I AM

This is what seems like it wants to be expressed through me today...

It feels/seems as if I lapsed into a coma of sorts sometime in mid-2013 and lasting until just a few months ago. This is how it seems to me. It seems like sometime in mid-2013 I lapsed into a coma in Oakland, California and two years later I somewhat magically regained consciousness and awoke here in Bremerton, Washington. This is in fact something of a quasi-dramatic overstatement being used mostly for effect. Obviously, I was not really in a coma during this period of time. However, it does somewhat realistically seem as if it did sort of happen.

I am also very cognizant of and have absolutely full consciousness and awareness about what has most likely triggered all of this.

Between February and May of 2013 I experienced two significant medical emergencies at my place of work in downtown San Francisco, CA. During the first event, I walked into my supervisor’s office very early in the morning and informed him of very concerning physical sensations I was experiencing. He subsequently called 911. Paramedics arrived, took some initial readings, and the decision was fairly quickly made by the paramedics to transport me by ambulance to Kaiser Hospital/San Francisco. I stayed at Kaiser for most of the day. Many tests were taken. I was eventually released several hours later. I went to Japantown and treated myself to dinner at my favorite Japanese restaurant there. The food was great, as usual. I then traveled back to Oakland to my partner and our apartment.

The second medical event occurred almost exactly 3 months later. I experienced very similar and equally concerning physical sensations. One again I walked into my supervisor’s office and explained to him that I was having the same symptoms I had experienced 3 months earlier. This time one of the physicians who was employed at my place of work was available and was called into my supervisor’s office for consultation. After a brief consultation with this person a decision was made once again to transport me via ambulance to Kaiser Hospital/San Francisco. Being carried through my place of work, however, on a gurney three months earlier, in front of co-workers and clients had been stress inducing for me. So this time I asked my supervisor if he would drive me to the hospital instead. He agreed. His car was parked several blocks away from the building. He informed me it would likely take him 15-20 minutes to come back and pick me up. I stayed outside and awaited his return. By the time he arrived back to take me to the hospital, some twenty minutes later, all my symptoms had abated and I felt oddly refreshed and very renewed. Given this, I requested that my supervisor drop me off at the San Francisco Transbay Bus Terminal instead of taking me to the hospital. He did this. I took a bus back home to Oakland and relaxed for the rest of the day.

Even though I had some very real physical symptoms during both of these medical encounters, like blood pressure readings of around 200/110 during both events, I slowly began to believe both events had essentially been rather intense panic attacks brought on by what I viewed as my extremely stressful life at that time. This, among other things, was significantly characterized by my job, which I experienced as both highly stressful and almost completely unrewarding in most ways. I also had other highly stressful aspects of my personal life at that time as well.

After the second medical “event” at my place of work, this place of work required that I get a release from my physician in order to return to work as a glorified wage slave there. Patrick, my Kaiser physician, was completely prepared to write me such a letter and told me so. However, I asked him not to do so. I was beginning to see certain clear writing on the wall in terms of my life, my life’s journey, and my future life’s vocation. This decision of mine to not get a work clearance from Patrick for all intents and purposes served as my resignation letter from my place of work. It also was the first conscious step toward what would eventually become a fourteen month stretch of homelessness for my partner, our two dogs, and myself, on the mean, somewhat unforgiving streets of Oakland, living in our twelve year old Buick Crossover. And it would also eventually be the decision that I would ultimately see as a lifesaving decision both physically and spiritually. But first, before I went to hell in order to save my life, we had enough saved from my wage slavery to pay for 6 months’ rent at our overpriced Cleveland Heights neighborhood Oakland apartment. And then we were graciously “put up” by a very supportive and loving Buddhist friend in Oakland for two more additional months before we hit the streets of Oakland living in our vehicle. Thirteen months later this same vehicle would transport us to our new home in Bremerton, WA.

Most of the things I experienced in my life before mid-2013 are relatively clear to me and feel very real, just like all of the life memories you have, unless, of course, you have dementia or some kind of chronic dissociative thing going on in your life. Things that happened in my life between mid-2013 and mid-2015 however, mostly feel like a somewhat shadowy dream or nightmare, (depending on different factors). I did experience many traumatic events during that thirteen months of living in the vehicle and of being homeless. Not all of that trauma had to do with living in the vehicle nor being homeless. My main point however, is that most of these events and even the people of that timeframe don’t feel completely real to me anymore. Events and people who are strongly connected to that 2-year period specifically and not to any previous period in my life feel the most abstract and unreal to me now. Each and every day many of these people feel less and less real and are pretty much on the periphery of my life at this point anyway. I experience relatively little sense of loss or grief around that. While at the same time I also have this sense that loss and grief are significant factors in why all of this is happening. However, it also feels like this entire experience has also been brought about by divine grace or will or some kind of weird destiny. This feels much more present and real than the grief and loss aspects do at this point. I experience this sense of divine grace and destiny as being very reassuring and as ultimately being very positive.

