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

Author’s Note-Chapter 1

Reading Check

1. Identity politics and the complexity of racial identities (Author’s Note)

2. The author (Introduction)

3. To identify themselves as white (Chapter 1)

Short-Answer

1. White fragility refers to the difficulty white people have when handling racial stress. It arises when a white person’s comfort is challenged by even “the mere suggestion that being white has meaning” (2) (Introduction)

2. That they should challenge themselves to have an internal dialogue about that discomfort because the only way to work against white fragility is to build “capacity to sustain the discomfort of not knowing” (14) (Chapter 1)

3. DiAngelo addresses white people in the text, which is important since she is actively choosing to disrupt the racial comfort that most white people experience living in a white supremacist society like that of the United States. Disrupting this comfort, she potentially hopes to undo and challenge (Chapter 1)

Chapters 2-4

Reading Check

1. White superiority (Chapter 2)

2. Discrimination (Chapter 2)

3. Color-blind racism, aversive racism, and cultural racism (Chapter 3)

4. Adaptive racism and the idea that race is a social construct (Chapters 2-4)

Short-Answer

1. This assumption that they have no racial identity 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 (Chapter 2)

2. Color-blind racism is when white people pretend not to notice race and assume “there can be no racism” (40-41). Meanwhile, aversive racism is a strategy of denial, where without explicitly naming or discussing racist, white people used coded language to share these beliefs (Chapter 3)

3. Racial innocence is white people’s belief that they are somehow outside of a racial identity or hierarchy. It leads to racial inequity in a variety of ways, including by supporting white people’s choice to live in segregated communities, where their idea of “racial innocence” can be reinforced by other white people (Chapter 4)

4. For example, DiAngelo describes the emergence of color-blind and aversive racism, both of which appeared after the successes of the civil rights movement. Color-blind racism pretends not to see color, while aversive racism denies that racism exists (Chapter 3)

Chapters 5-7

Reading Check

1. They’ll say things such as: “I was taught to treat everyone the same” or “My parents were not racist, and they taught me not to be racist” and “Focusing on racist is what divides us.” (Chapter 5)

2. Examples include: White resistance to affirmative action programs, white acceptance of violence towards Black people, and white willingness to punish or criminalize Black people more readily (Chapter 6)

3. A person’s familiar ways of perceiving, interpreting, and responding to social cues (Chapter 7)

Short-Answer

1. It’s called the “good/bad binary.” It posits that racism is bad, and so to be racist makes one a bad person; therefore, if one is a good person, that person must not be racist. This dichotomy falsely simplifies what racism is and racists are, limiting these terms to the most extreme examples of prejudice (Chapter 5)

2. In addition to building upon previous concepts, DiAngelo explores how the good/bad binary and anti-Blackness influence white people’s behaviors and actions (Chapters 5-7)

3. Because in the white mind, Black people are the ultimate racial “other.” Without Blackness, white people could not have constructed their own superiority (Chapter 6)

Chapters 8-11

Reading Check

1. Progressive (Chapter 8)

2. Learning through discomfort (Chapter 8)

3. Attacked, silenced, shamed, judged, angry, and scared, to name a few (Chapter 9)

4. They should develop stamina to “bear witness to the pain of racism [that they] cause” (Chapter 10)

Short-Answer

1. White people internalize white supremacist values while also learning to refute any participation in white supremacy. Challenging any aspect of this dynamic provokes white fragility (Chapter 8)

2. DiAngelo writes that when white women cry in cross-racial settings, they often do so in order to (subconsciously or not) focus emotional support onto themselves. If “emotions are political” (132), white women’s tears are a critical example of one way that emotions can be dangerously politicized (Chapter 11)

3. Rather than allowing people to sit with their discomfort, white fragility will cause them to react with anything from defensiveness, to violent language, to refocusing attention on themselves. It makes them retreat rather than engaging with their role in systems of oppression (Chapter 8)

4. This type of reaction exempts the white person from further engagement or accountability. A claim like that implicitly says that “my learning is finished” and/or “If I am feeling challenged, you are doing this wrong” (121) (Chapter 9)

Chapters 12

Reading Check

1. Gratitude, excitement, discomfort, and humility, to name a few (Chapter 12)

2. The fact that they were born into a racism-based society, and therefore no white person chooses this socialization. Still, it is white people’s responsibility to learn about it and to undo it (Chapter 12)

Short-Answer

1. White racial identity is “inherently racist,” DiAngelo writes, because “white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy” – therefore, there is no way to make this identity more positive (Chapter 12)

2. They can respond to feedback about racism with feelings like gratitude, excitement, discomfort, and/or humility. They can learn to cultivate behaviors that involve reflection, apology, and listening, rather than defensiveness (Chapter 12)