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

by Robin DiAngelo

THE PERCEPTION...

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

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

In 1922, the Supreme Court ruled that the Japanese could not be legally white, because they were scientifically classified as “Mongoloid.” A year later, the court stated that Asian Indians were not legally white, even though they were also scientifically classified as “Caucasian.”

In other words, people already seen as white got to decide who was white.

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In reality, only European immigrants were allowed to melt, or assimilate, into dominant culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, because, regardless of their ethnic identities, these immigrants were perceived to be white and thus could belong.

Race is a social construction, and thus who is included in the category of white changes over time.

European immigrants became racially united through assimilation.10 This process of assimilation—speaking English, eating “American” foods, discarding customs that set them apart—reified the perception of American as white.

It is on each of us who pass as white to identify how these advantages shape us, not to deny them wholescale.

Because race is a product of social forces, it has also manifested itself along class lines; poor and working-class people were not always perceived as fully white.

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However, poor and working-class whites were eventually granted full entry into whiteness as a way to exploit labor.

But racial divisions have served to keep them from organizing against the owning class who profits from their labor.

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clas...

RACISM

Prejudice is pre-judgment about another person based on the social groups to which that person belongs.

If I am aware that a social group exists, I will have gained information about that group from the society around me.

People who claim not to be prejudiced are demonstrating a profound lack of self-awareness.

it is important not to be prejudiced. Unfortunately, the prevailing belief that prejudice is bad causes us to deny its unavoidable reality.

We then feel the need to defend our character rather than explore the inevitable racial prejudices we have absorbed so that we might change them.

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

Most of us can acknowledge that we do feel some unease around certain groups of people, if only a heightened sense of self-consciousness.

Our unease comes from living separate from a group of people while simultaneously absorbing incomplete or erroneous information about them.

When the prejudice causes me to act differently—I am less relaxed around you or I avoid interacting wit...

Everyone has prejudice, and everyone discriminates.

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 is a structure, not an event.”

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Everyone has prejudice and discriminates, but structures of oppression go well beyond individuals.

women as a group could not deny men their civil rights.

men as a group could and did deny women thei...

Men could do so because they controlled all t...

for men to grant it...

Similarly, racism—like sexism and other forms of oppression—occurs when a racial group’s prejudice is backed by legal au...

This authority and control transforms individual prejudices into a far-r...

longer depends on the good intentions of individual actors; it becomes the default of the society and...

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

ideology,

Ideology is reinforced across society, for example, in schools and textbooks, political speeches, movies, advertising, holiday celebrations, and words and phrases.

These ideas are also reinforced through social penalties when someone questions an ideology and through the limited availability of alternative ideas.

Ideologies are the frameworks through which we are taught to represent, interpret, understand, and ma...

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Examples

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).

racial id...

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.

Racism is deeply embedded in the fabric of our society. It is not limited to a single act or person.