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

by Robin DiAngelo

The United States was founded on the principle that all people are created equal. Yet the nation began with the attempted genocide of Indigenous people and the theft of their land.

The identities of those sitting at the tables of power in this country have remained remarkably similar: white, male, middle- and upper-class, able-bodied.

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. Further, the colonizers who came were not free of their own cultural conditioning; they brought with them deeply internalized patterns of domination and submission.

Today’s white nationalists are not the first to recognize the importance of distancing oneself from more-explicit expressions of white supremacy.

“the Southern strategy”—how to appeal to the racism of white Southern voters without pronouncing it openly:

You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.