White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

A new social binary emerged in the wake of the civil rights movement. Since racism was bad, to be racist one must be a bad person; therefore, if one was a good person, one could not be racist. This reduced the casual definition of racism “to simple, isolated, and extreme acts of prejudice” (71), meaning that nearly all white people were exempt from being identified as racists. Not only does this dichotomy falsely simplify what racism and racists are, it also makes it extremely difficult to see racism as a systemic and institutionally supported issue.

Since adopting the good/bad binary, white people in the United States have resisted being labeled racist by arguing that they are good people. DiAngelo identifies common patterns of resistance that white people display. For example: “I was taught to treat everyone the same” (81), “My parents were not racist, and they taught me not to be racist” (83), and “Focusing on race is what divides us” (86). DiAngelo describes the false narratives propping each of these common ideas up and explains how urgent it is for white people to begin undoing them.