***AUTHORS’ RESPONSE TO COMMENTS***

We appreciate that this blog post, like the 2017 essay that sparked the creation of PHRE, has generated some passionate discussion.

For those who found this AMA, the White Phragility article, or the Phish Scene So White: Let’s Talk essay helpful or eye-opening, we invite you to visit our website at www.PhansForRacialEquity.org to learn how to get more involved with our work to build an inclusive, anti-racist jam band scene that is mobilized as a force for equity in our broader world.

In that spirit, we’d like to address some of the most common objections here in the comments in hopes that we can continue a productive dialogue.

“This is too political, and I come to Phish to avoid politics.”

Many of us, including the authors, see Phish and the surrounding scene as an escape from the pressures and pathologies of the outside world. We come to escape, so the last thing we want is someone confronting us with outside unpleasantness.

The challenge is that for everyone to be able to have that same, blissful, ignore-the-outside-world experience, there is work we must all do to ensure that those external problems don’t show up for some members of our community as obstacles to the great time we all want to share.

It is easy to assume everyone’s experience is similar to our own. But, while we are certainly having a collective experience at Phish, each person is also experiencing their own unique version–and this is shaped by lots of factors, including how we move through the world as a cluster of various identities.

Our fellow phans who are Black don’t leave behind what it means to be Black in America when they come through the turnstiles. When someone experiences racism on lot, or even face ignorance that doesn’t come from a place of hate (“where’s the bathroom” or “is this your first show”, along with other examples cited in the original 2017 essay), it means that same blissed-out, outside-of-politics experience we crave is not available to them. Since its founding, we’ve had phans of color come to PHRE with other experiences, including being harassed by venue staff, and we’re working on a feature on our website where phans can tell their stories about race in the scene–good and bad.

So, this raises a question: is one person’s “right” or wish to not face some unpleasant realities or “politics,” or have to look critically at the scene, more important than another phan’s“right” to enjoy a show in a safe, comfortable, and inclusive environment?

“You’ve set it up so if I disagree with you I’m “fragile,” so it’s heads you win, tails I lose.”

By talking about white fragility it can seem like we’re accusing anyone who disagrees with us of being fragile. But, if you read our essay, we’re actually saying something different.

When we say in our paper that many of the online comments posted on the original 2017 essay, and the AMA comments here are examples of fragility it is precisely because they are reflexively defensive, often without engaging with the actual material with an open mind. In some cases, the comments suggest that the very titles of those essays were perceived as accusations. One can disagree with PHRE on the factual premises of our work (e.g. “no, cops don’t treat us better because we’re white”) and certainly on our strategy (e.g. posting an AMA with the authors of the paper on Phish.net) without exhibiting fragility.

A good example of this is the poster who suggested the ideas in these essays might be right, but the messaging and overall effort isn’t helpful to achieving long-term goals around progressive politics and racial equity. That is certainly a reasonable thing to question and can lead to a productive dialogue. One could also question the factual premises behind our claims and ask for more evidence.

But, instead, there are numerous comments accusing the authors, and by implication anyone who shares our perspective, of being “new age wokesters” who will “ruin the scene” or similar because we’re raising uncomfortable questions And, it appears that several of our harshest critics are reacting without having read either the original 2017 essay or the academic journal article that forms the basis for this AMA series. This is apparent because posters have imputed to us goals we have explicitly disavowed (for example, it is not PHRE’s goal to diversify the scene; that could simply be a happy secondary result of our work), or made points we have addressed without engaging with our arguments.

“By making everything about race, you are the ones being divisive, even racist.”

Some folks suggest that focusing on (or even noticing) race is divisive, sort of like picking at a scab that would heal if we just left it alone. This is often associated with the notion that “I don’t see color” and that to notice race is actually a form of racism.

There are a few challenges with this line of thinking. First, race has been made salient / significant by societal forces that are beyond our individual control. While not noticing race or seeing color might seem like a noble aspiration, it’s simply not how the human brain functions. We’ve evolved over thousands of years to categorize people in groups and tribes, and plenty of studies have confirmed that we all harbor biases and assumptions about various groups, many of which we are not conscious of holding. In other words, one does not need to be an avowed racist for race to shape how we perceive people or situations. This is true for *all* of us, no matter our race or ethnicity.

So when a White person tells a Black person in America that they “don’t see color,” what we’re really saying is some combination of “I’m deluding myself into thinking that I don’t notice that you’re Black”, thus avoiding the opportunity to think proactively about whether we’re carrying any unexamined assumptions; and b) more importantly, “I’m refusing to acknowledge that you may be having a different experience than I am right now” because of the way race shapes American society in ways beyond any individual’s control.

Second, this line of thinking contains an underlying assumption that ‘usually things are not about race, and only occasionally does race rear its (ugly) head.’

But, this is typically the lived experience only for White people. This is because White folks tend to move through contexts (work, social, etc.) that are specifically constructed for them, and that center them, as the norm.

ARL: The first time this really hit me (Adam) was through a conversation I had with a Black friend in law school. At that point I thought most discrimination in our society was based on economics–so if poor Black people experienced prejudice and a harder path it was mostly because they were poor. Surely, wealthy, well-educated people of color are doing fine. Then my friend told me that he (an Ivy League graduate and Ivy League law student) was reliably followed in stores; and described how being Black in America is a central aspect of his lived experience every single day.

As White people, we (as three of the four authors experience) don’t have to think about race, how we show up, how we speak, etc. in most circumstances. Black people and other people of color, on the other hand, experience race constantly in American society.

RM: As a brown-skinned woman of Indian origin, I look different from about 95% of the people at Phish shows. At shows, I have experienced being invisible to people (such as not getting introduced in a group setting and being skipped over, when everyone else, who all happen to be White, does get introduced), to being objectified as “exotic” because I look different (Adam was a witness to one such experience!). Sometimes people at shows can’t pronounce my name or remember it (and not because of altered states!) because it is “different.” Although I have not experienced the worst of the micro- and maco-aggressions and “othering”, possibly because I am a lighter-skinned brown person? Many Phish fans understand what it's like to be judged based on appearance, but for most of the community that's based on the choice to dress a certain way or take on a certain image. What many White phans may not realize is that no matter how hard I rock my Kasvot Vaxt t-shirt and telegraph that I'm part of the scene, I still feel judged and placed in a category of outsider for something that is beyond my control. I could go on, but I’ll stop here. It’s a complicated subject that’s a lot easier to talk about in person than to write about in a short and limited forum like this one - as grateful as I am to have this forum!

***

If you find it exhausting to talk about race all the time, consider how exhausting it is to live with race forming a central part of one’s experience walking through America every day, just trying to live, work, and maybe see a concert here and there.

“White fragility is itself a racist term, since it’s an accusation made based on race.”

The term white fragility does acknowledge race and power structures in the U.S., but it does not paint all White people with a broad brush by suggesting all White people are fragile. Rather, it describes a particular set of defensive reactions (that we argue are triggered by false beliefs) that White people may exhibit when confronted with difficult or uncomfortable conversations about race.

Although not everyone agrees, many scholars define racism as the combination of prejudice and power, either by individuals or through systems. In this view, the term is not racist because it is a critique of a behavior exhibited by people at the top of the power hierarchy, that itself plays an essential role in maintaining that hierarchy.

What makes the concept both interesting and especially applicable to the Phish scene is that avowed racists may not experience much fragility about race. As both DiAngelo and our article explain, it is precisely people who see themselves as more progressive on race that tend to become most defensive when discussing it.