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

by Robin DiAngelo

White progressives do indeed uphold and perpetrate racism, but our defensiveness and certitude make it virtually impossible to explain to us how we do so.

I have never met a white person without an opinion on racism. It’s not really possible to grow up in the United States or spend any significant time here—or any

other culture with a history of Western colonization—without developing opinions on racism. And white people’s opinions on racism tend to be strong.

race relations are profound...

For example, I can be seen as qualified to lead a major or minor organization in this country with no understanding whatsoever of the perspectives or experiences of people of color, few if any relationships with people of color, and virtually no ability to engage critically with the topic of race. I can get through graduate school without ever discussing racism. I can graduate from law school without ever discussing racism.

when we try to talk openly and honestly about race, white fragility quickly emerges as we are so often met with silence, defensiveness, argumentation, certitude, and other forms of pushback.

not natural responses; 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.

include the ideologies of individualism and meritocracy, narrow and repetitive media representations of people of color, segregation in schools and neighborhoods, depict...

history, jokes and warnings, taboos on openly talking about race, ...

because the forces conditioning us into racist frameworks are always at play; our learning will never be finished.

actors in a shared culture.

This lens is neither universal nor objective, and without it, a person could not function in any human society.

individualism and objectivity.

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 coll...

Individualism is a story line that creates, communicates, reproduces, and reinforces the concept that each of us is a unique individual and that our group memberships, such as race, class, or gender, are irrelevant to our opportunities. Individualism claims that there are no intrinsic barriers to individual success and that ...

According to the ideology of individualism, rac...

we know that to be a man as defined by the dominant culture is a different experience from being a woman.

We are socialized into these groups collectively. In mainstream culture, we all receive the same messages about what these groups mean, why being in one group is a different experience from being in another. And we also know that it is “better”

to be in one of these groups than to be in its opposite—for example, to be young rather than old, able-bodied rather than have a disability, rich rather than poor. 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.

understanding of ourselves is necessarily based on our compa...

individuals, tackling group identity also challenges our belief in objectivity.

Thus, reflecting on our racial frames is particularly challenging for many white people, because we are taught that to have a racial viewpoint is to be biased. Unfortunately, this belief protects our biases, because denying that we have them ensures that we won’t examine or change them. This will be important to remember when we consider our racial socialization, because 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.

breaking a cardinal rule of individualism—I am generalizing.

I can predict that many readers will make similar claims of exception precisely because we are products of our culture, not separate from it.

social life is patterned and predictable in measurable ways.

We cannot understand modern forms of racism if we cannot or will not explore patterns of group behavior and their effects on individuals.

our definition of “racist.”

racists are mean people who intentionally dislike others because of their race; racists are immoral.

If your definition of a racist is someone who holds conscious dislike of people because of race, then I agree that it is offensive for me to suggest that you are racist when I don’t know you.

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

key to moving forward is what we do with our discomfort.

The differences we see with our eyes—differences such as hair texture and eye color—are superficial and emerged as adaptations to geography.1 Under the skin, there is no true biological race. The external characteristics that we use to define race are unreliable indicators of genetic variation between any two people.2

social and economic investments that drove science to organize society and its resources along racial lines and why this organization is so enduring.

Freedom and equality—regardless of religion or class status—were radical new ideas when the United States was formed. At the same time, the US economy was based on the abduction and enslavement of African people, the displacement and

genocide of Indigenous people, and the annexation of Mexican lands.

colonizers who came were not free of their own cultural conditioning; they brought with them deeply internalized patte...

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.

American scientists began searching for the answer to the perceived inferiority of non-Anglo groups. Illustrating the power of our questions to shape the knowledge we validate, these scientists didn’t ask, “Are blacks (and others) inferior?” They asked, “Why are blacks (and others) inferior?” In less than a century, Jefferson’s suggestion of racial difference became commonly accepted scientific “fact.”5

“The beneficiaries of slavery, segregation, and mass incarceration have produced racist ideas of Black people being best suited for or deserving of the confines of slavery,

Race is an evolving social idea that was created to legitimize racial inequality and protect white advantage. The term “white” first appeared in colonial law in the late 1600s. By 1790, people were asked to claim their race on the census, and by 1825, the perceived degrees of blood determined who would be classified as Indian. From the late 1800s through the early twentieth century, as waves of immigrants entered the United States, the concept of a white race was solidified.8

whiteness remained profoundly important as legalized racist exclusion and violence against African Americans continued in new forms.

To have citizenship—and the rights citizenship imbued—you had to be legally classified as white. People with nonwhite racial classifications began to petition the courts to be reclassified.

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.9

The metaphor of the United States as the great melting pot, in which immigrants from around the world come together and melt into one unified society through the process of assimilation, is a cherished idea.

In reality, 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.

Race is a social construction, and thus who is included in the category of white changes over time.

It is on each of us who pass as white to identify how these advantages shape us, not to deny them wholesale.

poor and working-class people were not always perceived as fully white.

However, poor and working-class whites were eventually granted full entry into whiteness as a way to exploit labor.