White Fragility

As a white person, this is the most important book I've ever read. If you're open and willing to truly engage, listen and learn, you will love this book. If you're not yet ready to accept discomfort and a ton of emotions that are uncomfortable, this is not for you.It has been an eye-opener to me and has answered so many questions (all of which started with ‘yes, but...' to which I had no previous answers. I started off taking notes thinking I would write down a quote here, another there but I've filled pages and pages with so much from the book, I almost copied it all down.I will continue to refer to my notes and this book for the rest of my life and am incredibly grateful to [a:Robin DiAngelo 5283261 Robin DiAngelo https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/f_50x66-6a03a5c12233c941481992b82eea8d23.png] for writing it.

I Though this book was really interesting, well built and def helped me question further my bias and consideration of my own position as a white person in a race based society.
My regret is that I would have love to find a kind of discussion with an expert, who is a POC. It makes me want to read more an educate myself further, but not with a book not written by a white author.

I finally read this (my sister had purchased it a while ago) mostly because of the unrest after the murder of George Floyd. I have to say, I was kind of shocked by how unrelenting it was; I think it's a useful and valuable book for sure. Kind of interesting how whether or not books like this(white people talking to white people about racism) existed before DiAngelo released White Fragility, none seems to have ever been nearly as popular or impactful.

Just a couple things I didn't like. Literally two.

- I felt she spent a lot of time repeating herself(probably necessary) and not enough time explaining certain terms and concepts she used. While reading, I tried to read it as if I were a skeptical/defensive white person. Early on in the book, she starts talking about how schools/America are still “segregated,” but doesn't quite explain much of how or why. Seems like something easy to balk at if one is looking for any reason to discredit the book and its ideas: Title 9 exists, de jure segregation à la Jim Crow no longer exists. At the same time, I think she mentioned that she wouldn't be explaining how America has been/is racist, and it's certainly a tall order to do so in one book (whose length would certainly turn people off). I guess I just wish there were some sections explaining certain things more fully, instead of repeated same-y anecdotes about her experiences in various workshops.

- The chapter on “White Woman Tears:” I definitely agree with the issue of white women weaponizing their emotions against people of color. What I don't agree with is the idea that it's somehow offensive when white women cry or are visibly upset when they are confronted with racism's effects on people of color. It's the first section of that chapter, I believe, and I just couldn't see the real justification for the embargo on this behavior. Personally I think that the black woman that approached DiAngelo was mostly in the wrong to say that “she didn't want to see any white woman's tears today.” Sure–if I were watching a white woman cry about unarmed black people getting shot, I would definitely be wondering if she were a decent “ally” herself and not just...sad about seeing people die...but I don't think that this emotional barrier should be maintained or erected. I can't see what purpose it serves. It's okay to not want performative/narcissistic tears to end up burdening or harming people of color, but not all instances of white women crying where race is a cogent factor can be classified as such. Feels like telling men not to cry in front of women in a feminist context–this actually doesn't help men, or women, and emotional repression probably makes a lot of tangible problems like domestic abuse worse.

Otherwise, powerful book; I definitely recommend it.

Absolutely required reading for any white person, even and especially including those who consider themselves racial progressives. This book masterfully dissembles the assumptions that we white people make when either obfuscating or denying our inevitable racist behavior, and describes in detail how our society's long, relentless history of white supremacy hammers this into white people from a young age.

This was a really insightful read, specifically written for White people, and I can't recommend it enough. This is really only a “beginner's level” book on racism, but, quite frankly, I think that's exactly where we all need to start. You won't get anywhere if you don't know the groundwork, anyway, and White Fragility puts a lot of things on the table simply as it is, and forces you to reconsider a lot of the maybe normal parts of life that you've missed out on realizing were really quite harmful towards people of color. It's things we say without thinking, or subconscious reactions we make, and the only way to improve ourselves is to realize where the problems lie and do our best to change them so it doesn't happen again. This book is a great starter for that in the realm of racism and it would do every White person on earth wonders to actually read it. 
Can definitely recommend.

