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

by Robin DiAngelo

assumed that he was “just like her,” and in so doing, she projected ...

Meanwhile, under the surface is the massive depth of racist socialization: messages, beliefs, images, associations, internalized superiority and entitlement, perceptions, and emotions.

While the idea of color blindness may have started out as a well-intentioned strategy for interrupting racism, in practice it has served to deny the reality of racism and thus hold it in place.

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

we can’t change what we refuse to see.

Countless studies show empirically that people of color are discriminated against in the workplace.

This defensiveness is rooted in the false but widespread belief that racial discrimination can only be intentional. Our lack of understanding about implicit bias leads to aversive racism.

AVERSIVE RACISM

Aversive racism is a manifestation of racism that well-intentioned people who see themselves as educated and progre...

Aversive racism is a subtle but insidious form, as aversive racists enact racism in ways that allow them to maintain a positive self-image

Rationalizing racial segregation as unfortunate but necessary to access “good schools”

Rationalizing that our workplaces are virtually all white because people of color just don’t apply

Avoiding direct racial language and using racially coded terms such as urban, underprivileged, diverse, s...

Denying that we have few cross-racial relationships by proclaiming how diverse our community or workplace is

Attributing inequality between whites and people of color to causes other than racism

Notice that the need for a gun is a key part of this story—it would not have the degree of social capital it holds if the emphasis were on the price of the house alone.

the story’s emotional power rests on why a house would be that cheap—because it is in a black neighborhood where white people literally might not get out alive.

not naming race provided plausible deniability.

But when I tell her that I am interested in how whites talk about race without talking about race, she switches the narrative.

Research in implicit bias has shown that perceptions of criminal activity are influenced by race. White people will perceive danger simply by the presence of black people; we cannot trust our perceptions when it comes to race and crime.

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Rather, the exchange reinforced our fundamental beliefs about black people.

race talk

“the explicit insertion into everyday life of racial signs and symbols that have no meaning other than positioning African Americans into the...

race talk always implies a racial “us” and “them.”

At the same time, because no one directly mentioned race, we could all deny that this was what we were actually talking about.

describing their hometowns as “sheltered.”

yet claiming that one has grown up in a sheltered environment raises a question that begs to be answered: “Sheltered from what and in contrast to whom?”

are we not in fact less sheltered from racist conditioning because we have to rely on narrow and repetitive media representations, jokes, omissions, and warnings for our understanding of people of color?

positioning white spaces as sheltered and those who are raised in them as racially innocent taps into classic narratives ...

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Whites rarely consider how sheltered and safe their spaces may be from the perspective of people of color

it reverses the actual direction of racial danger,

When you consider the moral judgment we make about people we deem as racist in our society, the need to deny our own racism—even to ourselves—makes sense.

Unfortunately, aversive racism only protects racism, because we can’t challenge our racial filters if we can’t consider the possibility that we have them.

CULTURAL RACISM

The body of research about children and race demonstrates that white children develop a sense of white superiority as early as preschool.

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millennials profess more tolerance and a deeper commitment to equality and fairness than previous generations did.12 At the same time, millennials are committed to an ideal of color blindness that leaves them uncomfortable with, and confused about, race and opposed to measures to reduce racial inequality.

41 percent of white millennials believe that government pays too much attention to minorities, and 48 percent believe that discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against people of color.

postracial.

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The students recorded more than seventy-five hundred accounts of blatantly racist comments and actions by the white people in their lives (friends, families, acquaintances, strangers).

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The first is how much explicit racism young people are exposed to and participate in.

The second is the idea that if someone is a good person, he or she

cannot be racist, as demonstrated in the student’s note that if someone overheard, the person ...

backstage—in all-white company.

Further, they found that whites involved in these incidents most often played predictable roles.