Talk:White defensiveness

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 30 August 2021 and 8 December 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Benrthorne.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 04:52, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Potential neutrality issue
While the subject definitely warrants an article as it's come up in politics in contemporary times, it is controversial and should be framed as such. Adding criticism of the theory, for example, would make the article more neutral. Kirbanzo (userpage - talk - contribs) 18:11, 9 March 2020 (UTC)


 * A good start would be rewriting the lede so that it's not explicitly racist. -Thucydides411 (talk) 11:00, 14 June 2020 (UTC)


 * I've rewritten the lede to attribute the term. However, the body of the article still presents this concept as if it were a scientific discovery, rather than a contested sociological concept. -Thucydides411 (talk) 11:11, 14 June 2020 (UTC)
 * "as it comes up in politics"
 * Shouldn't this warrant a citation? Who came up with the term? When does a phrase thrown around on media become a "term" or concept"? Following the article's logic, doesn't the black public's refusal/unwillingness to discuss atrocities committed by blacks (slavery, genocide, anti-white hate & criminality, especially in the US) warrant a similar article?
 * 24.189.248.62 (talk) 19:03, 28 November 2021 (UTC) - Uncle Joe


 * This is a New Yorker review of Robin DiAngelo's book White Fragility, which gives a critical view of the concept: . -Thucydides411 (talk) 12:59, 14 June 2020 (UTC)

I've added in a criticism section. Sdio7 (talk) 23:45, 14 June 2020 (UTC)
 * That doesn't suffice. The term is controversial, as is the entire concept (defensiveness, diversion, fragility), and this should be mentioned in the lede.

88.70.160.201 (talk) 07:38, 13 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Criticism sections are generally considered a bad way to organize articles per WP:CSECTION. If a concept is controversial, that should be indicated clearly throughout the text through citations to proper experts or similar high-quality sources, not confined to a single section and cited to axe-grindy culture-war opinion pieces.  EDIT:  Also, this is obvious, but opinion-pieces can't be used to frame an academic concept as controversial; we would ideally want sources of weight comparae at least secondary non-opinion coverage discussing the controversy.  --Aquillion (talk) 00:38, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Quite agree. There are very interesting and difficult issues in framing a concept like this for a public encyclopedia. I've tried to walk this line in my edits to the lead just now. Others, please let me know thoughts. Cleopatran Apocalypse (talk) 05:46, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

Jesse Lile?
Who is Jesse Lile, and why should we care about his criticism? We readers need to know his area of expertise, at least — an explanation as to why his opinion is paricularly important. MeegsC (talk) 13:57, 19 June 2020 (UTC)


 * I've shortened the description of his criticism. -Thucydides411 (talk) 18:17, 19 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I've added a snippet to identify his professional background. Schazjmd   (talk)  18:33, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

False statements in lead
The lead says DiAngelo coined the term in 2011, but its been around at least since 1996, e.g., this paper NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 19:56, 25 June 2020 (UTC)
 * The paper you link only uses the term in its references to another paper (Roman, L. G. (1993). White is a color! White defensiveness, postmodernism, and anti-racist pedagogy. In C. McCarthy & W Crichlow (Eds.), Race identity and representation in education. New York: Routledge.) that uses the phrase in its title. I don't have access to that 2d paper to see how they're using it. "White defensiveness" has a literal meaning so I'd think it was strange if nobody had ever used it before DiAngelo. But in this article, maybe it would be clearer to say DiAngelo popularized the phrase to mean all the baggage she attached to it, rather than coined. (I haven't read her book; I'm assuming that she equates "white defensiveness" and "white fragility" in it, as that's how the article reads.)  Schazjmd   (talk)  20:12, 25 June 2020 (UTC)


