White Fragility

Even though virtually no one claims to be racist, racism still exists. DiAngelo notes that she’ll now cover various ways that racism has adapted over time to continue to produce racial disparity, but in such a way that white people can deny any involvement in it. Systems of oppression are deeply rooted and not overcome with the election of President Barack Obama, for example, or the passage of legislation. Advances are tenuous, as can be seen in the white nationalist protest in Charlottesville that led the president of the United States to say that there were “very fine people on both sides,” which would have been unthinkable a few years earlier. Yet the same president can argue that he was the least racist person one could ever meet.

Color-blind racism is an example of racism’s adaptiveness. The idea is based on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, in which he hoped that one day he might be judged by his character, not his skin color. White people took this to mean that if they pretended not to see race, racism would end. In other words, it became racist to acknowledge race.

DiAngelo recalls a workshop she was co-leading with an African American man. In it, one white participant claimed that she didn’t see race. The man responded that pretending not to see race was not helpful to him, as it denied him the reality of the racism that he faces. She projected her sense of belonging and the feeling that race doesn’t matter onto him. But DiAngelo emphasizes that people do see race, and countless studies have proven that people of color are discriminated against. Still, pointing out racism—even with empirical evidence—can still be met with defensiveness, because many people believe that racial discrimination can only be intentional.

Averse racism is a term used for enacting racism while still maintaining a positive self-image. Some examples include white people rationalizing racial segregation as unfortunate but necessary to access “good schools,” using racially coded terms like “urban” or “diverse,” or rationalizing that workplaces are all white because people of color don’t apply.

DiAngelo gives an example of averse racism she observed: a white friend was describing a white couple who moved to New Orleans and bought a house for $25,000. DiAngelo’s friend explained that the couple had to buy a gun, and the woman was afraid to leave the house. DiAngelo knows immediately that they moved to a Black neighborhood, but because her friend never mentioned race—they both had plausible deniability about perpetuating negative racial stereotypes.

Readers might ask why acknowledging danger is a sign of racism if the neighborhood is genuinely dangerous. DiAngelo explains that research in implicit bias has shown that white people will perceive danger simply by the presence of Black people—white people cannot trust perceptions when it comes to race and crime. This kind of conversation is what Toni Morrison calls “race talk”: the explicit insertion of racial signals that elevate white people while demeaning people of color, and especially Black people.

DiAngelo notes that averse racism occurs all the time—examples include descriptions of neighborhoods she would receive when moving to a new state, or white students talking about their “sheltered” hometowns. News stories that describe violent crime in white suburbs as “shocking” strengthen these depictions. Additionally, white people rarely consider how safe their spaces feel to people of color (for example, Trayvon Martin’s experience in a gated white community). In reality, white people have historically perpetrated far more violence against people of color than the other way around.

Many white young adults believe that they are more tolerant than previous generations. But in a significant study, 626 white college students kept journals and recorded every instance of racial issues, images, or understanding they observed. Several commonalities exist in the thousands of examples they collected. The first is how much explicit racism young people are exposed to and participate in. The second is the idea that if someone is a good person, that person cannot be racist—like one student who is glad her friend told a racist joke without any people of color around, because if someone else who didn’t know him heard, they might “misunderstand” him.

The researchers also documented the white students’ racially conscious behaviors, like acting overly nice to people of color, avoiding them, using code words, mimicking Black mannerisms and speech, and being careful not to use racist terms. But still, the majority of racist behaviors occurred “backstage,” meaning in all-white company. This behavior keeps racism circulating, because the students are socially penalized for challenging racist jokes or behavior. These cultural norms insist that white people hide racism from people of color and deny it to themselves, but not actually challenge it in any way.