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

While speaking in more generalized terms to discuss white racial identity, it is important to speak specifically about different racial identities in the United States. DiAngelo explores anti-Blackness in more depth, writing, “[i]n the white mind, black people are the ultimate racial ‘other’” (90). Without Blackness, white people could not have constructed their own superiority, so “blackness is essential to the creation of white identity” (91).

DiAngelo lists ways in which anti-Blackness is visible in contemporary American culture, including: white resistance to affirmative action programs, white acceptance of violence towards Black people, and white willingness to punish or criminalize Black people more readily.

DiAngelo discusses how anti-Blackness allows white people to deflect and project their own negative emotions onto a Black subject. Analyzing the movie The Blind Side, she concludes that white peoples’ “need to deny the bewildering manifestations of anti-Blackness […] makes us irrational, and that irrationality is at the heart of white fragility” (98).

Chapter 7 articulates what happens for white people when their racial comfort and sense of safety is threatened and describes the circumstances in which this happens.

The interruption of a white person’s racial comfort can come from a shift in their perception of their “habitus,” a sociology term meaning “a person’s familiar ways of perceiving, interpreting, and responding to the social cues around him or her” (102). When a white person’s racial identity habitus is challenged, they often can only respond defensively. DiAngelo argues that when this kind of challenge causes a disequilibrium for the white person, “white fragility restores equilibrium” (106).