Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm

by Robin DiAngelo

In popular culture, “white supremacy” connotes people who would wear hoods and explicitly espouse the ideology that white people are superior. But this usage is extremely narrow and simplistic and leaves out vast layers of nuance and complexity. I use the broader sociological understanding of the term, which includes the multitude of ways our society elevates white people as the human ideal and norm for humanity and relegates everyone else as a particular kind of human, and always a lesser deviation from the white ideal. This relegation is reinforced when we consistently mark the race of anyone who is not white, while not naming our own.

We claim to support racial justice efforts but want to suppress the tensions that accompany achieving that goal.

In Letter from the Birmingham Jail, written in 1963 while he was imprisoned for protesting racial segregation, King observed that white moderates played a fundamental—albeit implicit—part in the resistance to racial equality: I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom. . . . Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.2

The call to go slow and avoid conflict only serves the status quo of white comfort.

Note, for example, the common guidelines many white organizations use when setting up discussions on race: assume good intentions, respect differences, speak for yourself. Whose interests do these guidelines serve? They serve white expectations for racial comfort: ensuring niceness and warding off direct challenges. In so doing, they are not accounting for the ever-present dynamics of power, assuming a universal (white) experience, and policing BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) people into not engaging with authenticity lest they face the punitive power of white fragility.

Some white progressives do want to talk about racism and voluntarily show up at optional workshops or presentations on racism, but they are more likely to be thinking about the other white people who really should be receiving the message, not their own need to hear it. Their first question is often some form of “How can I tell my family/friend about their racism?” I have begun to respond by asking, “Well, how would I tell you about your racism?” My point is that the question assumes it is not the person asking who needs help but always someone else. The asker has arrived and is now ready to go forth and enlighten others. White progressives who are more willing to acknowledge the existence of racism and white advantage will still typically locate it in any white person other than themselves. “Society,” “The Administration,” or certain political parties are also popular targets—vague categories that cannot easily be addressed and exempt those present in the room.

Our certitude that we are free of racism prevents us from any further growth and development.

in my workshops I ask participants to form groups of three and share their reflections on a series of questions. I give them one minute each, per question. The final question is “What are some of the ways in which your race(s) has shaped your life?” There are three consistent patterns that emerge in their answers. The first is how uncomfortable this question is for many white people. The second is how difficult it is for so many of us to answer with any depth or criticality. I have seen countless white people unable to fill the sixty seconds, awkwardly waiting out the time. This discomfort and lack of critical awareness is not innocent or benign. The collective impact of our inability has very real consequences for racialized people living and working around us. If I can’t tell you what it means to be white, I will not be able to engage with an alternate experience—what it means not to be white. Not only will an alternate reality be incomprehensible to me, but I will need to refuse that reality because of what it reflects back and exposes about mine.

This is one of the great contradictions of white progressives. On the one hand, I would never want to say or do anything racially hurtful. But on the other, don’t you dare tell me I have said or done anything racially hurtful!

We will not organize to enact systemic change to a system we do not acknowledge.

While virtually any white progressive you ask will claim to not be racist, consider the following questions for reflection: • Did you grow up in an integrated neighborhood? If so, do you still live in one? If not and you do now, is it due to gentrification? • If you did not grow up in an integrated neighborhood, why didn’t you? • If everyone is equal, how did you make sense of living separately? • Did your parents encourage you to visit the places where Black people lived in order to get to know them and build the relationships that were missing in your environment? • Did your parents have a significant number of Black friends themselves? • Did you attend integrated schools? If so, was your school considered to be “good”? • Did you study systemic racism in your K–12 education? If you graduated from college, did you study systemic racism there? • Was it integrated throughout your education by your professors, including your Black professors? Or were your professors overwhelmingly white? Did those white professors have to demonstrate that they were able to engage with issues of racism in the curriculum and classroom dynamics before they were considered qualified to teach? • Did you have to demonstrate that you had a foundational understanding of racism before you could graduate, or teach, manage people, or practice medicine or law? • If you were not educated about racism, have you sought every— or even any—opportunity to gain that education yourself? • Do you work in an orga...

In discussing white people who define their politics as fiscally conservative but socially liberal, McGhee notes that all poverty in the US could be eliminated by spending just 12 percent more than the cost of the 2017 Republican tax cuts. Resistance to this expenditure is due in part to media’s representation of poverty as a Black issue, which distances the white collective from a problem they perceive as belonging to the Other. White people’s social liberalism thus more often manifests in “helping” a culture that is seen as deficient.

