We’re Understanding Society with a Microscope — And it’s Dangerous

My Takeaways from White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

You’re doing your Ph.D. in Astronomy at Harvard. You want to study the stars. Then you buy a very very very powerful microscope.

You buy a microscope that can see individual atoms.

I hope you get kicked out of your Ph.D. program.

One simply cannot study the vastness of the sky with a device that is built to study the vastness of particles. You won’t have the right perspective. To understand the collective of the stars, you must look at the collective stars. You need a telescope.

This analogy follows for anyone trying to understand the world, society or an intricate system. Set aside individuality to understand the collective.

For me, this idea emerged after reading ‘White Fragility’ by Robin DiAngelo.

In the context of understanding how racism is present in the societal infrastructure, my takeaway was that we must:

Set aside our uniqueness (individualism) to understand society (the collective system)

Cultural shifts create cultural dogma