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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Author’s Note-Chapter 1

Chapters 2-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-11

Chapter 12

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 2-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 2 Summary: “Racism and White Supremacy”

DiAngelo explains that many people believe that race is the result of biological or genetic differences, but this is not the case. The concept of race was the result of pseudoscientific efforts to justify the economic practices of slavery in the United States and global colonization. These efforts established a hierarchy based on false categories of racial difference. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the idea of race evolved to continue “legitimiz[ing] racial inequality and protect[ing] white advantage” (17) in the United States.

Race is a social construct that constantly shifts meanings to perpetuate white superiority. The definition of whiteness and what it means to be a white person changed over time. Although there are class differences between white haves and have-nots, this doesn’t exempt poor and working-class white people from receiving some race-based privileges.

DiAngelo distinguishes racism from prejudice. All people have prejudice, which is not necessarily a bad thing—it is a natural consequence of being human. Prejudice can lead to discrimination, or “action based on prejudice” (20). Racism is a specific kind of discrimination—“a racial group’s collective prejudice […] backed by the power of legal authority and institutional control” (20). Like other forms of oppression, racism happens when a dominant racial group establishes systems and institutions to reinforce discrimination based on race. The historical context in which the category of race emerged in the United States and its current racist systems make it impossible for white people to avoid being part of these racial ideologies. In turn, while Black people can discriminate against others based on their own prejudice, they cannot be racist because all of the systems in place reinforce anti-Black discrimination. DiAngelo emphasizes that both the individual beliefs of white people and the larger systems that support racism in the United States create white privilege.

As a result, white people benefit from a series of societal and personal advantages. Critical race scholar Cheryl Harris describes “whiteness as property” (24), explaining that “identity and perceptions of identity can grant or deny resources” (25). In other words, being white, or perceived as white, allows people to get both tangible resources (e.g., money, land) and intangible ones (e.g., a positive sense of self).

The complex nature of white identity gives white people systemic advantages and individual benefits. However, white identity also allows white people to feel that they are exempt from having to think about or talk about racial identity—that they are outside racial categories. This often leads white people to be especially uncomfortable in situations that challenge their sense of stability about race and racial identity. These scenarios trigger white fragility.

White supremacy, like race and racism, has changed over time, as have public perceptions about what constitutes white supremacy. DiAngelo argues white supremacy is a “sociopolitical economic system of domination based on racial categories that benefits those defined and perceived as white” (30). This definition explains the widespread, systemic benefits for white people in the United States, which range from overrepresentation in the government and the media to the disparities in the education system. In addition, white supremacy allows white people to operate from what sociologist Joe Feagin terms the “white racial frame” (34), in which white people set the rules and values of society so that white people are superior and central, while other people are inferior and marginal.

Chapter 3 Summary: “Racism After the Civil Rights Movement”

Racism’s adaptability has allowed white people to shift exactly what defines race, white supremacy, and racism. Three types of racism emerged in the United States after the civil rights movement: color-blind racism, aversive racism, and cultural racism. These three examples show how racism has continued to adapt.

Color-blind racism is the argument that “if we pretend not to notice race, then there can be no racism” (40-41). Once a white person says that race doesn’t matter or isn’t visible to them, they can pretend that the entire structure of white supremacy also doesn’t exist. However, this discounts the experiences of people of color. White people have subconscious racial bias, so it is impossible to be color-blind.

Aversive racism works on a strategy of denial. Without naming race explicitly, white people rationalize their racist beliefs or use coded language to share these beliefs. This allows white people to “enact racism in ways that allow them to maintain a positive self-image” (43), denying that they are racist without actually questioning their beliefs or avoiding racist statements.

Cultural racism is the result of the constant stream of racist information that people take in as part of American society, combined with “the idea that if someone is a good person, he or she cannot be racist” (48). Cultural racism allows white people to pretend to be “good” in social settings, yet also hold racist beliefs when they can do so in solidarity with other white people.

Chapter 4 Summary: “How Does Race Shape the Lives of White People?”

Chapter 4 explores some of the intangible ways that white supremacy benefits white people and shapes their lives.

For white people, a sense of racial belonging in “virtually every situation or context deemed normal, neutral or prestigious” (53) is the natural consequence of being white. A general sense of comfort allows white people to be free from the weight of worrying about their racial identity in any context, to subconsciously see themselves as superior, and to move freely in almost all spaces without ever questioning their own racial identity. White people develop the sense that being white is the norm and don’t feel the need to identify themselves or other white people by race.