People who raise an objection to generalizing about white people may be confusing speaking about people at the group level with stereotyping. Stereotyping occurs when we take a trait demonstrated by one or a few members of a social group and project that trait onto all members of that group.

Sociology of law professor Jacqueline Battalora explains that from its founding, the United States established that whiteness—being seen as a white person—would result in access and opportunity as a matter of law.8 For example, the Naturalization Law of 1790 required that an immigrant be white in order to naturalize as a US citizen. This conferred advantage to those immigrants seen as white for more than 150 years. The law of 1790 is one among thousands that constructed a prevailing culture of preference for white people.

The legal exclusion of Black people, in addition to illegal acts of terrorism against them such as lynching, continued all the way through to the 1960s. Black people were denied the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) housing loans in the 1950s that allowed a generation of white people to attain middle-class status through home ownership. Home ownership is critical in the US because it is how the average person builds and passes down wealth, providing the starting point for the next generation. In her acclaimed book Race for Profit, professor of African American studies Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues that the transition in the 1960s and ’70s from the exclusionary policies of the FHA to inclusionary policies, via the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Act of 1968, tied HUD and the FHA to real estate brokers, mortgage bankers, and home builders. Taylor explains how, even early in the program, unscrupulous mortgage banks dominated the market. With the federal government guaranteeing loans, these banks sold as many homes as possible to African Americans in poor communities—“the riskier the buyer, the better,” because the bank got paid even if borrowers defaulted.9 With mortgage banks largely unregulated and incentivized to sell, homes that should have been condemned were pushed on African American buyers. Where redlining and racial profiling had blocked Black Americans from the home ownership that created a booming middle class for white people after World War II, it now made Bla...

The ideology of individualism is dependent on a denial of the past as relevant to the present, allowing us to ignore the results of centuries of systemic racial discrimination.

White women who enact white feminism want gender inequality acknowledged and addressed, and in this way differentiate their experience from the experience of men. At the same time, they use the category “women” as if there is one shared collective experience of womanhood, while using their own as a reference point. A cogent example of universalizing womanhood occurred when I was leading an affinity group for white women. They were asked to brainstorm a list of white advantages. As one group finished sharing their list, which included advantages such as representation in media, not being followed in stores, and being more likely to get loans, they apparently felt the need to put a positive spin on things and added, “But motherhood is universal to all women, regardless of race.” I was so taken aback that it took me a moment to collect myself enough to reply, “Motherhood is perhaps one of the starkest examples of the differences between white women and Black women—from infant and maternal mortality rates, to empirical evidence of racism in healthcare and education, to having to send your children to schools filled with teachers who fear them and textbooks that ignore them, to terror for your children’s lives anytime they interact with the police, to name just a few differences.” These women were progressive feminists, attending an equity conference and participating in a white women’s affinity group. Yet they left at the break and sent a messenger to let me know they were lea...

If we use the line of reasoning that we are all individuals and that social categories such as race, class, and gender don’t matter and are just labels that stereotype and limit us (pejoratively dismissed as “identity politics”), then it follows that we all end up in our own “natural” places. Those at the top are merely a collection of individuals who rose on their own individual merits, and those at the bottom are there due to individual deficiencies. Group membership is thereby rendered inoperative, and racial disparities are seen as the result of essential character attributes rather than the result of consistent structural barriers. Via individualism, it is either “just a fluke” that those at the top are a very homogenous collection of individuals, or else white, middle- and upper-class cis men and sometimes cis women are better at everything. White advantage is not a factor because we don’t see color anyway—we see each person as a unique individual, and we treat them as such. Thus individualism not only upholds the myth of meritocracy (success is the result of ability and hard work) but also upholds social Darwinism (survival of the fittest) and belief in the overall superiority of those at the top.

because the ideology of individualism is only granted to white people, it allows us to see negative behavior by any Black person as proof of what is wrong with Black people, while negative behavior by any white person only proves what is wrong with that individual person.13 This is why generalizing about white people in the context of challenging racism is different from generalizing about Black people. Granting Black people individuality interrupts a racist dynamic within a culture that has denied their individuality. Conversely, suspending individuality for white people is a necessary interruption to our denial of collective advantage.

we claim to value diversity as long as problematic racial dynamics are not named or challenged. By every measure across virtually every institution in every society where white people dominate, racial inequality persists. For example, a 2019 psychological study showed not only the vast difference in wealth between white Americans and Black Americans but also how skewed white Americans’ perceptions were of that gap. Researchers asked participants to imagine that the average white family in the United States has a hundred dollars.2 When asked what a comparable Black family has, most Americans guess eighty dollars. The answer is less than ten dollars.

