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

Use these essay questions as writing and critical thinking exercises for all levels of writers, and to build their literary analysis skills by requiring textual references throughout the essay.

Differentiation Suggestion: For English learners or struggling writers, strategies that work well include graphic organizers, sentence frames or starters, group work, or oral responses.

Scaffolded Essay Questions

Student Prompt: Write a short (1-3 paragraph) response using one of the below bulleted outlines. Cite details from the book over the course of your response that serve as examples and support.

1. White Fragility uses a wide range of citations and examples, focusing primarily on sociology.

• What are some of the secondary or primary sociological evidence from the text that supports DiAngelo’s theory of “white fragility”? (topic sentence)
• Examine concepts like “habitus” from Chapter 7 and general sociology on whiteness
• DiAngelo furthers the sociological conversation about whiteness by elaborating the concept of “white fragility”

2. Almost every chapter of White Fragility begins with an epigraph that describes an interaction between people.

• How do these epigraphs contribute to the work as a whole? (topic sentence)
• Explore 2-3 of the epigraphs and how they relate to individual chapters
• Explain if you think DiAngelo’s epigraphs effectively explicate the themes of White Fragility

3. DiAngelo describes a number of assumptions that undergird white fragility.