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

by Robin DiAngelo

We must be willing to consider that unless we have devoted intentional and ongoing study, our opinions are necessarily uninformed, even ignorant.

I can say so because nothing in mainstream US culture

gives us the information we need to have the nuanced understanding of arguably the most complex and enduring social dynamic of the last several hundred years.

I can get through graduate school without ever discussing racism.

I can get through a teacher-education program without ever discussing racism.

In fact, 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.

These are 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.

Interrupting the forces of racism is ongoing, lifelong work because the forces conditioning us into racist frameworks are always at play; our learning will never be finished.

definition of racism—as

intentional acts of racial discrimination committed by immoral individuals—engenders a confidence that we are not part of the problem a...

WE DON’T UNDERSTAND SOCIALIZATION

We make sense of perceptions and experiences through our particular cultural lens.

This lens is neither universal nor objective,

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.

These groups matter, but they don’t matter naturally, as we are often taught to believe.

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

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.

Our understanding of ourselves is necessarily based on our comparisons with others.

If group membership is relevant, then we don’t see the world from the universal human perspective but from the perspective of a particular kind of human.

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.

because denying that we have them ensures that we won’t exam...

I am generalizing.

white people having racial humility and of not exempting ourselves from the unavoidable dynamics of racism.

A more fruitful form of engagement (because it expands rather than protects his current worldview) would have been to consider how Italian Americans were able to become white and how that assimilation has shaped his experiences in the present as a white man.

we are products of our culture, not separate from it.

I ask readers to make the specific adjustments they think are necessary to their situation, rather than reject the evidence entirely.

None of these situations exempts you from the forces of racism, because no aspect of society is outside of these forces.

“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 which we live; individualism will not. For now, try to let go of your individual narrative and grapple with the collective messages we all receive as members of a larger shared culture. Work to see how these messages have shaped...

WE HAVE A SIMPLISTIC UNDERSTANDI...

In the post–civil rights era, we have been taught that racists are mean people who intentionally dislike others because of their race; racists are immoral.

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.

Why does this unsettle me? What would it mean for me if this were true? How does this lens change my understanding of racial dynamics? How can my unease help reveal the unexamined assumptions I have been making? Is it possible that because I am white, there are some racial dynamics that I can’t see? Am I willing to consider that possibility? If I am not willing to do so, then why not?

To interrupt white fragility, we need to build our capacity to sustain the discomfort of not knowing, the discomfort of being racially unmoored, the discomfort of racial humility.

understand how the forces of racial socialization are constantly at play.

this means first struggling with what it means to be white.

But race, like gender, is socially constructed. The differences we see with our eyes—differences such as hair texture and eye color—are superficial and emerged as adaptations to geography.1

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF RACE IN THE UNITED STATES

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.

the colonizers who came were not free of their own cultural conditioning; they brought with them deeply internalized patterns of domination and submission.3

If science could prove that black people were naturally and inherently inferior (he saw Indigenous people as culturally deficient—a shortcoming that could be remedied), there would be no contradiction between our professed ideals and our actual practices.

enormous economic interests in justifying enslavement and colonization.

“Why are blacks (and others) inferior?”

In less than a century, Jefferson’s suggestion of racial difference became commonly accepted scientific “fact.”5

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. Exploitat...

“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, segregation, or the jail cell.

7

disparity in condition can only be the result of systemic discrimination.