I may not be a producer of racist ideas, but I have been a consumer.4 This changes the question from “Have I been impacted by the racist ideology circulating in the culture?” (a question most white people answer with a reflexive “No!” thereby requiring no further action) to “How have I been impacted by the racist ideology circulating in the culture?” And “How does this show up in my relationships and interactions?”

Psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum succinctly defines racism as “a system of advantage based on race.”5 This system encompasses economic, political, social, and cultural structures, and actions and beliefs that institutionalize and perpetuate an unequal distribution of resources between white people and Black, Indigenous, and people of color. In my work, I describe racism as collective racial bias backed by legal authority and institutional control. Only white people’s collective bias is backed with this level of power, so I do not use “racism” to describe the bias of BIPOC people. Of course BIPOC people have racial bias, but it is not backed in a way that embeds it into the entire fabric of the society and all of its institutions. I simply refer to their bias as “bias.” Systemic racism consistently works to the benefit of white people overall and to the disadvantage of BIPOC people overall, which is why I reserve language to capture its directional nature. For white readers who feel unsettled by the idea that BIPOC people are not “just as racist as we are,” I ask you to reflect on why that is such a sticking point for you. What do you think you lose by acknowledging that the impact of bias is profoundly different based on the institutional weight behind it?

If we limit racism’s scope to individual acts, then we are actively ignoring the insidious ways it operates. We also open the door for each of us to take an exemption.

Explicit forms of racism are not typically perpetrated by white progressives (although when cornered white progressives can and do erupt in straight-up racism, we don’t generally do so casually). Our racism avoids the blatant and obvious, such as saying the N-word or telling people to go back to where they came from. We employ more subtle methods: racial insensitivity, ignorance, and arrogance. These have a racist impact and contribute to an overall racist experience for BIPOC people, an experience that may be all the more maddening precisely because it is easy to deny and hard to prove. I am constantly asked for examples, so here are a few: • Confusing one person for another of the same racial group • Not taking the effort to learn someone’s name; always mispronouncing it, calling them something that’s easier to pronounce; making a show of saying it, or avoiding the person altogether • Repeating/rewording/explaining what a BIPOC person just said • Touching, commenting on, marveling at, and asking questions about a Black person’s hair • Expecting BIPOC people to be interested in and skilled at doing any work related to race • Using one BIPOC person who didn’t mind what you did to invalidate another who did • Calling a Black person articulate; expressing surprise at their intelligence, credentials, or class status • Speaking over/interrupting a BIPOC person • Lecturing BIPOC people on the answer to racism (“People just need to . . .”) • Bringing up an unrelated racial topic...

Consider a study of racial activist burnout, in which educational researchers Paul Gorski and Noura Erakat noticed a pattern.10 While both white activists and activists of color experienced burnout, the reasons varied. Of particular relevance, these researchers found that 82 percent of the activists of color they interviewed identified white racial justice activists as a major source of their burnout. The activists of color “attributed their burnout to the attitudes and behaviors—the racism—of white activists” (italics in original).

Niceness requires that racism only be acknowledged in acts that intentionally hurt or discriminate, which means that racism can rarely be acknowledged. Being nice also allows for absolution: if they didn’t intend to perpetuate racism, the act cannot and should not count.

in response to some of his elementary school staff dressing up like stereotypical Mexicans and other staff dressing as a border wall with “Make America Great Again” written on it, Middleton, Idaho, school superintendent Josh Middleton acknowledged “poor judgement” but insisted there was no “malicious intent.”2 In response, writer Kaitlyn Greenidge tweeted, “Sometimes I think white people use the ‘I didn’t intend to be racist’ to really mean ‘I was hoping my racism would have no consequences.’”3

Niceness can protect racism in several ways. First, it is difficult to get under the surface in a culture of niceness. To challenge and break through the facade requires conflict, and conflict is forbidden in a culture of niceness. How can we raise an uncomfortable and often contentious issue such as racism when niceness has been established as the procedural norm?

