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White Fragility: Why it is so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

Critical race scholar Zeus Leonardo critiques the concept of white privilege as something white people receive unwittingly. He says that this concept is analogous to suggesting that a person could walk through life with other people stuffing money into his or her pockets without any awareness or consent on the walker’s part. Leonardo challenges this conceptualization, which positions white privilege as innocence, by arguing that “for white racial hegemony to saturate everyday life, it has to be secured by a process of domination, or those acts, decisions, and policies that white subjects perpetrate on people of color.”

Zeus Leonardo, “The Color of Supremacy: Beyond the Discourse of ‘White Privilege,’” Educational Philosophy and Theory 36, no. 2 (2004): 137–52, published online January 9, 2013.

White Fragility Why it is so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo

“As a culture, we don’t claim that gender roles and gender conditioning disappear the moment we love someone of the “opposite” gender. I identify as a woman and am married to someone who identifies as a man, yet I would never say, “Because I am married to a man, I have a gender-free life.” We understand that gender is a very deep social construct, that we have different experiences depending on our gender roles, assignments, and expressions, and that we will wrestle with these differences throughout the life of our relationship. Yet when the topic is race, we claim that it is completely inoperative if there is any level of fond regard. In an even more ludicrous form of reality, we even go as far as to claim that racial conditioning disappears if we can calmly walk by people of color on the streets of large cities.”

“I then ask, ‘What would it be like if you could simply give us [white people] feedback, have us graciously receive it, reflect, and work to change the behavior?’ Recently a man of color sighed and said ‘It would be revolutionary.’”

-White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo

“While speaking up against...explicitly racist actions is critical, we must also be careful not to use them to keep ourselves on the ‘good’ side of a false binary. I have found it much more useful to think of myself as on a continuum. Racism is so deeply woven into the fabric of our society that I do not see myself escaping from that continuum in my lifetime. But I can continually seek to move further along it. I am not at a fixed position on the continuum; my position is dictated by what I am doing at a given time. Conceptualizing myself on an active continuum changes the question from whether I am or am not racist to a much more constructive question: Am I actively seeking to interrupt racism in this context?”

-White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

“I was co-leading a workshop with an African American man. A white participant said to him, ‘I don’t see race; I don’t see you as black.’ My co-trainer’s response was ‘Then how will you see racism?’”

-White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

“Whites hold the social and institutional positions in society to infuse their racial prejudice into the laws, policies, practices, and norms of society in a way that people of color do not. A person of color may refuse to wait on me if I enter a shop, but people of color cannot pass legislation that prohibits me and everyone like me from buying a home in a certain neighborhood.”

-White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

“The poor and working classes, if united across race, could be a powerful force. But racial divisions have served to keep them from organizing against the owning class who profits from their labor.”

-White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo