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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.