This is a book written by a white person to white people about white people - and race.
It's not what the 1 star reviews say it is. It just challenges some unspoken beliefs and that makes people insecure, angry, hostile and nervous. White Fragility.

Come on, people, we white people are not in any kind of trouble. If there is one ounce of decency in you, you admit this.

Stop whining about not being “allowed” to feel this or that, stop getting insulted and offended because people tell you you hurt someone. Stop challenging your victim and arguing about whether your victim is “really” hurt or just being oversensitive. We are the strong ones, the privileged ones, the ones who benefit of the European racial prejudices put into system. You might not want to admit it, but it's nevertheless there. We are not the ones being discriminated as a group of people, by those who hold the power. I might personally be discriminated against, hurt, violated, in trouble, and there's plenty of people of color who are better off than I am, but COME ON! When even the President of United States gets called an ape just because he's a black man, the society is racist. And it's not racist against us, the white people.

So - stop being fragile white snowflakes. Yes, yes, we are all pretty and unique, but nevertheless white and fragile.

I verified a lot of it through my different “minority” identities.
I am a Feminist living in a culture where a man is the norm.
I am Autistic living in a culture where “neuronormals” (duh) are the norm.
I am a Pagan living in a culture where Christians are the norm. (Most of them secular, sure, but nevertheless.)
I have some experiences through my husband, but those are, of course, just second hand, and don't really count.
I mostly recognized the patterns as Autistic. The “neuronormal fragility” is strong.
The male fragility is also a thing, but surprisingly enough, so is the female fragility.

It might have been easier for me to read, because I'm Finnish, and because I went in to learn to become a better ally. I wanted to see what this “white fragility” is, and if I have it, do my best to get rid of it. Now, as far as I can see, I don't have much of it. It doesn't much matter, because all the things Robin DiAngelo said we should be doing goes for everyone in every situation where we are privileged. And I am, very privileged in many ways.

I admit being a racist.
I do have a preconceived idea of who the person is based on their skin color. My idea of who the person is is much more varied when I look at white people than when I look at black or yellow people.
I just assume that to everyone the people of their own race is the norm, and see the people with the same skin color as individuals and the people with the different skin color as members of a group. Now, I might be wrong, there, and it's just us white people who think that way. I remember asking a Kenyan woman if they have a pejorative+ name for white people, and she didn't tell me, so either she was polite enough not to offend me, or we white people are real a-holes. Nevertheless, if they had had a name, it would have been only a jolly curiosity to me. Because I'm white. My whiteness is the norm, the ideal, I'm safe from racism, so ethnic slurs don't mean anything.
I'm married to a Jewish man. The mere “Jew” can be a threat. We live in a very antisemitic neighborhood, and there are days he won't even leave the apartment, because of the threat of violence.

So, all these white people saying “we are being targeted now!” don't know what they are talking about. Whiny entitled babies. Needing to acknowledge that other races are just as deserving of the privileges we have been enjoying for hundreds of years is nothing to be afraid of. But, sure, we lose the “first ching” as it's called in Swedish. The opportunity to get to choose before everyone else. And, sure, that is a loss of a benefit. After all, they give this “first ching” as a VIP benefit to club members etc.
But - if I acknowledge I lose this benefit, I have to admit I have the benefit,
and I also have to admit that it's racially motivated, not merit based.
And then I have to admit that I do consider my race being more deserving than others, that is, that I'm a racist.
And that I don't really care about merit, as long as someone else is more merited than I am...
You know, the Affirmative Action? It doesn't say that if a white person and a black person seek for employment, the job has to go to the black person. It says, that if a white person and a black person see for employment, the job goes to the better merited, UNLESS THEY ARE EQUALLY MERITED, AND THEN the job goes to the black person. EQUALLY MERITED. And it exists because the society isn't merit based, it's based on nepotism, money and chauvinism. People prefer people they identify with, people they'd choose as friends, over everyone else.
Just look at your friends. Look at your spouse and your children and their friends. I bet it's pretty monochromatic.