 * There are two related terms here: "white defensiveness" (coined in 1993, as far as I can tell) and "white fragility" (coined by Robin DiAngelo in 2011). Both come out of "Whiteness Studies," a sub-field of Critical Race Theory. The two terms should be differentiated more clearly in the lede and throughout the article. -Thucydides411 (talk) 11:25, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for peering behing the paywall. If the terms are "related" this implies they are not synonyms, so its unclear why "White Fragility" is given as an alternative name for the topic of this article? NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 12:07, 6 July 2020 (UTC)
 * The term "white fragility" (as opposed to the book article) used to redirect to White privilege. Then this article was created in March 2020 and the redirect changed. When this article was written, lumped the two terms together, and DiAngelo was just a minor part of the article. Since then, the focus in the article has gradually shifted to place more emphasis on DiAngelo's views and counters to it. (There is also the related White backlash article.) I think the earlier version of the Definition section did a better job with the overall article concept than the current version that overemphasizes DiAngelo's "white fragility".  Schazjmd   (talk)  13:38, 6 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks! This isn't really my area but I'd encourage interested eds to try to tune up this collection of articles.  It may makes sense to do some merging/splitting/re-arranging, I don't know.  FYI, DiAngelo's work was added to theWhite privilege article in March 2015 as a paragraph in a different section.  I assume it was given a sub section heading later on, and that's what the redirect pointed at.  This doesn't matter, unless eds try to sort things out and I just thought I'd share the diff link to save someone else the trouble of looking. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 14:56, 6 July 2020 (UTC)


 * I'll have to look more at the literature on "white defensiveness," but Google ngrams indicates that it's a term that came and went in the 1990s. I'm a bit doubtful as to whether it's actually notable enough for its own page. -Thucydides411 (talk) 19:04, 6 July 2020 (UTC)
 * This is premature and I don't want to get into it now (and in any case I don't know enough to discuss it)..... if this page "white defensiveness" goes away, what happens to DiAngelo's coined term "white fragility" (as opposed to her book by that title)? NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 19:32, 6 July 2020 (UTC)
 * If this article went away, there's still White privilege (the concept). Schazjmd   (talk)  19:43, 6 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Good point. I think I need a map NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 21:00, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

Excessive focus on DiAngelo
The article quotes a ton of opinion-pieces criticizing DiAngelo, yet only quotes her a few times in passing - far more text is devoted to opinion-piecs criticizing her than to DiAngelo herself! I've removed the lowest-quality ones, but even for the higher-quality ones, they belong on White Fragility (book) or on her article, not here, since this article covers a lot more than just her. More generally it feels like editors who knew the concept was controversial have tried to prove it by padding a controversy section with opinion-pieces disagreeing with DiAngelo specifically; that's not the appropriate way to go about that sort of thing and is an inappropriate use of a WP:CSECTION. (An opinion writer in the Federalist disagreeing about a sociological concept about race tells us nothing on its own, say.) What we need are, ideally, sources covering its academic reception, or at least WP:SECONDARY non-opinion pieces discussing the concept and its flaws. Then, once we have those, this coverage should be worked into the appropriate article rather than quarantined into a criticism section. --Aquillion (talk) 00:54, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Ongoing neutrality issues?
Are there seen to be ongoing neutrality issues on this page? I actually think it would benefit from some commentary around the contested nature of the type of thing that white defensiveness is... but apart from that it otherwise seems fairly reasonable. Cleopatran Apocalypse (talk) 01:19, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

Removed unnecessary paragraphs
The section under white fragility was a WP:COATRACK of various criticisms aimed at Robin DiAngelo's book, that had nothing to do with the concept of white fragility. These "criticisms" of the book (well, the valid ones, coming from subject experts and reliable sources) belong on the book's article, not this page. 46.97.170.19 (talk) 14:36, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

The paragraphs I removed were not relvant to the section. They were criticisms of a book that has it's own wikipedia page. Please discuss before reverting. 46.97.170.19 (talk) 11:08, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