I know that trauma plays some role in what I am experiencing or have experienced in the last two years. It however, in no way has the starring role. I don’t believe I am in denial about that. Now that I feel relatively safe—and around what feel like authentically loving, caring, and supportive people—many of whom, in reality, feel much more like angels than mere mortals, I do not really have the motivation to lie to nor kid myself in such ways.

I believe I experienced a Dark Night of the Soul spiritual event, and a significant series of traumatic events simultaneously between 2013-2015. There were periods where the trauma was likely the most prominent. I believe I am now in a period where the Dark Night of the Soul experience is the most prominent. I believe my “coma” experience is due to the process of coming out of the Dark Night and experiencing a sort of “rebirth” that has come about as a direct result of it. I do not believe I think this simply because believing such is “sexier” than believing that everything I am experiencing is the sole purview of trauma or depression or some similar such thing. I am continuously consulting with both helping professionals and “spiritual friends” all of whom have my very best interests at heart and whom I believe would not in any way lead me astray. Each of these individuals concur with my assessment of things. 

My sense of now being awakened from my “coma” is marked by several current experiences. Some things feel almost completely foreign now--things that use to be very important in my life. Now it is as if they were never really a part of my real life at all. I will, for example, sometimes go to the social media pages of strident progressive social justice activists friends whose views I use to 99% agree with and I will read these people's last forty or fifty posts. Sometimes I’ll spend more than an hour just reading his or her posts. Or I will read an entire progressive social justice periodical or newsletter from cover to cover—one that used to be a favorite of mine. In each instance, I will have the sense while engaging in this activity and will also come away feeling as if I just read something in an exotic foreign language that I have absolutely no facility nor skill for understanding. I don’t experience anger nor frustration about what I have read. I used to when I would engage in this same activity a couple of months ago, but not now. I also don’t laugh sarcastically at what is being said and expressed. I don’t feel superior nor wiser. I don’t really feel anything. I just have this odd sensation that I simply do not really understand anything that is being expressed—that almost everything that is being expressed is something that simply no longer computes for me. I have the awareness that I used to hold the exact same beliefs as the ones I just read. Sometimes that feels somewhat odd. It no longer however, really makes any sense to me now.

Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, The Tooth Fairy, and White Fragility

Right about the time, in the last quarter of 2014, when deep consciousness surrounding the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO and Eric Garner in Long Island, NY, was beginning to grow, a lot of media attention was being focused on their deaths/murders, and certain people were beginning to get very angry, and I began seeing all kinds of things online being presented as potential answers, explanations, and general framing's for the growing questions people were asking about America’s racial life. Some of these presentations put forth to address these questions many were asking were things I saw as being credible and helpful. Others I saw as being much less so. Some of the items that were presented as solutions or explanations, to my eye, seemed to be of a type that made the situation even worse. This is where so called “White Fragility,” I believe, comes in.

It was while engaging in my own part of this challenging process, early in that process, that I became aware of a paper entitled, White Fragility by researcher and university professor, Dr. Robin DiAngelo—a white, female academic and social researcher. Various groups of people—progressive social activists, people who worked in the fields of diversity and inclusion and cultural competency, whiteness studies, and others, began to float this paper on social media and other places during this time of great and growing racialized unrest and turmoil in America. The paper was lauded in many of these same circles as a credible explanation for why white people, as a whole, have a difficult time engaging in discussions about racism, white privilege, white supremacy, and related topics. I am aware, because of my deep involvement in Zen in particular and Buddhist Studies in general, that some of these same conversations were also taking place in some Buddhist and Zen spaces as well.

The copy of Dr. DiAngelo's paper I saw had been retrieved from the annals of the International Journal of Critical Pedagogy where it had been published in 2011.

From the very beginning I had a palpable uneasiness with the paper before I even read one sentence of it. I had a strong gut aversion to the title—White Fragility. I eerily sensed something ominous my way coming.

