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

by Robin DiAngelo

how identity and perceptions of identity can grant or deny resources.

Instead of the typical focus on how racism hurts people of color, to examine whiteness is to focus on how racism elevates white people.

Whiteness rests upon a foundational premise: the definition of whites as the norm or standard for human, and people of color as a deviation from that norm.

because no matter how fantastic a player Robinson was, he simply could not play in the major leagues if whites—who controlled the institution—did not allow it.

white history is the norm for history. Thus, our need to qualify that we are speaking about black history or women’s history suggests that these contributions lie outside the norm.

Whites also produce and reinforce the dominant narratives of society—such as individualism and meritocracy—and use these narratives to explain the positions of other racial groups.

White supremacy in this context does not refer to individual white people and their individual intentions or actions but to an overarching political, economic, and social system of domination.

Those who write and direct films are our cultural narrators; the stories they tell shape our worldviews.

By constantly using the white racial frame to interpret social relations and integrating new bits, whites reinscribe the frame ever deeper.

Pretending that she did not notice that he was black was not helpful to him in any way, as it denied his reality—indeed, it refused his reality—and kept hers insular and unchallenged.

Racial bias is largely unconscious, and herein lies the deepest challenge—the defensiveness that ensues upon any suggestion of racial bias.

defensiveness is rooted in the false but widespread belief that racial discrimination can only be intentional.

aversive racism: holding deep racial disdain that surfaces in daily discourse but not being able to admit it because the disdain conflicts with our self-image and professed beliefs.

Research in implicit bias has shown that perceptions of criminal activity are influenced by race.

We believe we are superior at a deeply internalized level and act on this belief in the practice of our lives, but we must deny this belief to fit into society and maintain our self-identity as good, moral people.

In backstage settings, where people of color were not present, white students often used humor to reinforce racial stereotypes about people of color, particularly blacks. Picca and Feagin argue that the purpose of these backstage performances is to create white solidarity and to reinforce the ideology of white and male supremacy.

Is an Asian or an Indigenous child’s development the same as a white child’s within the context of white supremacy?

To break white solidarity is to break rank.

Notice that within a white supremacist society, I am rewarded for not interrupting racism and punished in a range of ways—big and small—when I do.

my silence is not benign because it protects and maintains the racial hierarchy and my place within

In understanding the power of white fragility, we have to notice that the mere questioning of those positions triggered the white fragility that Trump capitalized on.

enabled the white elite to direct the white working class’s resentment toward people of color. The resentment is clearly misdirected, given that the people who control the economy and who have managed to concentrate more wealth into fewer (white) hands than ever before in human history are the white elite.

has not been African Americans who resist integration efforts; it has always been whites.

Because people of color are not seen as racially innocent, they are expected to speak to issues of race (but must do so on white terms).

It has been well documented that blacks and Latinos are stopped by police more often than whites are for the same activities and that they receive harsher sentences than whites do for the same crimes.

2016 study found that half of a sample of medical students and residents believe that blacks feel less pain18

Growing up in segregation (our schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, shopping districts, places of worship, entertainment, social gatherings, and elsewhere) reinforces the message that our experiences and perspectives are the only ones that matter.

Upward mobility is the great class goal in the United States, and the social environment gets tangibly whiter the higher up you climb.

“In a postracial era, we don’t have to say it’s about race or the color of the kids in the building. . . . We can concentrate poverty and kids of color and then fail to provide the resources to support and sustain those schools, and then we can see a school full of black kids and say, ‘Oh, look at their test scores.’

we are taught that we lose nothing of value through racial segregation.

For most whites, however, racism is like murder: the concept exists, but someone has to commit it in order for it to happen.

If, as a white person, I conceptualize racism as a binary and I place myself on the “not racist” side, what further action is required of me? No action is required, because I am not a racist. Therefore, racism is not my problem; it doesn’t concern me and there is nothing further I need to do.

In the same way that a pier sits on submerged pillars that are not immediately visible, the beliefs supporting our racial claims are hidden from our view.

We can be told, and often are told, to treat everyone the same, but we cannot successfully be taught to do so because human beings are not objective.

gender is a very deep social construct, that we have different experiences depending on our gender roles, assignments, and expressions,

Whether you define racism as racial prejudices and individual acts or as a system of racial inequality that benefits whites at the expense of people of color (as antiracists do),

A parent training a child not to say certain things that are overtly racist is teaching the child self-censorship rather than how to examine the deeply embedded racial messages we all absorb.

the children showed that they did not become less racially biased with age, but that they had learned to hide their racism in front of adults.

We bring our racial histories with us, and contrary to the ideology of individualism, we represent our groups and those who have come before us. Our identities are not unique or inherent but constructed or produced through social processes.

we don’t see through clear or objective eyes—we see through racial lenses.

Refusing to engage in an authentic exploration of racial realities erases (and denies) alternate racial experiences.

Racism is complex and nuanced, and its manifestations are not the same for every group of color.

remind my readers that I am addressing white people at the societal level. I have friends who are black and whom I love deeply. I do not have to suppress feelings of hatred and contempt as I sit with them; I see their humanity. But on the macro level, I also recognize the deep anti-black feelings that have been inculcated in me since childhood. These feelings surface immediately—in fact, before I can even think—when I conceptualize black people in general. The sentiments arise when I pass black strangers on the street, see stereotypical depictions of black people in the media, and hear the thinly veiled warnings and jokes passed between white people. These are the deeper feelings that I need to be willing to examine, for these feelings can and do seep out without my awareness and hurt those whom I love.

Creating a separate and inferior black race simultaneously created the “superior” white race: one concept could not exist without the other.

Scholars have argued that whites split off from themselves and project onto black people the aspects that we don’t want to own in ourselves.

No employer is required to hire an unqualified person of color, but companies are required to be able to articulate why they didn’t hire a qualified person of color (and this requirement is rarely enforced). Additionally, affirmative action never applied to private companies—only to state and governmental agencies.

Anti-blackness is rooted in misinformation, fables, perversions, projections, and lies. It is also rooted in a lack of historical knowledge and an inability or unwillingness to trace the effects of history into the present.

If blacks are not human in the same ways that we white people are human, our mistreatment of them doesn’t count.

whites can only be white if someone is not white—if someone is the opposite of white. White is a false identity, an identity of false superiority. In that sense, whiteness isn’t real.

white identity depends in particular on the projection of inferiority onto blacks and the oppression this inferior status justifies for the white collective.