In White Fragility’s introduction, author and educator Robin DiAngelo establishes that white people in the United States live in a deeply unequal society and benefit from that inequality. When white people’s positions are challenged, or when this inequality is merely named in any way, white people view it as an attack on their character. In other words, it’s perceived as a challenge to their identities as good, moral people, and they get defensive, guilty, angry, afraid, and often silent as a result. But by reacting in this manner, white people restore their own comfort and deflect from the issue of race, maintaining the racial hierarchy. This concept is what DiAngelo calls “white fragility,” the title of her book, and she emphasizes that white people must be willing to combat these reactions in order to disrupt racism.
White people have a difficult time admitting that being white affects their perspective because of several misleading ideologies, including individualism and objectivity. Individualism holds that all people are unique and have no commonalities even among social groups, and objectivity holds that it is possible to be free from bias—neither of which, DiAngelo argues, are actually true. For example, one man in DiAngelo’s workshop argues that white people can experience racism, citing how Italian Americans were once discriminated against. But DiAngelo points out that Italians were able to assimilate into white American society, and that has affected him a great deal because he works for a company whose employees are overwhelmingly white.
Many people believe that there are biological differences between the races, but in reality, different races were established in order to justify the genocide and enslavement of African and Indigenous people during the United States’ founding. If they believed that Black and Indigenous people were inherently inferior, white people did not have to treat them equally.
Racism is different from prejudice (thoughts, feelings, and stereotypes) and discrimination (action based on prejudice). Racism requires legal authority and institutional control, which is why white people cannot experience racism, because they have always had the legal authority and institutional control over people of color.
Many people associate white supremacy with extremism or violence, but the term white supremacy also captures the assumed superiority of white people and the practices that result from that assumption. It is the overarching political, economic, and social system of white people’s domination—it’s not just overt acts of violence or extremism perpetrated by hateful individuals. Examples of white supremacy include how white people control most of the wealth in the United States, how they create narratives about themselves and others in the media, and how white neighborhoods and schools are often seen as “better” than those with mostly people of color.
DiAngelo explains that people’s conception of racism has changed over time. Following the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” people believed that merely naming race was racist, and therefore “color-blind” ideology became prominent. White people pretended not to see race, believing that doing so would solve racism. But this method ignores the very real biases that people of color face. White people also use coded language in order to talk about race without directly naming it—a “good” or “sheltered” neighborhood general refers to a white neighborhood, while a “sketchy” one often refers to a predominantly nonwhite neighborhood. White people also rarely hold each other accountable for incidents of racism, comforted by the fact that they are not the ones who told a racist joke or story, for example. Yet they tacitly endorse this behavior by remaining silent, and are given social capital (like seeming fun, or being part of the team) in return for remaining silent in the face of racism rather than calling it out. This, DiAngelo says, is white solidarity.
Prior to the civil rights movement, it was socially acceptable for white people to openly proclaim their superiority. But when white people saw Black men, women, and children brutally attacked by police dogs and fire hoses, they didn’t want to be connected with these acts of extreme violence. As a result, they associated racism only with immoral, violent people, while good people could not be racist. Because of this, any accusation of racism is read as a character assassination, and white people get angry and defensive at those accusations. But in reality, racism is not a binary and everyone—even good people—can and do hold prejudices. Thus, people should welcome feedback so that they can work to change their behavior.
Most of the time, however, people respond to accusations of racist behavior with white fragility, and DiAngelo illustrates several examples of the white fragility she observes in her workshops. Some people are silent and believe that they “can’t say anything anymore.” But this kind of statement only shows that white people believe others are too sensitive, rather than honestly examining why their statements might cause offense. DiAngelo also notes that when white woman cry—whether in sympathy over racism or because they are personally receiving feedback on racist behavior—everyone’s attention turns to consoling them instead of focusing on racism. Thus, in this way, white fragility helps maintain white supremacy because it deflects the discussion away from how to interrupt racism and often positions white people as victims. But DiAngelo emphasizes that it is more important to focus on interrupting white supremacy than maintaining the appearance of not being racist.
In DiAngelo’s final chapter, she models how to not react with white fragility in discussing an incident between her and a web developer her company hired named Angela. DiAngelo makes an offhand comment about her Black coworker Deborah’s hair, and later she hears that Angela, who is Black, thought the comment was inappropriate. DiAngelo processes her feelings with another white person (as to not burden a person of color with her feelings), apologizes to Angela for her racist remarks, asks for further feedback, and makes honest efforts to remedy her behavior in the future. As a result, she and Angela are able to build a stronger relationship going forward. This exchange illustrates DiAngelo’s main point that it is more important for white people to own up to their inevitable racism and work to change it rather than try to convince others that they do not have racist behavior in the first place, and DiAngelo models the best way to do that. Otherwise, white people acting as they always have will simply maintain the racial inequality that DiAngelo has outlined throughout the book.
