pardon the redundancy) who stands against racism is performative (what I wouldn’t give to see if they had stood when it was Biden in the oval office…). It falls short of acknowledging that you can’t be exempted from racism when you where raised and are part of a system founded on it. As the author of White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo (who coined the term) says “The biggest adaptation of racism over time has been the idea that racism is a conscious bias of bad people”. This binary opposition between good and evil allows to put oneself at a distance from evil people — the ones doing the racism — and is a racist construction.

Whoo ! That was a lot to unpack. I hope this story helped you either make sense of an experience or feel validated in some way. Stay tuned for part II where I talk about what truly matters though this all, i.e. my takeaways from this experience, and the beautiful wisdoms I received from those I least expected.

Have you ever been on either side of white fragility ? If that’s the case I’d love to hear your story. Email me at sarah.novaro@gmail.com.

Note : you might have thought to yourself “Why call him out when you could call him in, Sarah ?”, as one could expect from a trauma-informed coach. I don’t extend that to him for numerous reasons that would take up too much space to go into in an already long letter, but I’m willing to share more if you reach out.