The Black Lives Matter movement is opening up a lot of great conversations about our cultures' conditionings and behaviours around race, and these conversations are circulating widely on social media, making it easier than ever for people to educate themselves about how racial bias shows up in our culture.
These conversations must be had if we are going to heal racial inequity in our world and can become very uncomfortable for the people who must have them. This discomfort shows up for many white people whose racial biases have been pointed out, and for people of colour who could be putting themselves at various levels risk to try and point out or discuss racial bias.
The more I look into this the more I find that people of colour are asking white people like me to do our own research on the internet, rather than burden them with the task of tiptoeing around our white fragility in order to help us understand how our racial biases are functioning in our relationships.
So I listened to the audiobook version of Robin DiAngelo's book, White Fragility, which was great. It really helped me recognize my own white fragility and gave me tools to deal with my own racial biases. Those biases are there in me. I don't want them, but they are there, they are deep, and I want to retrain my body/mind system to minimize their damaging effects in my relationships.
The book is long and has a lot of great things in there I want to remember, and an audiobook is not so easy to scan back through for the salient points. Thankfully the RISE District YouTube channel has published this great whiteboard animation to efficiently explain this complex and emotionally loaded topic.
Here’s a direct link to the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/CdFCRHhygHo
The topic of this explainer video is White Fragility, which directly refers to the emotional explosions or implosions many white people have when they feel their identity of being a good person is threatened by having someone point out some racial bias that's showing up in their assumptions or behaviours.
The brilliance of this video is that it makes the topic very clinical and unemotional in the way it presents concepts that could otherwise be inflammatory while making the visuals compelling and engaging and visually relevant so that the viewer's mind is receiving the information from a few different angles at the same time.
The characters are drawn as non-threatening ordinary-looking people. The filmmakers were careful to avoid making the characters into caricatures or stereotypes, striping any emotional judgement out of the tone of the video. This allows a very thorough and succinct summary of the White Fragility principles DiAngelo teaches to be told in a way that is very palatable and easy to receive.
This animated explainer video and others like it are excellent tools that allow people to educate themselves about racial bias and conditioning without stressing out the people of colour in their lives, and without having to navigate through the agitating flame wars that fill the internet when researching controversial topics. This is a great gift to our society, all made possible with the power of whiteboard animation and YouTube!