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

by Robin DiAngelo

White Fragility is a vital, necessary, and beautiful book, a bracing call to white folk everywhere to see their whiteness for what it is and to seize the opportunity to make things better now.

While implicit bias is always at play because all humans have bias, inequity can occur simply through homogeneity; 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 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 challenging injustice.

Socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves, we become highly fragile in conversations about race.

We consider a challenge to our racial worldviews as a challenge to our very identities as good, moral people.

Thus, we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling ...

I conceptualize this process as white fragility.

Though white fragility is triggered by discomfort and anxiety, it is born of superiority and entitlement. White fragility is not weakness per se. In fact, it is a powerful means of white racial control and the protection of white advantage.

the participants might be undereducated about race because of scant cross-racial interactions?

the pillars of whiteness—the

the unexamined beliefs that prop up our racial responses.

I came to see that the way we are taught to define racism makes it virtually impossible for white people to understand it. Given our racial insulation, coupled with misinformation, any suggestion that we are complicit in racism is a kind of unwelcome and insulting shock to the system.

One of the greatest social fears for a white person is being told that something that we have said or done is racially problematic. Yet when someone lets us know that we have just done such a thing, rather than respond with gratitude and relief (after all, now that we are informed, we won’t do it again), we often respond with anger and denial.

I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color.

White progressives can be the most difficult for people of color because, to the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived. None of our energy will go into what we need to be doing for the rest of our lives: engaging in ongoing self-awareness, continuing education, relationship building, and actual antiracist practice. 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.

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.

Yet our simplistic definition of racism—as intentional acts of racial discrimination committed by immoral individuals—engenders a confidence that we are not part of the problem and that our learning is thus complete.

To understand white fragility, we have to begin to understand why we cannot fully be either; we must understand the forces of socialization.

two key Western ideologies: individualism and objectivity.

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.

According to the ideology of individualism, race is irrelevant.

Yet even though Gates’s son has clearly been handed unearned advantage, we cling tightly to the ideology of individualism when asked to consider our own unearned advantages.

Regardless of our protestations that social groups don’t matter and that we see everyone as equal, we know that to be a man as defined by the dominant culture is a different experience from being a woman.

These dimensions of our culture shape our group identities.

But because of our society’s emphasis on individuality, many of us are unskilled at reflecting on our group memberships. To understand race relations today, we must push against our conditioning and grapple with how and why racial group memberships matter.

In addition to challenging our sense of ourselves as individuals, tackling group identity also challenges our belief in objectivity.

Rather than use what you see as unique about yourself as an exemption from further examination, a more fruitful approach would be to

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

Setting aside your sense of uniqueness is a critical skill that will allow you to see the big picture of the society in whi...

Work to see how these messages have shaped your life, rather than use some aspect of your story to excuse yourself from their impact.

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

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

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,

Race is an evolving social idea that was created to legitimize racial inequality and protect white advantage.

When slavery in the United States was abolished in 1865,

To have citizenship—and the rights citizenship imbued—you had to be legally classified as white.

To understand racism, we need to first distinguish it from mere prejudice and discrimination.

Prejudice is foundational to understanding white fragility because suggesting that white people have racial prejudice is perceived as saying that we are bad and should be ashamed.

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

When a racial group’s collective prejudice is backed by the power of legal authority and institutional control, it is transformed into racism, a far-reaching system that functions independently from the intentions or self-images of individual actors.

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

Racism is a system.

Women of color were denied full access until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

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).

Racism is deeply embedded in the fabric of our society.

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.

When I say that only whites can be racist, I mean that in the United States, only whites have the collective social and institutional power and privilege over people of color. People of color do not have this power and privilege over white people.

Scholar Marilyn Frye uses the metaphor of a birdcage to describe the interlocking forces of oppression.

The birdcage metaphor helps us understand why racism can be so hard to see and recognize: we have a limited view.