When I was in high school, I got in a fight with someone who claimed that people who were conservative were uneducated.

I told her “you don’t even have a high school diploma. You think you know any better?”

She was frustrated and couldn’t explain her point.

The point was that conservative people are not “less educated,” even if it is true that those with a college degree tend to be liberal.

The point was that even at that age I understood her argument to be based in feelings of middle class entitlement to intellectual superiority.

The conservatism we see now is a continuation of the same “moving right show” that brought us prisons and austerity measures. It is the conclusion to a capitalism that can only manufacture and profit off crisis. Indeed, it is through crisis itself that capital sustains itself.

So when she decided she was more educated, she was searching for a way to posit a difference between herself and other white people: that difference being her situatedness within an enlightened and liberal white middle class.

This enlightened and liberal white middle class is also the main driver of the readership of white fragility — a book that hopes to hold white people accountable without asking them to also consider their nuances of their exploitation under capitalism.

The enlightened white liberal middle class can receive critiques of white fragility because they are enlightened: they know themselves to be the good whites, because they do not further the exploitation and exposure of Black people to premature death in the way conservatives do.

What needs to be said here is that white people also suffer under crisis capitalism, but they do so in a bearable way. Part of the ability to bear capitalism is the knowledge that you are enlightened. That your kind are smart and kind and important.

But this kindness, smartness, importance isn’t in relation to Black people — it is in relation to those Other whites, who are not kind, not smart, not important. Part of enlightened white middle class existence is positing difference from working class whiteness.

So when I see the work that white fragility does, its popularity, it feels to me more like a wedge between the enlightened white middle class and the “uneducated” white lower class. Moreso than a primer on race, it reifies class difference and makes capitalism bearable.

By continuing to divide the proletariat and render complacent middle class white people, it actually does un-revolutionary work. Because what people of color need is not an enlightened white middle class, but a revolutionary white middle class who sees Black people as their own.

In Asian American communities, we also have a class of bearable suffering under capitalism, which is the model minority class. There is a strong resonance between the model minority and the enlightened white middle class. In fact, they often end up in marriages together.

Some Asian American people have come up with this phrase: the model minority mutiny. Knowing full well the costs of complacency in living a bearable life under capitalism—which is the further exploitation and exposure to premature death of Black people in this country.

So this is also the work I hope those who read white fragility can harness: to disown the bearability of their place under capital and join the revolutionary, anti-capitalist movement that is the call to defund the police and create new modes of community care.

Because what is at the heart of these calls is the abolitionist principle that also demands an end to exploitation under capitalism. More than white fragility, white people must confront how being complacent in living a bearable life harms Black people.

White fragility, I am saying, posits a difference from an uneducated white working class. Indeed, it offers the feeling of class mobility and solidification to a particular class of white people. But it does nothing to further one’s love and identification with Black people.

Identification WITH, rather than separation FROM, is the key: revolutions are not built on difference from racists, but are built instead on understanding our differences amongst ourselves and utilizing those differences to build revolutionary knowledges and strategies.

So rather than focusing on fragility, we ought to focus, again, as always, forever, on Black culture and scholarship and knowledge production. And we must do so knowing that the first step is to disown one’s class comfort, to realize this is central to solidarity and alliance.

Do not accept your fragility. Do not believe you are fragile. Do not accept your whiteness. White mutiny. White revolution. White people reading Black writers. White people doing activist work. White people quitting their jobs. White people joining the movement.

I don’t want you to further speak well of race. I want you to burn cop cars. I want you to demand we defund the police. I want rowdy ass whites who break down prison walls. Fragility is the least of your problems. Love Black people. Reject capitalism. Build a better world.