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

by Robin DiAngelo

Color-blind statements insist that people do not see race, or if they see it, it has no meaning to them. Color-blind claims include the following:

The second set I term color-celebrate. This set claims that the person sees and embraces racial difference. Color-celebrate claims include statements such as these:

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. To topple the pier, we need to access and uproot the pillars.

While the implication that a racist could not tolerate knowing, working next to, or walking among people of color is rather ridiculous, the sad fact is many whites have no cross-racial friendships at all.

Racism cannot be absent from your friendship. Few people of color whom I’ve met have said that racism isn’t at play in their friendships with white people. Some whites are more thoughtful, aware, and receptive to feedback than others, but no cross-racial relationship is free from the dynamics of racism in this society.

“I was taught to treat everyone the same.”

humans cannot be 100 percent objective.

While everyone of every race holds prejudice and can discriminate against someone of another race, in the US and other white/settler nations, only white people are in the position to oppress people of color collectively and throughout the whole of society.

your parents could not have taught you not to be racist, and your parents could not have been free of racism themselves.

A racism-free upbringing is not possible, because racism is a social system embedded in the culture and its institutions.

“My parents were not racially prejudiced, and they taught me not to be racially prejudiced.” This statement would still be false because it is not humanly possible to be free of prejudice.

While it isn’t comfortable for most whites to talk about racism, we must do so if we want to challenge—rather than protect—racism.

To avoid talking about racism can only hold our misinformation in place and prevent us from developing the necessary skills and perspectives to challenge the status quo.

I believe that the white collective fundamentally hates blackness for what it reminds us of: that we are capable and guilty of perpetrating immeasurable harm and that our gains come through the subjugation of others.

Carol Anderson, in her book White Rage, argues that “the trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement.

It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem; rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship.

if and when an educational program does directly address racism and the privileging of whites, common white responses include anger, withdrawal, emotional incapacitation, guilt, argumentation, and cognitive dissonance (all of which reinforce the pressure on facilitators to avoid directly addressing racism).

habitus

white fragility—the predictability of the white response to having our racial positions challenged.

habitus is the result of soc...

Because it is repetitive, our socialization produces and reproduces thoughts, perceptions, expressions, and actions. Thus, habitus can be thought of as a person’s familiar ways of perceiving, interpreting, and responding to social cues.

white fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress in the habitus becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.

When disequilibrium occurs—when there is an interruption to that which is familiar and taken for granted—white fragility restores equilibrium and returns the capital “lost” via the challenge.

White equilibrium is a cocoon of racial comfort, centrality, superiority, entitlement, racial apathy, and obliviousness, all rooted in an identity of being good people free of racism.

White fragility functions as a form of bullying; I am going to make it so miserable for you to confront me—no matter how diplomatically you try to do so—that you will simply back off, give up, and never raise the issue again.

white fragility as the means to end the challenge and maintain that power and control.

White fragility is much more than mere defensiveness or whining. It may be conceptualized as the sociology of dominance: an outcome of white people’s socialization into white supremacy and a means to protect, maintain, and reproduce white supremacy.

white fragility. One of the most common is outrage: “How dare you suggest that I could have said or done something racist!”

ASSUMPTIONS

FUNCTIONS OF WHITE FRAGILITY

These behaviors and the assumptions undergirding them do not in fact present the claimant as racially open; quite the opposite. They block any entry point for reflection and engagement.

The contradictions in these rules are irrelevant; their function is to obscure racism, protect white dominance, and regain white equilibrium.

Racism is the norm rather than an aberration.

Feedback is key to our ability to recognize and repair our inevitable and often unaware collusion.

guide...

it is the feedback I want and need.

Understanding that it is hard to give, I will take it any way I can get it.

Thank you.

I know that I have blind spots and unconscious investments in racism.

I did not set this system up, but it does unfairly benefit me, I do use it to my advantage, and I am responsible for interrupting it.

I believe that what it comes down to is this: I need to trust that you won’t think I am racist before I can work on my racism.

I do not require anything from someone giving me feedback before I can engage with that feedback. Part of my processing of that feedback will be to separate it from its delivery and ascertain the central point and its contribution to my growth.

As I have tried to show throughout this book, white people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview because it is the bedrock of our society and its institutions.

I repeat: stopping our racist patterns must be more important than working to convince others that we don’t have them.

If I believe that only bad people are racist, I will feel hurt, offended, and shamed when an unaware racist assumption of mine is pointed out. If I instead believe that having racist assumptions is inevitable (but possible to change), I will feel gratitude when an unaware racist assumption is pointed out; now I am aware of and can change that assumption.

White women’s tears in cross-racial interactions are problematic for several reasons connected to how they impact others.

there is a long historical backdrop of black men being tortured and murdered because of a white woman’s distress, and we white women bring these histories with us.

Because racism does not rely solely on individual actors, the racist system is reproduced automatically. To interrupt it, we need to recognize and challenge the norms, structures, and institutions that keep it in place.

if we whites want to interrupt this system, we have to get racially uncomfortable and be willing to examine the effects of our racial engagement.

Tears that are driven by white guilt are self-indulgent.