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

by Robin DiAngelo

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.

While there is no biological race as we understand it (see chapter 2), race as a social construct has profound significance and shapes every aspect of our lives.1 Race will influence whether we will survive our birth, where we are most likely to live, which schools we will attend, who our friends and partners will be, what careers we will have, how much money we will earn, how healthy we will be, and even how long we can expect to live.

Discrimination is action based on prejudice.

Ideologies that obscure racism as a system of inequality are perhaps the most powerful racial forces because once we accept our positions within racial hierarchies, these positions seem natural and difficult to question, even when we are disadvantaged by them.

stating that racism privileges whites does not mean that individual white people do not struggle or face barriers. It does mean that we do not face the particular barriers of racism.

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

can justify my silence by telling myself that at least I am not the one who made the joke and that therefore I am not at fault. But my silence is not benign because it protects and maintains the racial hierarchy and my place within it.

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.’ It’s all very tidy now, this whole system.”

But racial generalization also reinforces something problematic for people of color—the continual focus on their group identity. Furthermore, it collapses many racial groups into one generic category, thereby denying the specific ways that different groups experience racism.

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. It is blackness that refuses to accept subjugation, to give up.”

dominant conceptualization of racism as individual acts of cruelty, it follows that only terrible people who consciously don’t like people of color can enact racism. Though this conceptualization is misinformed, it is not benign. In fact, it functions beautifully to make it nearly impossible to engage in the necessary dialogue and self-reflection that can lead to change. Outrage at the suggestion of racism is often followed by righteous indignation about the manner in which the feedback was given.

interrupting those patterns becomes more important than managing how we think we look to others.

stopping our racist patterns must be more important than working to convince others that we don’t have them. We do have them, and people of color already know we have them; our efforts to prove otherwise are not convincing.

We are supposed to remain stoic and strong because otherwise we become the angry and scary people of color.

They do not feel close to white people to whom they can’t speak honestly about racism, and these relationships always have a degree of distance and inauthenticity.

uncomfortable about our interaction the other day but it has taken me a while