White Fatigue: Naming the Challenge in Moving from an Individual to a Systemic Understanding of Racism

Abstract

This article introduces the notion White fatigue. White fatigue occurs for White students who have grown tired of learning and discussing race and racism, despite an understanding of the moral imperative of anti-racist and anti-oppressive practices. The article differentiates White fatigue from ideas like White resistance, White guilt, or White fragility, arguing that each of these phenomenon occur at different stages of White Racial Identity Development. Distinction is also drawn among White fatigue and other forms of racially based fatigue, specifically racial battle fatigue and White people fatigue syndrome. Further drawing on the notion of stereotype threat, the article considers the challenges for White students learning about race and racism while simultaneously resisting being labeled a racist. This struggle is elemental to the manifestation of White fatigue. Ultimately, the author argues that educators must be more accurate in how they define the range of responses from White students, consistently humanize all students in the process of understanding race and racism, and encourage further research for understanding a condition that is happening to a growing number of students.

Acknowledgments

I would like to give a special thank you to Gena Brooks Flynn, Jacob Flynn, Leslie David Burns, Ozlem Sensoy, Patrick Roberts, La Vonne Neal, and Michelle Tenem-Zemach for their invaluable advice and support in the completion of this article.