By the time I came upon this paper I had come to a place in my life where I had developed a personal distaste and a deep uneasiness with theoretical and human research based propositions and hypotheses that felt a need to present their ideas couched within a presumed to be sound scientific framework of what I saw as unnecessary name calling, finger pointing, and negative character framing directed at particular people, groups of people, or specific identity groups. A research paper with the title, Black Rage or The Asian Dragon Lady Syndrome or Understanding the Drunken Indian Syndrome would have certainly brought about the exact same response from me as the one I had when I first saw that provocative title--White Fragility. 

My guess is that there are a whole lot of white folks out there who have never even heard of so called white fragility. Yes, for you neophytes out there, there is now this thang called white fragility. Read 'em and weep. In some ways I think it is a good thing that many people have not heard about this. If there are lots of white folks and others out there who haven’t heard of this, it holds out hope that this overwrought stereotype masquerading as a real, viable thing is perhaps not getting much play outside the very specific quarters one would expect it to be quickly welcomed into. At the other end of the spectrum however, many of you white folks may have people of color friends and colleagues who are progressive social justice activists or diversity and inclusion folks who view you as being intrinsically “fragile” in the same way Dr. DiAngelo suggests. You might not look so kindly on that characterization or upon knowing that you might have friends who view you in such an unflattering way. Take note.

The idea that Dr. DiAngelo felt such a strong imperative to potentially color (pun intended) the entire white population of the world as being specifically “fragile” in one sweeping and seemingly infallible "fail" swoop is fairly astonishing to me. And it is a sweeping characterization otherwise it might be called something like “intermittent white fragility” or “randomly occurring white fragility.” But, alas it isn’t. Dr. DiAngelo has named her new group based pejorative—white fragility, joining such others as all black people being lazy, all American Indians having a biological pre-disposition toward alcoholism, and there being a real thing commonly expressed as The Asian Dragon Lady.

I initially read Dr. DiAngelo’s scientific paper, White Fragility, four times. It was only after reading it this number of times that I felt confident in my initial assessment of it.

I came away from those four readings with an absolute certainty there was never nor is there now a real thing called “white fragility” within the entire compendium of human scientifically provable experiences. And I also came away from those initial four readings very reaffirmed in my understanding that there are most certainly human fragilities of all kinds and expressions that indeed show up and in countless concrete expressions in society and in the world. I came away reaffirmed in my understanding that there are all kinds of human failings, anxieties, forms and expressions of woundedness, expressions of emotional immaturity, or any number of other things that can indeed be characterized as a general expression of “fragility” of some kind or another and that these can show up in countless ways in the human animal--all kinds, forms, shades, sizes, colors, and ethnicities of the human animal.

There are however, two places where I in fact believe white fragility truly does exist. I believe white fragility absolutely exists in the dualistic ego mind. This is a place that is very expert and incredibly adept at creating divide and conquer strategies that are extremely ingenious, seem incredibly plausible and legit, and is very creative at manipulating its hosts and feeding on its hosts weak spots, fears, and anxieties. And I believe white fragility also exists in a certain expression of emotional reality that shows up primarily as off-the-charts frustration experienced by some people of color and some of our more overzealous white allies. This is an emotional reality that needs an outlet for its near inability to comprehend what it experiences with certain white folks if finds so incredibly tedious and unconscionable. It simply needs some kind of expressed outlet. The belief in something like "white fragility" makes complete sense to me as a type of outlet this energy would seek. I understand the frustration. I can’t however, condone its oppressive expression.

Further, what Dr. DiAngelo and others are, I believe, in some cases, intentionally and willfully mislabeling as white fragility, is likely yet another of the unbelievably complex and deep expressions of pure and simple privilege—and not just white privilege either—privilege in general. I believe perhaps most humans have some form of privilege at our immediate disposal. Perhaps none of these expressions of privilege want to be called out. Most people in America, for example, who own their own home, would likely fiercely balk at the idea that their ability to own said home comes about as a result of the direct and systemic oppression of someone else—perhaps millions or billions of others. No, the vast majority of people would likely be quick to point out how they had earned said home with their individual hard work, meticulous planning, skillful and arduous attention to fiduciary detail, etc. Imagine, now, if you will, how white folks, for the most part, must navigate this world we all live in. White folks are essentially told that not only their homes but literally every single thing they possess of any value whatsoever came to them singularly by the fact that they have white skin. You’d be extremely defensive too and in a state of deep denial if this was the energy you too had to deal with All. The. Time. You can lie but you can’t lie convincingly enough if you try and deny this. It takes an extreme degree of spiritual fortitude, development, psychological maturity, and humility not to fiercely defend what we believe we got through our own devices. It is this response born from the energy of privilege that is probably being miscast as white fragility. When this is added to that emotionally based frustration I mentioned above, is added to the extremely and sometimes evil and conniving dualistic ego mind—Viola! The Easter Bunny…ummm, I mean, make believe white fragility!

