Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm

by Robin DiAngelo

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?