NPOV
This article is in serious need of a balance and point of view review. As it’s currently written, It’s presented in a way that portrays the hypothesis as being of an undisputed factual nature. It doesn’t even offer any kind of Scholarly critique of the concept or even general criticism. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2603:6010:3b00:700:9c12:3345:17a6:dbc4 (talk) 16:44, 3 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Can you give some concrete examples of scholarly literature that's missing? — Bilorv ( talk ) 22:16, 4 May 2021 (UTC)
 * On this, I added "perceived" in the lead (following the sentence in the article) and a few other minor changes. There's an important conceptual distinction between an academic theory that lacks a scientific evidence base and a scientific theory that does have such an evidence base. It's not to say the theory is not describing a real phenomenon, but that at present we have no basis to know whether it's describing a real phenomenon. The solution is simply to not assert the theory as factual. Cleopatran Apocalypse (talk) 23:45, 1 August 2021 (UTC)
 * OK, I feel as if I may be dancing on very thin ice here but I came across a few things that present an alternate viewpoint which may or may not be worth noting here on the page. https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/black-fragility and https://books.google.com/books/about/Black_Fragility.html?id=JPq6zgEACAAJ. I doubt substack has any validity as a RS but I only post it as something of a starting point to bring the article back to the center.71.190.233.44 (talk) 06:03, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

Origin of "White Fragility", supposedly coined by DiAngelo is probably inaccurate
In this article, "White Fragility" was supposedly coined by her in the early 2010s. However, I have found evidence in an article written in the September 2005 Smithsonian article about the Riceville, Iowa 3rd grade experiment by renowned teacher Jane Elliot that proves otherwise. And I quote, pp. 86, 4th paragraph "Elliot replied "Why are we so worried about the fragile egos of white children who experience a couple of hours of made up racism one day when blacks experience real racism every day of their lives?"" Gizziiusa (talk) 06:45, 14 April 2022 (UTC)gizziiusa  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gizziiusa (talk • contribs) 06:40, 14 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Not at all the same. DiAngelo's "white fragility" refers to the inability of white people to handle race-based criticism, instead resorting to defense mechanisms of denial, refusal to consider their own unconscious biases, etc... Elliot was defending her then-new experiment from critics who claimed white children would endure "psychological damage" if they participated in her event. The preceding paragraph; source
 * Hundreds of viewers wrote letters saying Elliott's work appalled them. "How dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children," one said. "Black children grow up accustomed to such behavior, but white children, there's no way they could possibly understand it. It's cruel to white children and will cause them great psychological damage."
 * ValarianB (talk) 12:12, 14 April 2022 (UTC)
 * In general, it's worth adding that Wikipedia is a secondary source. A claim like "DiAngelo coined 'white fragility' in the 2010s" should have a source that says exactly that, and we rely on that source to do the professional fact-checking that is out of our jurisdiction. Using a primary source that just says "white fragility" (or similar) pre-2010 is not a good source: it would be synthesis to use it to make a conclusion not stated explicitly in some source, like "DiAngelo did not coin the term because..." — Bilorv ( talk ) 18:39, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

Likely COPYVIO; revdel may be needed
I undid two revisions by, an editor in the Wiki Ed course Understanding Diversity, including their rev. 1102794679 of 23:12, 6 August, for which Earwig reports 37.9% likelihood of WP:COPYVIO from https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/white-privilege. Earwig reports 0% as of rev 1102793888‎ of six minutes earlier by User:Luk3 @23:06. Possible copyvio/revdel required. Offending material was removed in this edit; users Doug Weller and Ian (Wiki Ed) were pinged in the revert edit summary. Mathglot (talk) 10:10, 7 August 2022 (UTC)


 * @Mathglot Done. Doug Weller  talk 10:25, 7 August 2022 (UTC)

Some of the paragraphs in the article seem out of order.
I'm not super familiar with this kind of stuff so I don't feel confident in making any changes myself, but it seems like the first three paragraphs in the subsection "White denial" seem out of order. It seems that way to me because the first paragraph ends with "Regarding white denial, the theologian Leah Gaskin Fitchue wrote in 2015:", but the paragraph following it has it's own citation and isn't indented like the third paragraph, which I believe may be the quote in question. I THINK, given what I see, that the fix would be swapping the second and third paragraphs, but as I said, I don't wanna break anything. 2600:100F:A100:4D86:C5FA:83AB:967F:E1BE (talk) 08:37, 4 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I agree, so I've done the swap. Next time go ahead and do it yourself. You can't break anything in a Wikipedia edit that can be reverted by a single click, and you're more likely to get more attention/feedback on the issue through making an article edit than a talk page comment. — Bilorv ( talk ) 10:58, 7 July 2023 (UTC)