The term has been applied to characterize the responses of white people to portrayals of the Atlantic slave trade and European colonization, or scholarship on the legacy of those systems in modern society.
[5] Academics, such as Robin DiAngelo, Julia Chinyere Oparah, George Yancy and Leah Gaskin Fitchue, have detailed ranges of what they define as white defensive responses in their works.
[10] Historically, it has also taken more extreme forms such as the suggestion that slavery in the United States was a benign system or even had a civilizing effect on African Americans.
[19] According to Robin DiAngelo, white people react to "racial stress" with an "outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation".
[22] The journalist Peter Baker argues that "white fragility" can be expressed by silence or shutting down; denial; accusations of reverse racism; or upset, anger, or rage at an interpersonal level.
[15][non-primary source needed] In 1800, a failed rebellion planned by the slave Gabriel Prosser caused both a drop in support for anti-slavery societies, which had been petitioning against structural racism, and an increase in white defensiveness in the Upper South.
[25] In the post-slavery United States, there has historically been frustration from African American communities at white defensiveness and its consequences causing a lack of accountability.
[27] Cynthia Levine-Rasky's 2011 research showed how an unconscious white defensiveness is often present in traditionally-minded teaching candidates in a Canadian university.
[28] Cameron McCarthy argues that a form of defensiveness can be an insistence on a relativistic view of history in which white people are also the victims of historical oppression and racism.
[29] In the late 1990s, Professor Paul Orlowski observed the emergence of white defensiveness in working-class communities of British Columbia, Canada, where investigating structural racism in the province led to accusations of being "anti-white".