I one wrote a deeply personal article about how I have a hard time trusting straight white men. The article had practically nothing to do with racism. It had a lot to do with the AIDS crisis and my experiences with homophobia in the heartland where the men I grew up with are overwhelmingly white.

At its heart, the article was about my struggle to understand how I relate with people, particularly with straight white men.

And while the article went over well and engendered many positive discussions, a very significant minority of fragile white guys felt like they had to chastise me for being “racist against white people.” Their over-the-top anger was difficult to understand given my article was about homophobia and gender policing much more than it was about race — really just an honest effort to share some of my internal experiences and struggles.

One fairly popular straight white Medium writer ripped into me for being “racist” and blocked me on Twitter. (Though, oddly, not on Medium.)

This kind of white fragility makes me angry, mainly because I know exactly how prevalent racism is among white people in the United States. And so do most white people.

No, not all white people are racist, but we all grow up with it and we all see it every day. Even if we don’t directly participate in it, we know it’s there and we tolerate it.

Fragility and denialism serve to suppress efforts to extinguish racism. We can’t fight against something we collectively pretend isn’t real or isn’t serious.

When we pretend that acknowledging racism against Black people amounts to the same thing as being “racist” against white people, then we fall down a rabbit hole leading to absurdities greater than anything Alice ever encountered.