Now to Dr. DiAngelo’s White Fragility paper itself.  I found this paper itself to be sloppy and careless science at best—dangerous pseudo-science at the very worst. I found it to be completely unconvincing in its attempt to persuade me that the author had come up with something real that was worthy of my attention and serious consideration.

It is my hope that all further potential explorations into this concept by Dr. DiAngelo, if those further explorations are without significant alterations to the constructions presented in the paper I read, do not find grant money sponsorship nor further publication. I do not believe the idea of “white fragility” as presented in the paper of the same name positively contributes whatsoever to race discourse in America nor in the world. I believe it is a detriment and a distraction to such discourse. It is my (hopeful) prediction that the eventual fate of the future of this bogus and harmful concept of white fragility will necessarily be hindered by the evidenced based, peer reviewed, and double blind study standards that collectively often apply to social science research. This is my hope at least unless Dr. DiAngelo makes wide, significant, and fundamental changes to the presentation I read in her paper.

In this paper, Dr. DiAngelo also includes what she calls “a cogent example of White Fragility.” In this so called cogent example, she references a training she was giving in a workplace setting in which a white female attendee left the training upset. The worker retreated to her desk after she received what the paper terms as “sensitive and diplomatic feedback on how some of her statements had impacted several people of color in the room” 

Let’s look at this a little more closely and deeply, shall we?

Dr. DiAngelo, for example, expects the reader to simply take her word for it that the woman’s retreat back to her desk is solely the result of what specifically happened in that training room. I do believe that is a fairly reasonable assumption one might make. I do not however, believe it is the only possibility by any stretch of the imagination and definitely not the only possibility in the realm of social research that requires other possibilities be ruled out. If Dr. Di Angelo were a freelance and unseasoned journalist instead of a tenured social scientist/researcher/professor I might not expect more from this "cogent example." However, I do expect more from a scientist/researcher/professor who is purporting to convince the world of the validity of her newly minted group based pejorative, and so will future potential grant sponsors and funders.

Perhaps the woman in the so called cogent example suffers from some mental, emotional, or physical ailment that at least partially contributed to her flight from the training room. Perhaps the woman suffers from panic attacks. Maybe she is simply a drama queen. Perhaps there were long standing and intense conflicts or “bad blood” between her and the co-workers we are told she is insensitive to during the training. Maybe she has recently ended a romantic relationship with a black man and has experienced trauma and/or anger/ and/or possible rejection, hurt feelings around it all that provided strong bearing on how she conducted herself in that training. Hey, stranger things have happened. The point is, Dr. DiAngelo gives no indication that she has explored nor teased out any other potential factors that may have explained or contributed to the woman’s behavior before jumping full blast to the conclusion that the woman unerringly, incontrovertibly, and unquestionably is suffering from so called White Fragility which, of course, it completely benefits her to believe and jump to because she in the major stakeholder here in the presumed reality of so called white fragility.

Also, since she has come up with this new pejorative—White Fragility—and also presumably has been giving the type of diversity training's that play a central role in her cogent example and for a very long time, one would think she would have an extensive file of "cogent examples" from which to choose from and include in her paper. After all, this is what she is now seemingly most professionally invested in—convincing us all in the validity of white fragility. Yet she only puts forth one cogent example of it (and a very poor one, I might add). If she has them filed away somewhere, she doesn’t bother to include them. She doesn’t even mention them. She only gives us one single cogent example for something as presumably wide in scope it necessarily or potentially effects every single white person on the planet. It seems very suspect to me that she only presents one cogent example of white fragility here.

Additionally, I stridently question the academic rigor of this paper as well as the entire foundation of what she wants us all to believe when she sat down to compose the paper and she only included one cogent example of white fragility. She does give us one other similar example near the beginning of the paper that she doesn’t call a cogent example. Are two presumed and not very deeply explored examples of White Fragility really supposed to be enough to justify a character flaw potentially to be found in an entire group of people on the planet? She didn’t, after all, name it Very Intermittent and Very Randomly Occurring White Fragility. She needs to justify and validate that extremely bold assertion called white fragility, far more convincingly.

Further, with regard to that woman who leaves the training because of her supposed white fragility—most people are uncomfortable with being publicly challenged and in front of people they know or work with no matter how “sensitively and diplomatically” one might believe this challenge has been presented.