When you want me to be “nice” as a Black person, you mean: • Don’t talk about race • Don’t cause conflict • Don’t say anything that might upset me or other white people I care about • Don’t be direct • Don’t tell me what you really think • Tell me I’m a good person • Smile, be friendly • Don’t cause me to feel anything • Don’t pressure me to take action or own something I did • Don’t defend yourself against my racism lest you be seen as a bitter, angry person • Don’t name my racism

When you’re being “nice” as a white person, you: • Believe that means you can’t possibly be racist • Set me up as the mean Black person if I call you on your racism • Smile as a shield against genuine vulnerability • Assume that your whiteness/white space is comfortable for me • Are just being “professional” and following “the rules” because “nice” people don’t make waves • Think it’s not fair that I’m not being “nice” back (you’ve been magnanimous to include me; why am I not granting you the benefit of the doubt that you are not racist?) • Justify not interrupting racism because you didn’t want to hurt another white person’s feelings (at the expense of my feelings) • Leave me to take risks and be vulnerable • Will objectively watch from a “nice” distance to “learn what you and your people are feeling”

I urge my readers to notice how often proximity is used as evidence of a white person’s lack of racism, and how ridiculous yet unquestioned is the underlying belief that a racist cannot tolerate proximity to Black people.

In another example of using proximity as evidence of a lack of racism, then vice president Joe Biden recalled how he’d worked productively alongside two segregationist senators, including the virulently racist Senator James Eastland (Democrat-Mississippi). “At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything,” Biden said.9 “Today, you look at the other side and you’re the enemy.” Mr. Biden then recalled his time serving in the Senate. “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland. He never called me boy, he always called me son.” In response, Senator Cory Booker released a statement saying Biden’s “relationships with proud segregationists are not the model for how we make America a safer and more inclusive place for Black people, and for everyone.” He added that he was disappointed that Biden “hasn’t issued an immediate apology.” Biden’s response included invoking his past work on civil rights: “I’ve been involved in civil rights my whole career” and the classic “There’s not a racist bone in my body.” Biden insisted that it was Booker who owed him an apology for suggesting his comments were racist. Notice that while Biden and Meadows are on different ends of the political spectrum, their responses to charges of racism were similar.

We can’t proceed with any kind of authenticity in anti-racist work if we continually position ourselves in the victim role.

We do not have the answer to racism, and we need to stop lecturing Black people as if we do.

Note that every year in the month of February, when we celebrate Black History, we acknowledge the tragedy of imposed segregation on Blacks in the Jim Crow South. Yet white people live the most segregated lives of any racial group.

Also note how we talk about white segregation in glowing terms; a “good” or “safe” neighborhood or school is assumed to be primarily white. I think this is actually one of the most powerful messages of white supremacy: there is no inherent loss in leading a segregated life. Most white people will go from cradle to grave with few if any authentic sustained cross-racial relationships with Black people and not see that anything of value is missing. Reflect for a moment on the profundity of that message.

We need to develop the humility to not know. We do not have to fully understand a racialized person’s experience before it can be validated. We also need to build the capacity to just sit with the discomfort and heartbreak of bearing witness to expressions of pain about racism rather than try to block them, explain them away, or co-opt them with expressions of our own pain.

Given the risk it takes to give us feedback, many racialized people let a great deal of white racism go unchecked and only bother challenging us when a line is crossed or they are at the end of their patience. Insisting that they deliver this feedback to us calmly is profoundly controlling on our part and functions to prioritize our feelings over theirs.

I remember that when emotions are high, they are likely not all about me but also about what I represent. This helps me take the upset less personally and makes it easier to receive the feedback, learn what I can from it, and move forward.

When white people employ silence to maintain a degree of comfort, that silence functions as a means to maintain control. In addition to maintaining control, I submit that the issue taken with my approach that day was one of unfulfilled expectations. As white progressives, the participants expected to be validated in their wokeness, not called in and exposed. Their need to maintain face was so powerful as to allow them to continue maintaining silence, even when those they were ostensibly worried about hurting were telling them it was hurtful. This is the heartbreaking power of the white need for racial control. The great irony of silence as a means to save face is that it doesn’t convince anyone that we are not racist; it actually conveys the opposite.