White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

by Robin DiAngelo

On a television talk show in 1965, James Baldwin responded passionately to a Yale professor’s argument that Baldwin always concentrated on color: I don’t know if white Christians hate Negros or not, but I know that we have a Christian church that is white and a Christian church which is black. I know that the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday. . . . I don’t know whether the labor unions and their bosses really hate me . . . but I know I am not in their unions. I don’t know if the real estate lobby is against black people but I know that the real estate lobbyists keep me in the ghetto. I don’t know if the Board of Education hates Black people, but I know the textbooks they give my children to read and the schools that we have to go to. Now this is the evidence. You want me to make an act of faith risking . . . my life . . . on some idealism which you assure me exists in America which I have never seen.