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

by Robin DiAngelo

whiteness has been, to pinch Amiri Baraka’s resonant phrase, the “changing same,” a highly adaptable and fluid force that stays on top no matter where it lands.

whiteness is at once the means of dominance, the end to which dominance points, and the point of dominance, too, which, in its purest form, in its greatest fantasy, never ends.

whiteness is a fiction, what in the jargon of the academy is termed a social construct, an agreed-on myth that has empirical grit be...

whiteness goes even one better: it is a category of identity that is most useful when its...

we don’t have to intend to exclude for the results of our actions to be exclusion.

if I am not aware of the barriers you face, then I won’t see them, much less be motivated to remove them. Nor will I be motivated to remove the barriers if they provide an advantage to which I feel entitled.

Not naming the groups that face barriers only serves those who already have access; the assumption is that the access enjoyed by the controlling group is universal.

taught that women were granted suffrage in 1920, we ignore the fact that it was white women who received full access or that it was white men who granted it. Not until the 1960s, through the Voting Rights Act, were all women—regardless of race—granted full access to suffrage.

Naming who has access and who doesn’t guides our efforts in ch...

though I am centering the white voice, I am also using my insider status to challenge racism.

Multiracial people, because they challenge racial constructs and boundaries, face unique challenges in a society in which racial categories have profound meaning. The dominant society will assign them the racial identity they most physically resemble, but their own internal racial identity may not align with the assigned identity.

The dynamics of what is termed “passing”—being perceived as white—will also shape a multiracial person’s identity, as passing will grant him or her society’s rewards of whiteness.

Given how seldom we experience racial discomfort in a society we dominate, we haven’t had to build our racial stamina.

white fragility is triggered by discomfort and anxiety, it is born of superiority and entitlement.

the power of the belief that only bad people were racist, as well as how individualism allowed white people to exempt themselves from the forces of socialization.

we are taught to think about racism only as discrete acts committed by individual people, rather than as a complex, interconnected system.

became clear that if I believed that only bad people who intended to hurt others because of race could ever do so, I would respond with outrage to any suggestion that I was involved in racism.

they are social forces that prevent us from attaining the racial knowledge we need to engage more productively, and they function powerfully to hold the racial hierarchy in place. These forces include the ideologies of individualism and meritocracy, narrow and repetitive media representations of people of color, segregation in schools and neighborhoods, depictions of whiteness as the human ideal, truncated history, jokes and warnings, taboos on openly talking about race, and white solidarity.

We make sense of perceptions and experiences through our particular cultural lens. This lens is neither universal nor objective, and without it, a person could not function in any human society.

individualism holds that we are each unique and stand apart from others, even those within our social groups. Objectivity tells us that it is possible to be free of all bias. These ideologies make it very difficult for white people to explore the collective aspects of the white experience.

opportunity is not equally distributed across race, class, and gender.

We gain our understanding of group meaning collectively through aspects of the society around us that are shared and unavoidable: television, movies, news items, song lyrics, magazines, textbooks, schools, religion, literature, stories, jokes, traditions and practices, history, and so on. These dimensions of our culture shape our group identities.

Our understanding of ourselves is necessarily based on our comparisons with others.

We come to understand who we are by understanding who we are not.

because of our society’s emphasis on individuality, many of us are unskilled at reflecting on our group memberships.

there is a vast difference between what we verbally tell our children and all the other ways we train them into the racial norms of our culture.

A more fruitful form of engagement (because it expands rather than protects his current worldview) would have been to consider how Italian Americans were able to become white and how that assimilation has shaped his experiences in the present as a white man.

patterns are recognized as such precisely because they are recurring and predictable.

I ask readers to make the specific adjustments they think are necessary to their situation, rather than reject the evidence entirely.

to ask yourself, “I am white and I have had X experience. How did X shape me as a result of also being white?”

The racial status quo is comfortable for white people, and we will not move forward in race relations if we remain comfortable.

race, like gender, is socially constructed.

Race science was driven by these social and economic interests, which came to establish cultural norms and legal rulings that legitimized racism and the privileged status of those defined as white.

The idea of racial inferiority was created to justify unequal treatment; belief in racial inferiority is not what triggered unequal treatment. Nor was fear of difference. As Ta-Nehisi Coates states, “But race is the child of racism, not the father.”6 He means that first we exploited people for their resources, not according to how they looked. Exploitation came first, and then the ideology of unequal races to justify this exploitation followed.

the court stated that being white was based on the common understanding of the white man. In other words, people already seen as white got to decide who was white.

only European immigrants were allowed to melt, or assimilate, into dominant culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, because, regardless of their ethnic identities, these immigrants were perceived to be white and thus could belong.

Prejudice is pre-judgment about another person based on the social groups to which that person belongs.

Discrimination is action based on prejudice. These actions include ignoring, exclusion, threats, ridicule, slander, and violence.

When the prejudice causes me to act differently—I am less relaxed around you or I avoid interacting with you—I am now discriminating.

When a racial group’s collective prejudice is backed by the power of legal authority and institutional control, it is transformed into racism,

“Racism is a structure, not an event.”

racism—like sexism and other forms of oppression—occurs when a racial group’s prejudice is backed by legal authority and institutional control.

Ideologies are the frameworks through which we are taught to represent, interpret, understand, and make sense of social existence.

Examples of ideology in the United States include individualism, the superiority of capitalism as an economic system and democracy as a political system, consumerism as a desirable lifestyle, and meritocracy (anyone can succeed if he or she works hard).

The racial ideology that circulates in the United States rationalizes racial hierarchies as the outcome of a natural order resulting from either genetics or individual effort or talent.

Racism differs from individual racial prejudice and racial discrimination in the historical accumulation and ongoing use of institutional power and authority to support the prejudice and to systematically enforce discriminatory behaviors with far-reaching effects.

People of color may also hold prejudices and discriminate against white people, but they lack the social and institutional power that transforms their prejudice and discrimination into racism; the impact of their prejudice on whites is temporary and contextual.

Whites hold the social and institutional positions in society to infuse their racial prejudice into the laws, policies, practices, and norms of soci...

If you stand close to a birdcage and press your face against the wires, your perception of the bars will disappear and you will have an almost unobstructed view of the bird. If you turn your head to examine one wire of the cage closely, you will not be able to see the other wires. If your understanding of the cage is based on this myopic view, you may not understand why the bird doesn’t just go around the single wire and fly away. You might even assume that the bird liked or chose its place in the cage.

Being perceived as white carries more than a mere racial classification; it is a social and institutional status and identity imbued with legal, political, economic, and social rights and privileges that are denied to others.