Whether we like it or not, systemic racism and white preference will be at the heart of the 2016 presidential election. Not surprisingly, Democrats see the issue one way; Republicans see it in another light.

GOP leader Donald Trump, for instance, has galvanized the disaffected white vote in early primary states, forcing his closest competitors to match his political rhetoric on issues such as immigration reform.





Hillary Clinton, hoping to rally non-white voters to her side before the South Carolina primary, took a different approach in a Harlem neighborhood in New York City earlier this week. Clinton talked about systemic racism, and asked white Americans to “practice humility” and recognize white preference that social scientists have long documented in American culture.

"White Americans need to do a better job of listening when African-Americans talk about the seen and unseen barriers that you face every day," she said at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on Monday. "We need to recognize our privilege and practice humility, rather than assume that our experiences are everyone's experiences."

Clinton used her Harlem speech to promote a new $2 billion plan that would create teams of social workers, educators and behavioral health specialists in schools where there are abnormally high rates of arrests on school grounds.

Some sort of intervention is obviously needed in these schools. Whether in-school educational and social science teams can help, though, is debatable. Still, Clinton’s goal in the program – to create a pipeline where children from these troubled schools have a chance to make it through to college – is perhaps the most important thing we can focus on in America right now. Education is the great equalizer.

"This is not just an education issue," Clinton said. "This is a civil rights issue, and we cannot ignore it any longer. The bottom line is this: We need to be sending our kids to college. We need a cradle-to-college pipeline, not sending them into court and into prison."

But the bigger issue at the heart of what Clinton was speaking to – and what is driving potentially tens of millions of white GOP primary voters into the arms of reality TV star and billionaire Donald Trump – is something that many white Americans live every day but likely don’t understand.



It’s called “white fragility.”

Social scientists have only recently begun to sort through this concept. In short, it’s the belief among white Americans that they are under siege in a country where white preference is eroding and where long-established social norms are changing dramatically. And they’re terrified of that change.

“White fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves,” social scientist Robin DiAngelo wrote in a 2011 study in the International Journal of Critical Pedagogy. DiAngelo said these actions could include outward displays of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt. It could also mean silence. And all these behaviors function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.

In her study on “white fragility,” DiAngelo (who is white) described an illustrative, extraordinary encounter that she moderated with a black colleague in a setting where all of the participants (other than the co-moderator) were white.

“I am a white woman. I am standing beside a black woman,” DiAngelo wrote. “We are facing a group of white people who are seated in front of us. We are in their workplace, and have been hired by their employer to lead them in a dialogue about race. The room is filled with tension and charged with hostility. I have just presented a definition of racism that includes the acknowledgment that whites hold social and institutional power over people of color. A white man is pounding his fist on the table. His face is red and he is furious. As he pounds he yells, ‘White people have been discriminated against for 25 years! A white person can’t get a job anymore!’ I look around the room and see 40 employed people, all white.”

DiAngelo then describes the palpable, deep-seated anger – the “white fragility” - that permeates the beliefs of this group.

“There are no people of color in this workplace. Something is happening here, and it isn’t based in the racial reality of the workplace. Why is this white man so angry? Why is he being so careless about the impact of his anger? Why are all the other white people either sitting in silent agreement with him or tuning out? We have, after all, only articulated a definition of racism.”



What DiAngelo witnessed was the public display of “white fragility” that is now at the core of a vitriolic, corrosive political discourse in the 2016 presidential election. Both national political parties are playing off this “white fragility,” for vastly different reasons and possible outcomes.

While the concept of “white privilege” – the notion that white Americans are the lucky recipients of favor in life by virtue of the color of their skin, and that this fact is embedded in all aspects of modern American life – has been studied by social scientists for decades.

“Whiteness is dynamic, relational, and operating at all times and on myriad levels,” DiAngelo wrote. “These processes and practices include basic rights, values, beliefs, perspectives and experiences purported to be commonly shared by all but which are actually only consistently afforded to white people.”

But this much newer concept of “white fragility” – that tens of millions of white Americans are threatened by a social upheaval of such privilege - is quite new. It is clearly unsettling.

When that basic premise of privilege for white people in America is challenged – as it is now on many fronts and as the demographics change in the country – it causes social, personal upheaval. It causes “white fragility” – and translates into the political voices on display in the 2016 presidential primaries.

So what can we do about this? Perhaps most importantly, we should talk about it publicly.