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

by Robin DiAngelo

We see it in the president of the United States positioning the avowed white supremacist neo-Nazis marching openly in the streets—including one man who drove a car into a crowd of protesters—as equal in character to the people protesting them.

President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office.

Our projections allow us to bury this trauma by dehumanizing and then blaming the victim. If blacks are not human in the same ways that we white people are human, our mistreatment of them doesn’t count. We are not guilty; they are. If they are bad, it isn’t unfair. In fact, it is righteous.

As Coates points out, “toiling blacks are in their proper state; toiling whites raise the specter of white slavery.”8

The messages that circulate relentlessly across the generations reinforce the white belief that blacks are inherently undeserving (a frankly outrageous belief, given the state-sanctioned robbery of their labor).

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.

“The truth is that, despite all this, a black man was elected president of the United States: the ultimate advancement, and thus the ultimate affront. Perhaps not surprisingly, voting rights were severely curtailed, the federal government was shut down, and more than once the Office of the President was shockingly, openly, and publicly disrespected by other elected officials.”

White people are the saviors of black people. • Some black children may be innocent, but black adults are morally and criminally corrupt. • Whites who are willing to save or otherwise help black people, at seemingly great personal cost, are noble, courageous, and morally superior to other whites. • Individual black people can overcome their circumstances, but usually only with the help of white people. • Black neighborhoods are inherently dangerous and criminal. • Virtually all blacks are poor, incompetent, and unqualified for their jobs; they belong to gangs, are addicted to drugs, and are bad parents. • The most dependable route for black males to escape the “inner city” is through sports. • White people are willing to deal with individual “deserving” black people, but whites do not become a part of the black community in any meaningful way (beyond charity work).

Social taboos against talking openly about race • The racist = bad / not racist = good binary • Fear and resentment toward people of color • Our delusion that we are objective individuals • Our guilty knowledge that there is more going on than we can or will admit to

Deep investment in a system that benefits us and that we have been conditioned to see as fair • Internalized superiority and sense of a right to rule • A deep cultural legacy of anti-black sentiment

It is far more the norm for these courses and programs to use racially coded language such as “urban,” “inner city,” and “disadvantaged,” but rarely use “white” or “over-advantaged” or “privileged.”

When you combine this rarity with my lifetime of racial centrality, internalized superiority, sense of myself as a unique individual, and expectation for racial comfort that our culture engenders, I simply never had been called upon to build my capacity to endure racial stress.

habitus is the result of socialization, the repetitive practices of actors and their interactions with each other and with the rest of their social environment. 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.

Habitus maintains our social comfort and helps us regain it when those around us do not act in familiar and acceptable ways. We don’t respond consciously to disequilibrium in the habitus; we respond unconsciously. Bourdieu explains that “habitus is neither a result of free will, nor determined by structures, but created by a kind of interplay between the two over time: dispositions that are both shaped by past events and structures, and that shape current practices and

structures and also, importantly, that condition our very perceptions of these.”4 In this sense, habitus is created and reproduced “without any deliberate pursuit of coherence . . . without any conscious concentration.”5 In the rare situation in which the white position is challenged, disequilibrium results.

Suggesting that a white person’s viewpoint comes from a racialized frame of reference (challenge to objectivity) • People of color talking directly about their own racial perspectives (challenge to white taboos on talking openly about race) • People of color choosing not to protect white people’s feelings about race (challenge to white racial expectations and the need for, or entitlement to, racial comfort) • People of color being unwilling to tell their stories or answer questions about their racial experiences (challenge to the expectation that people of color will serve us)

A fellow white disagreeing with our racial beliefs (challenge to white solidarity) • Receiving feedback that our behavior had a racist impact (challenge to white racial innocence) • Suggesting that group membership is significant (challenge to individualism) • An acknowledgment that access is unequal between racial groups (challenge to meritocracy) • Being presented with a person of color in a position of leadership (challenge to white authority) • Being presented with information about other racial groups through, for example, movies in which people of color drive the action but are not in stereotypical roles, or multicultural education (challenge to white centrality) • Suggesting that white people do not represent or speak for all of humanity (challenge to universalism)

They were unable to separate intentions from impact.

Notable, however, is that though a majority of whites in the poll say discrimination against them exists, a much smaller percentage say they have actually experienced it.1

This history becomes profoundly minimized when whites claim they don’t feel safe or are under attack when they find themselves in the rare situation of merely talking about race with people of color.

when whites discuss issues that make them uncomfortable, they become almost incomprehensible.”7 Probing forbidden racial issues results in verbal incoherence—digressions, long pauses, repetition, and self-corrections. Bonilla-Silva suggests that this incoherent talk is a function of talking about race in a world that insists that race does not matter. This incoherence suggests that many white people are unprepared to explore, even on a preliminary level, their racial perspectives and to work to shift their understanding of racism. This reluctance maintains white power because the ability to determine which narratives are authorized and which are suppressed is the foundation of cultural domination. This reluctance has further implications, for if whites cannot explore alternate racial perspectives, they can only reinscribe white perspectives as universal.