Every single day I observe people being strongly triggered and strongly reactive in situations far less intimidating than what I can imagine took place in that training room with Dr. DiAngelo. When I was homeless in Oakland I spent a lot of time in McDonald’s restaurants because of the free internet. I very often witnessed people throwing unbelievably intense and severe temper tantrums because of something like receiving a small order of fries instead of the medium order of fries they thought they had ordered. I’m not talking here of a quick and mild rebuff and redirecting of the McDonald’s employee nor of giving some mildly sassy though essentially harmless "attitude" to the employee. No, I’m talking women taking out their earrings in preparation for full-on battle while screaming a colorful assortment and stream of expletives at extremely high decibels while simultaneously literally trying to reach over the counter, seriously going for the (completely shocked) workers throat. I kid you not. And the triggered and reactive men were no better.

We now live in a world where many people simply don’t know or seemingly don’t understand the concept of restraint nor public decorum. We engage in totally overwrought and tension inducing public scenes and displays spurred on by our completely out of control reactivity, lack of self-discipline, and seemingly raw, bloodthirsty instincts that lie just a razor thin distance below the surface. Perhaps people just watch too many reality shows these days. I don’t know. What I do know is that it takes unbelievably very little stimulus to set many people off these days and have them behaving like raging maniacs in very public spaces—on public transportation, in public libraries, in hip and trendy restaurants in Noe Valley in San Francisco, on urban street corners, etc. It’s very scary. Such behavior is completely normalized in America today, especially in large urban areas and metropolitan centers. When considering this, the woman who left Dr. Di Angelo's training seems like an extremely mild mannered little kitten compared to the ferocious, bloodthirsty tigers and tigresses I've seen in action in all kinds of public settings in urban America.

If this had been a paper entitled Black Fragility or Latin Fragility instead, and with a similar lackluster presentation of cogent examples presented, justifying its presumed existence, which I am convinced someone could have easily have come up with containing at least as much of a premise for them as DiAngelo comes up with as a premise for White Fragility here--I wonder how many of the exact same people who have lauded, praised, and have been impressed with Dr. DiAngelo’s work here, would even give such a paper called Black Fragility or Latin Fragility even a serious passing glance? Or an even better question—I wonder how many would have been completely outraged and would have made sure we all knew just how outraged they were?

Finally, I believe everything Dr. DiAngelo attributes to “White Fragility” is explained by forms and expressions of human fragility and human failing that are present in and that can be appropriately generalized to the entire human population on the planet where they pertain to various regularly occurring and observable failings that can show up within a certain large percentage of people representing many different groups of people. So instead of us having “Alcoholics Fragility,” or “Drug Addicts Fragility,”or “People living with Depression Fragility,” or “Narcissistic Personality Fragility,”or “Obsessive Compulsive People Fragility” or “People who have been Traumatized Fragility”—all of these are correctly presumed to be subsumed under the general human condition of “human fragility,” and so should so called “White Fragility.”

It saddens me there are people like Dr. DiAngelo out in the world who are motivated, for whatever reasons, to characterize real personal failings people in the world have and are dealing with through pejorative and sensationalized labeling and scapegoating. It especially saddens me in this particular instance where I know there will be all kinds of guilt and shame ridden, progressively minded, very good intentioned white folks who will innocently fall prey to these shenanigans of hers. I absolutely know there will be white folks who will confidently and proudly label themselves as suffering from this new, intrinsic personality flaw du jour that has now come onto the academic, social justice, and/or diversity and inclusion scene—enabling some portion of them to now evaluate themselves in some new, negative, and completely concocted false light. 

One result of this will be that others of us will be able to triumphantly add white fragility to our cache of verbal and conceptual weapons to use on these same misguided, good- intentioned, self-labeling folks and others. So a new way to divide and conquer and insult and blame has now come onto the scene. I can now fully envision White Fragility conferences occurring various places in The San Francisco Bay Area. Of course they will be in The San Francisco Bay Area--probably Oakland, and maybe eventually other places in America as well, in the near future, though definitely in Oakland. At these conferences, guilt and shame ridden, misguided, good- intentioned white folks will get the opportunity to gather and verbally beat up on themselves and ask for absolution for their presumed offensive sins and will also get the privilege of getting beat up on by so called “experts” on White Fragility who’ve been flown in and paid big bucks specifically for such a purpose, for a day or a week-end, all in the name of fake “science,” and fake “social progress,” and fake “personal development.” God help us all.

Here is a PDF copy of Dr. DiAngelo's White Fragility paper: White Fragility paper