Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm

by Robin DiAngelo

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.