FARMINGTON — A Bates College professor addressed about 90 people at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day service on white people’s inability to tolerate racial stress.
“Are white people really that fragile?” asked Charles Nero, professor of rhetoric, African-American studies and American cultural studies at the Lewiston college.
His speech honoring the late Civil Rights Movement leader was titled “White Fragility and the Civil Rights Movement in Hollywood.” It was sponsored by the Farmington Area Ecumenical Ministry at Old South Congregational Church.
He quoted Robin DiAngelo, consultant and trainer on issues of racial and social justice, saying, “‘White fragility is the inability of whites to tolerate racial stress.'”
According to DiAngelo, who holds a doctoral degree in multicultural education, white fragility triggers a range of defensive moves that include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence and leaving the stress-inducing situation.
Why Hollywood on a day to honor King, Nero asked. Quoting King, he said, “‘Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.'”
Nero said stories and films about black people are usually told from the perspective of a white person saving black people, citing the movie “The Blind Side.”
It is a beautiful story told as a white woman’s narrative, he said. A white woman saves a young black man, helps him become an athlete in high school and college and go on to play for the National Football League.
“The reason it is done is about white fragility,” he said. “White people can’t be made to feel uncomfortable. They need to be at the center.”
From “The Blind Side,” he showed a scene of a confrontation between a group of black men and the white woman. She tells them she carries a gun, is a member of the National Rifle Association, the District Attorney is in her prayer group and they will be arrested if they went to her neighborhood.
The movie provides two allusions to the Civil Rights Movement, Nero said. First, white resistance to integration and second, urban renewal and the interstate highway system.
The act allowing school integration “broke the back of the public school system in the South,” he said. While public schools became underfunded, private, often religious, schools began to flourish.
Books from public schools were taken and in one state, desks were sold at 50 cents apiece, he said.
“Why don’t we hear this story?” he asked. “It doesn’t make white people look good.”
Instead, the stories are about white people helping a few blacks based on their Christian morals. The main black character in “The Blind Side” was allowed into a private school based on “it’s the right thing to do.”
Scenes from the movie showed urban renewal work that wiped out many black neighborhoods to build an interstate highway system, he said.
There is a violence to white fragility as seen in the Black Lives Matter movement, Nero said. Suspicions can result in violence and death at the hands of police.
“We create walls and block out what is uncomfortable,” Pastor Jordan Shaw of Trinity United Methodist Church prayed, asking God “to break our hearts around the things that break your heart and to give us the courage to do the hard work.”
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