When I read "Black fragility" in the title, I thought you meant how racism has been very recently changed to mean ONLY prejudice against Blacks, and attempts to bring racism back to mean prejudice based on any skin color will be met with woke hysteria.

This phenomenon is not a joke and is getting more and more hateful. I have experienced it myself in Medium and in real life.

There is a segment of the woke crowd very invested in monopolizing and weaponizing the word "racism" so that it becomes a weapon that only they can wield and which can never apply to them. It has been used to minimize and deny prejudices faced by other minorities. It provides a cover and shield for these people to speak and behave in racist ways towards other minorities.

It needs to be called out for what it is: neoracism.

Your point that all this color-labeling is reaching reductio ad absurdum is spot on. When faced with irrefutable evidence of atrocities even worse than slavery being perpetrated on non-black bodies, a commitment to making racism only about Black experience of White prejudice means you either have to deny that it is about race, or claim that it was white supremacy.

The fact that Whoopi chose the first and her apologists chose the second is revealing. I am happy to assume that Whoopi wasn't consciously trying to deny facts of history. Rather, I suspect she said that because this attitude that racism is ONLY a Black/White thing is so prevalent that she had internalized it unconsciously.

The real tragedy here is how her apologists think limiting the meaning of racism to Black experience helps Black people fight it. That may be true when dealing with rich liberal Whites, especially those who love to virtue signal and are ok with letting one minority sit on the high table as long as there are others to fill their place as serfs. But it galls other Whites, especially poor rural ones into active opposition when a more unifying approach might have induced them towards greater tolerance. And it makes other minorities like myself weary of an "anti-racism" project that is unapologetically racist towards us.

So to say what you had implied but left unsaid, fragility is the result of trying to defend prejudice. Prejudice is impossible to defend so the defence quickly degenerates into apoplexy. Anyone can harbor prejudices and anyone can choose to cling on to those prejudices in face of it being made plain. There is thus no need to color-label fragility. To do so is really an attempt to mislead, to imply that only White people are fragile when in fact anyone, Black, Jewish, Asian, Hispanic, Indigenous, Christian, Atheist, American, British, Eskimo, etc can all become fragile when we clutch our prejudices like Gollum clutches his precious.