To Be a Better Ally, Stop People-Pleasing
Being anti-racist means learning to manage your automatic stress response
Most people have heard of fight or flight, but there’s a third, lesser-known way people respond to feeling threatened — and in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, it was visible all over the social media accounts of White people.
As the fight for racial justice gained steam across the country, millions of White people found themselves unsure how to act on social media: agreeing with anti-racist memes that filled their Instagram feeds, but worried about adding to the performative noise flooding the platform. “I didn’t want to post just because other people were, but I was also worried what they would think about my silence,” one conflicted 31-year-old White woman told me. “So I ended up posting several times that week as a way to relieve my own stress about it.”
White people have a long history of centering ourselves in Black people’s trauma, of course. It’s rooted in what’s known as the “fawn” response, the instinct to people-please as a means of self-preservation. “A fawn response is an attempt to avoid conflict through people-pleasing or any behavior that would ensure your safety in an interaction,” says Nicola Pierre-Smith, a Philadelphia-based therapist.
