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

Race is a socially constructed set of categories that mostly defy genetic or biological rules. Scholarship on race defines it as based on external characteristics that “are unreliable indicators of genetic variation between any two people” (15). This is because race science was “driven by…social and economic interests” (16) which supported slavery and colonization in the Americas. Without the construct of race, the United States’ social, political, and historical landscape would have been profoundly different.

The specifics of the racial category of white “first appeared in colonial law in the late 1600s” (17) and was soon attached to a number of social and political advantages, including citizenship and landownership. Because “race is a social construction […], who is included in the category of white changes over time” (18). This is important to understanding the resistance of white people who do not want to be classified as white.

In order to define racism, DiAngelo carefully delineates between prejudice, discrimination, and systemic oppression. Racism is the legal and institutional backing of “a racial group’s collective prejudice” (20), becoming “a far-reaching system that functions independently from […] individual actors” (20). DiAngelo also borrows a key idea from Ta-Nehisi Coates, who states, “race is the child of racism, not the father” (16). In other words, race was created in order to systematize oppression on a societal scale.

DiAngelo frequently references the idea that “racism is deeply embedded in the fabric of society” (22), reminding her audience that it is not possible to locate racism in just one act or just one person. The concept follows from her mantra that “racism is a structure, not an event” (28). This is important to her overarching arguments about white fragility: Every white person is socialized to be racist, yet the system also exists without the individual acts of each white person. It is thus important for white people to carefully examine how they have been socialized into racism in order to undo it.

For DiAngelo, “white identity is inherently racist” (149). It is impossible to separate individual white people from the system of racism—white people inevitably hold racist assumptions and display racist behaviors.

DiAngelo challenges many popular definitions of racism by exploring different misconceptions of what makes a person racist. Perhaps the most significant one of these is her exploration of the good/bad binary, which creates “the false assumption that [white people] can’t simultaneously be good people and participate in racism” (49). This binary allows white people to argue that if they are good, they therefore are not racist. Unfortunately, this obfuscates the ways that racism operates systemically, furthering the aims of white supremacy. 

Whiteness, or being identified as a white person, is a racial category devoid of any real genetic or biological markers. Whiteness is instead constructed on “a foundational premise: the definition of white as the norm or standard for human, and people of color as a deviation from that norm” (25). This foundation created a system in which anyone who was classified as white could benefit from the superiority and advantages that came with this identification, be they social, cultural, institutional, and material.

DiAngelo coins the term white fragility to discuss “a response or ‘condition’ produced and reproduced by the continual social and material advantages of whiteness” (106). This response occurs when a white person experiences “an interruption to [racial comfort] which is familiar and taken for granted” (106). When a white person responds defensively to a perceived threat to their racial equilibrium—in settings when a white person feels that someone has accused them of being racist or of not understanding something about race—they tend to respond with white fragility. The ensuing emotions and behaviors allow that white person to shut down or act out in order to end the perceived threat.

DiAngelo discusses both the historical roots of and modern social “triggers of white fragility […] as challenges to white power and control, and of white fragility as the means to end the challenge” (112). When a white person reacts to one of these triggers with any of the negative emotions and behaviors listed in Chapter 9, they are displaying white fragility and are “reproduc[ing] white supremacy” (113). DiAngelo cautions that this “continual retreat from the discomfort of authentic racial engagement” is what “perpetuates a cycle that keeps racism in place” (111).

White privilege most frequently refers to advantages and benefits that come from whiteness. DiAngelo describes white privilege as “a sociological concept referring to advantages that are taken for granted by whites and that cannot be similarly enjoyed by people of color in the same context” (24). White privilege is mostly invisible to white people; accusations of having white privilege are a white fragility trigger.

DiAngelo describes white solidarity as an invisible, unspoken agreement for white people to maintain “silence about anything that exposes the advantages of the white position and tacit agreement to remain racially united in the protection of white supremacy” (58). White solidarity is a dangerous tool of white supremacy because it demands white people acquiescence to white supremacy in social and institutional settings.

DiAngelo suggests that white people must break “the silence about race and racism with other white people” (148), an important antidote to individual white fragility. This is a difficult task, she cautions, because “in a white supremacist society, [one is] rewarded for not interrupting racism and punished in a range of ways—big and small—when [one does]” (58). In undoing racism, it is critical, DiAngelo believes, to interrupt racism publicly and with other white people, even if it means triggering white fragility.