Sure, we could say that most people alive today in spite of their color has been a slave, and that the game field has been leveled, but... it's like... think about an online computer game. You get XP by years you play, and the XP gives bonus points to all players playing the same kind of character. Like, better luck pick-pocketing, or higher charm counter or so. Now, some kinds of characters haven't been around for as long as others, because at one point, some people playing a certain type of character deleted all the others. Now, those players aren't playing any longer, but other people playing the same character kind don't think the others should either get the deleted benefits back, get compensated for it, or that everyone's benefits are zeroed. Simply because THEY didn't delete anything, because they are letting everyone play and they think it was really bad to delete the characters.

Second reading:

Summary: A discussion of white resistance to understanding the social dynamics of race. 

I re-read White Fragility to participate in an online book discussion. And I continue to think that while White Fragility is very helpful and worth reading that there are issues with it. A number of people object to the title because they do not believe that being called fragile is helpful. The objections go in several directions. This piece, “It's not White Fragility, it's White Flammability” is an argument that the term fragile does not adequately take into account the harmful backlash that many White people express in response to being confronted with racism.

Of all the countless encounters I've had with white fragility, I may have thought, no matter what I say, this white person is going to react with anger and accusations and exclamations of their own innocence and my wrongness for attacking them, and nothing good will come of it. I never thought, this white person is fragile, this white person's whiteness is fragile, or even this white person's idea of themselves is fragile.

I thought, and felt in my body, this white person is dangerous. Because they don't know they're white. They don't know they are not an individual. They think they're an original. They think what they're about to say is something they came up with, that came to them as a person, not as a white person. They are living a script, they are in a play, and I am caught in it with them. - from White Flammability article

Mark Charles, in his book Unsettling Truths, has a chapter on Participation-Induced Traumatic Stress Disorder. He discusses why he thinks that labeling what DiAngelo understands as White Fragility as PITS makes more sense. I generally agree with the content of what Charles is saying in that chapter, but I am not sure that the problems of labeling it as a psychiatric disorder are any less than the current term.

And then there are the complaints in the other direction that say that a term like fragility creates an opposition within White people to hearing the actual problems being raised. I think it is easier to respond to this point from the book:

Because we are not raised to see ourselves in racial terms or to see white space as racialized space, we position ourselves as innocent of race. On countless occasions, I have heard white people claim that because they grew up in segregation, they were sheltered from race. At the same time, we turn to people of color, who may also have grown up in racially segregated spaces (because of decades of de jure and de facto policies that blocked them from moving into white neighborhoods) to learn about racism. But why aren't people of color who grew up in segregation also innocent of race?

I continue to think that the audience for this book is mainly miscast. White Fragility is a book that was written primarily for White progressives that are already trying to pay attention to racial issues and confront their racism. DiAngelo expressly says that in the introduction. White Fragility is not a particularly helpful book for people that do not think that systemic racism exists or believes that racism is solely about individual personal animus based on skin color.

One of the reasons I think White Fragility has become so ubiquitous is that generally, White people do not listen to Black and other racial minorities talk about race. It is why White people tend to like to be moderators of conversations about race and direct the discussion instead of stepping aside and listening.

James Baldwin made these points decades ago: “Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”  or “ There isn't any Negro problem; there is only a White problem.” Many others have made similar points, what I like about White Fragility is that it is attempting to directly confront the reality of the ‘White problem' of race in America. What I get frustrated about with White Fragility is that part of the problem of the book is resistance to understanding the actual problem of race and the desire to make it about sociological reality alone.

Read in the right frame, and in context with history and other Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian voices White Fragility can be a very helpful book. But read by itself in a particular mode, I think it can become a book that helps dismiss.

When I first read it, I thought it was one of the best books to explain what it means to be White to White people. I still think it can be very helpful, but there have been a number of books that have either been written since or I have read since. Here is a list of some that I think should also be considered:

• So You Want to Talk about Race


• Good White Racist


• Why are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria


• White Awake


• Be the Bridge

And that does not include a number of books about history or specialized subtopics that are significantly helpful.

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