critical race theorist Barbara Applebaum, who asserts that ‘all white people are racist or complicit by virtue of benefiting from privileges that are not something they can voluntarily renounce’. How could they be otherwise, the theory goes, given that they have been socialised in a world that is undergirded by racism at all levels? White fragility, then, is not simply a defensive reaction to unjust accusations, but is to be ‘conceptualized as the sociology of dominance: an outcome of white people’s socialization into white supremacy and a means to protect, maintain, and reproduce white
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