![White Fragility: Why it's So Hard For White People to Talk About Racism White Fragility: Why it's So Hard For White People to Talk About Racism](https://www.proleacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/White-Fragility-Robin-DiAngelo.jpg)
This book is recommended across the country. It’s read in seminars and book clubs from coast to coast. It’s also banned in some places, including, briefly, my son’s own school district. People hear the term “White Fragility” and think this is going to be an attack on white people (it’s really not). They think it’s going to be revolutionary (it’s also really not). Others think it’s going to be glass-shattering and life changing, and maybe it is for some. I didn’t find it that way.
At the core of the book really is the term in the title, white fragility. Despite my deep reservations about this book, it’s a very useful term, and DiAngelo was right on the money when she coined it. What she means by it is the defensiveness, hostility that some white folk feel when you bring up the thornier parts of race relations. They avoid discussing slavery, discrimination, and the systems of racial oppression that still operate in American life. That is 100% real, and I’ll give kudos to the author for attempting to call it out. She’s done it in a way that’s caught fire in the public discourse.
You’ll hear white fragility in the insistence of some people that we should be “color-blind”. They claim we must be “post-racial”, which seems to mean we should not talk about racial matters at all. You’ll hear it when they insist that racism is a thing of the past, or that our institutions no longer discriminate. Point out aspects of our economic, legal and political systems that still create racially unequal outcomes, and they’ll call this divisive or coincidental. If they admit that it’s more than coincidental, they’ll insist they have no responsibility for the sins of people that are long dead. They’ll deny they have what’s called white privilege. Some seem to believe admitting it is the same as saying their life wasn’t hard (it isn’t). They fear that accepting their privilege implies they’re well-off (it doesn’t). It also doesn’t always mean that they intend to lord that privilege over others.
The author seems to intend this book for use in and by corporate HR seminars about what white fragility is. As such, it seems to have two main goals. It is meant to explain the behavior of white people when confronted with these ideas. It’s also an invitation for those same people to experience empathy for their black coworkers and neighbors. I’m not going to deny it has some value in that. If it didn’t, I’m certain it wouldn’t be popular.
Yet White Fragility fails to explore the nature of systemic racism in the United States. It doesn’t emphasize how it feeds into the circumstances that non-white Americans face. DiAngelo seems intent on tackling racism as a matter of one person regarding another with prejudice or hatred. This is a popular view – that racism is about perception, feelings, one-on-one treatment. And yet DiAngelo is familiar with the work of scholars like Ibram X. Kendi, whose way better book How to Be an Antiracist makes clear that racist policies are central to racism. In fact, leaders implemented racist policies in the West before the racist ideologies that justified them. The bibliography of the book makes clear that DiAngelo is familiar with this work, but she stays silent about it here. This book plays dumb about the impact that racist policies have on our situation. It pretends that this is still just a matter of individual hatreds and blind spots. In this respect, DiAngelo does a disservice to the cause even as she helps popularize it.
White Fragility: Why it's So Hard For White People to Talk About Racism
A guide to how white people manage to avoid racial discomfort and diversity while convincing themselves they're free of prejudice. However, its corporate-HR overtones - and lack of awareness ...
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