White Fragility

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


White Fragility is about the difficulties we have when addressing issues about race with white people. Chapter by chapter, Diangelo takes her experience in diversity training to make the case that white people do not like talking about race issues precisely because talking about them damages the status quo that white people consciously or not, protect at all costs.

She doesn’t mince words, and she doesn’t pull back from the premise that basically we live in a society that is comfortable for white people and alien to non-white people. There is overwhelming white control of our major institutions: To that end, she lays out the following facts (which I have truncated just for convenience):

Ten richest Americans=100 percent white.
US Congress, US governors, US President and Vice President= 90, 96 and 100 percent white, respectively.
People who decide what tv shows we watch, books we read, news is covered, or music is produced= 93, 90, 85 and 95 percent white, respectively.
(This is all on page 31.)

Robin Diangelo comes at this from the perspective of sociology, which looks at overall trends and patterns in human behavior. You can nitpick and find an exception somewhere that contradicts what she says, but it does not render the arguments any less valid. She notes the reactions she gets when she speaks about these things and how so often white people come at her with the same anger and arguments.

“For many white people, the mere title of this book will cause resistance because I am breaking a cardinal rule of individualism—I am generalizing.” (P. 11)
Many white people are defensive when confronted with the question of their own racism: “my grandparents were Italian/Irish/whatever and they experienced racism so I’m not a racist…” (you are leaning on an accomplishment that you didn’t earn, and your immigrant forefathers assimilated and are now seen as “white.”) or “I’m friends with a Black person,” (yeah? The very point she makes is that racism is structural and baked in and is a part of all of us whether we know it or not) She confronts these and many more in the text.

Race is a social construct. There are no commonalities among Black people or white people that come about because of genetics or biology. It is entirely a product of societal conditioning.
This kind of blew my mind to realize it.
*
This book throws cold water on white people. And to be honest, we really need that.
I’d love to buy extra copies of this just to see who would read it. I’d love to share it with other white people but I am almost certain it would fall on deaf ears of fragile white people. That this or that argument is slightly off so therefore I will disregard the whole book (some people are literal as fuck and defensive as hell.). Some people will fail to accept the premise that the US is still basically a white country, having been founded and forged on the backs of slaves and indigenous people.

No…no one wants to hear that. But it would be nice if they did…








View all my reviews