Opinion

Opinion: Reparations Reveals a Sense of “White Fragility”

Published

7 years ago

July 27, 2019

Editor’s Note: Leo Bazile, a former city councilmember and scholar on reparations issues has published articles in the Post and has proposed that Oakland “remain in the vanguard of direct action and advocacy on the issue.” He says, “The leadership shown by Barbara Lee and Lynette McElhaney makes it possible for the community to participate through a commission to present our plans to congress.”

When Katrina Browne testified before the June 19 congressional hearing on the H.R.40 Reparations Legislation introduced by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and co-sponsored by Rep. Barbara Lee, she addressed the very important threshold issue of White Fragility.

Katrina Browne

She testified about her discovery that she was a descendant of one of the largest and most powerful slave trading families in the history of this country.

Browne said she, as a 27-year old Seminary student studying theology and ethics, received a family history brochure from her grandmother that pointed out that she is a descendant of the De Wolf family of Rhode Island slave traders that brought more enslaved Africans to the Americas than any other U.S. family. Her calm and sincere testimony revealed their family’s relationship of wealth and political power. When she said:

“Over 12,000 men, women and children were taken across the middle passage in their ships.” The family’s leading slave trader, James De’ Wolf, was reported to have become the second richest man in the nation at the time of his death—and he served in the U.S.Senate.”

Browne’s testimony should be read by all who are concerned about the political and moral questions that the Reparations issue raises for the upcoming 2020 elections.

Since Black Democrats are being told by some leaders that raising the Reparations issue could jeopardize the election, Browne’s White Fragility issue rubs up against the political reality of when and how to address this moral imperative.

So is the moral imperative more important to African Americans than who the next president is going to be?

Browne testified:

“I want to acknowledge rightaway that the very idea of this REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY AND RACISM is to assault their sense of what this nation has been, of how we achieved our national greatness and perhaps even the role their families and communities played in this history. To weigh a national effort at acknowledgement and repair is to discount what they believed were hard sacrifices of previous generations. And to question the sources of their prosperity is to connect them to the history of slavery.”

In her New York Times bestseller on the subject of “White Fragility,” Robin Diangelo wrote about how whites enjoy benefits from this separate and unequal society “We are insulated from racial stress, at the same time we can come to feel entitled to and deeply deserving of our advantage. Given how we experience racial discrimination in a society we dominate we haven’t had to build our racial stamina. Socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or never admit to ourselves, we become “highly fragile” in conversations about race.

We consider a challenge to our racial worldview as a challenge to our very identities as good, moral people. Thus we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling and unfair moral offense.

“ To connect us to the system of racism triggers a range of defensive responses such as anger, fear and guilt And behaviors such as argumentation, silence and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation.

These responses work to reinstate white equilibrium as they repel the challenge. They return our racial comfort and maintain our dominance within the racial hierarchy. I conceptualize this process as “White Fragility.”

“ Though white fragility is triggered by discomfort and anxiety, it is born of superiority and entitlement. White fragility is not a weakness per se, in fact, it is a powerful means of white racial control and protection of white advantage,” Di Angelo writes.

Leo Bazile

Posts by Leo Bazile

Arts and Culture

COMMENTARY: Black Music is the Sound of Black Freedom: Let Us Reclaim Both This Juneteenth

Black Music Month started when Black Music Association members Ed Wright, Kenny Gamble and his wife, journalist and radio host Dyanna Williams were able to persuade President Jimmy Carter to establish the observation on June 7, 1979.

Published

1 day ago

June 9, 2026

Oakland Post

Robert Johnson (1911-1938) is thought of as the godfather of blues music, especially Delta blues. The 29 songs recorded by him during his short life have been of massive inspiration to guitarists and musicians over the last 80 years. Public domain photo.

By Wanda Ravernell

Black Music Month and Juneteenth are inextricably linked – Black music is the sound of our freedom.

From the plaintive moans of the enslaved Africans’ ‘sorrow songs,’ to the fields of Civil War battle where Black soldiers picked up abandoned bugles, to the upright piano played in juke joints on Saturday night and churches come Sunday morning, our ancestors’ innovation in the face of want, fear, degradation, and hopelessness has yielded genres of music imitated ’round the world.

In 2000, Congress made it official. In 2009, Pres. Barack Obama changed the name to African American Music Heritage Month and in 2023, Pres. Joe Biden changed it back to Black Music Month, two years after he declared Juneteenth a national holiday, the result of a movement led by Opal Lee.

Our ancestors battle for freedom over these last 400 years and the music that allowed them expression of their humanity deserved to be honored.

But we may be losing sight of the value of their sacrifices.

‘Sing a Song Full of the Faith That the Dark past Has Taught Us…’

Along with the long-known exploitation of Black musicians whose recordings were stolen by record companies, the commercialization of Juneteenth feels like another kind of theft.

I had never heard of Juneteenth until I moved to the Bay Area from my hometown of Philadelphia. I didn’t know it was one of many freedom festivals celebrated by descendants of enslaved people in the United States.

Emancipation Day was Jan. 1 in Pennsylvania, April 16 in Wash., D.C., May 20 in Florida, and Aug. 8 in Kentucky. But Juneteenth, June 19, has the most renown, known in Texas as the ‘colored peoples’ Fourth of July.’

It was marked by parades, beauty pageants, rodeos, backyard barbecues and church picnics.

Yes, church.

The formerly enslaved began the day praying in thanks for their freedom just as they had prayed for Jubilee – the day of freedom – when they had chains on their feet and hands. They ‘testified’ about their past suffering and how they had managed to overcome.

And they sang.

Although, we will not hold it this year, Omnira Institute’s Juneteenth Ritual of Remembrance recalled this part of Juneteenth with prayers in the languages of the African captives. In the middle of the ceremony, a soloist would lead us in singing “Many Thousand Gone” while we took turns reciting portions of the Emancipation Proclamation, the news of freedom that took more than two years to reach Texas – two months after the Civil War ended.

“Many Thousand Gone” was famously recorded by Black luminary Paul Robeson in 1947:

“No more auction block for me,

No more, no more

No more auction black for me

Many thousand gone.”

Other verses refer to the ‘pint of salt’ and the ‘driver’s lash,’ the realities of enslavement that they had survived.

‘Sing a Song Full of the Hope That the Present has Brought Us’

All of the genres of African American music have at their root songs like that, the essence being, as Stevie Wonder, wrote, “the joy inside our pain.” So Black music is not just music. It is our story, our history, our very strength.

During the Civil Rights Movement, which peaked 100 years after slavery ended, the people testified that it was the freedom songs – based on spirituals – that gave them the heart to march, face attack dogs, fire hoses, beatings, and shootouts with vigilantes.

The music reminded them that power was in the people. That music, our music, can do so again. We don’t have to accept the commodification of the products of our culture.

The power of those songs is showing a resurgence across the South as we battle again for the right to self-determination through the ballot box.

Those songs are the voices of our ancestors, voices forged in their blood, their sweat, their tears, joy and, above all, faith. Those songs, those prayers live in our blood and our very breath.

This Juneteenth, let us reclaim those holy voices expressed in Black music for ourselves. It is our birthright. It can neither be bought nor sold. No more. Never again.

Wanda Ravernell is the executive director of Omnira Institute, sponsor for 18 years of the Juneteenth Ritual of Remembrance and Oakland’s 11^th Annual Black-Eyed Pea Festival, which will take place on Sept. 12.