One of the most important social aspects of white identity is white solidarity, a phenomenon through which white people “protect white advantage and not cause another white person to feel racial discomfort by confronting them” (57). White solidarity allows white people to remain racially comfortable in a wide range of scenarios, since challenging a white person leads to many of the symptoms of white fragility.

DiAngelo explains the idea of white racial innocence, whereby white people position themselves outside of a racial identity or hierarchy. This leads to racial inequity, partly because white racial innocence supports white people’s choices to live in segregated communities. The different aspects of the social and personal dimensions of white identity feed into each other. DiAngelo argues that it is white people’s “responsibility to grapple with how this socialization manifests itself in our daily lives and how it shapes our responses when it is challenged” (69).

Chapters 2-4 Analysis

DiAngelo’s analysis rests on two major precepts of critical race theory. The first is the adaptive nature of racism. This flexibility is critical to understanding larger ideological shifts in the United States, as well as to interrogating why white people currently support a white supremacist system. Even though the sociopolitical context of race has changed dramatically over the last centuries, DiAngelo argues that “racism can still exist because it is highly adaptive” (40). Its adaptive nature has led to new permutations of racism and racist belief systems; for example, DiAngelo describes the emergence of “color-blind” and aversive racism, both of which appeared after the successes of the civil rights movement. In order to address the highly malleable nature of racism, DiAngelo urges readers to spend time untangling these new adaptations in order to understand their impact on the current social landscape.

This adaptability is supported by a wealth of historical scholarship on race in America. Recent books like Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning and the aforementioned The New Jim Crow trace the evolutionary arc of American racism from slavery to the Jim Crow era to the present era of mass incarceration. Between each era, white elites develop new tactics for preserving racial caste-systems, adapting racism for the current moment. According to Alexander, for example, the civil rights movement that brought an end to the Jim Crow Era required individuals who sought to perpetuate white supremacy to eliminate explicit racism from their rhetoric. Both Alexander and DiAngelo cite Republican strategist Lee Atwater’s infamous quote that in a supposedly “color-blind” America, politicians were forced to signal their racism through coded terms like “forced busing” and “states’ rights.” Alexander adds that the signature innovation that distinguishes the systemic racism of mass incarceration from the systemic racism of Jim Crow and slavery, is that the current caste system “appears voluntary” (Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow. New York: The New Press. 2010).

The second pillar of critical race theory DiAngelo leans on in her analysis is that race is a social construct. This too is supported by countless scholars who view whiteness as an exclusionary concept designed solely to oppress those who do not belong under this arbitrary label. In The New York Times, Princeton University scholar and author of The History of White People Nell Irwin Painter addresses the phenomenon described by DiAngelo in which white people—particularly those descended from non-Anglo-Saxons—deny their own whiteness on a genetic and cultural basis. She writes,

In the 1970s, long after they had been accepted as ‘white,’ Italians, Irish, Greeks, Jews and others proclaimed themselves ‘ethnic’ Americans in order to forge a positive identity, at a time of ‘black is beautiful.’ But this ethnic self-discovery did not alter the fact that whiteness continued to be defined, as before, primarily by what it isn’t: blackness (Painter, Nell Irwin. “What is Whiteness?” The New York Times. 21 Jun. 2015).

Moving on, DiAngelo argues that white fragility exists because white people in the United States feel racially comfortable in all settings and expect this comfort to continue—an assumption that comes directly from a white supremacist system. White supremacy builds ideologies that center whiteness socially and institutionally. These ideologies feed white people’s social behaviors, leading to a range of choices designed to increase white people’s comfort. White people are free to segregate themselves physically, participate in public spaces that portray whiteness as valuable, and collude with other white people to maintain a sense of racial superiority using coded language and other tactics of subconscious solidarity. White people believe they deserve constant comfort and safety regarding their racial identity; when this comfort is challenged, white fragility erupts.

Having chosen a complex subject matter likely to raise negative emotions, DiAngelo carefully structures White Fragility to support readers in understanding her arguments and ideas. Her introduction clearly states her own subjective stance in any conversation about race; references to the work of leading scholars back up her arguments.

After presenting a clear set of definitions, DiAngelo shifts to a more narrative, emotionally focused style. Rather than relying solely on intellectual arguments, DiAngelo is careful to ground readers in the social and emotional landscape of racial socialization, which is important to her eventual points about white fragility. DiAngelo uses the first person for a significant portion of Chapter 4, explaining racial socialization by using specific examples from her own life to draw much broader, generalized conclusions. For example, DiAngelo uses a personal event, her own birth, to reference larger patterns of racial inequity like disproportionate access to healthcare, writing, “[i]f I were born in a hospital, regardless of the decade in which I was born, any hospital would be open to me because my parents were white” (51).