Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm

by Robin DiAngelo

In the same way that silence from a position of power is a power move, niceness from a position of power can also be a power move.

In order for white people to unravel our internalized racial dominance, we have two interwoven tasks. One is to work on our own internalized oppression—the ways in which we impose limitations on ourselves based on the societal messages we have received about the inferiority of the lower-status groups to which we may belong. The other task is to face the internalized superiority that results from being socialized in a racist society—the ways in which we consciously or unconsciously believe that we are more important, more valuable, more intelligent, and more deserving than Black people.

After hours of evidence illustrating the enduring tragedy of systemic racism and anti-Blackness over the last four hundred years, beginning with genocide toward Indigenous people and three hundred years of kidnapping, enslavement, torture, rape, and brutality toward African Americans, up through the present day with mass incarceration and police executions, with an epidemic in missing and murdered Indigenous women and white nationalism on the rise, with children separated from parents and incarcerated at the Mexico border, and the consistent outcomes of profound racial inequality at every measure, why is “But what if it isn’t really racism?” the first place so many white people go?

anti-racism takes both personal and public courage to stand firm in the face of the inevitable pushback, retaliation, and seductive rewards for silence and complicity. Niceness is not courageous and will not sustain us in the face of resistance.