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

One of the most important aspects of White Fragility is DiAngelo’s choice to specifically address white people. She explains this decision in the Author’s Note: “I am white and am addressing a common white dynamic. I am mainly writing to a white audience; when I use the terms us and we, I am referring to the white collective” (xiv). Though DiAngelo is careful to note that people of color and multiracial people can also benefit from understanding the ideas presented in the book, her primary audience is white Americans.

By choosing to directly address this audience, DiAngelo disrupts the racial comfort that most white people experience living in a white supremacist society like the United States. Though she frequently acknowledges the discomfort that she is likely causing her white readers, DiAngelo doesn’t shrink from posing hard questions for white readers to ponder as they try to understand her arguments. For example, the end of Chapter 1 directs readers to reflect on a series of questions if they feel they “are different from other white people” (14). DiAngelo’s persistence in challenging white readers is part of her overall argument in the text: If white people cannot see themselves as complicit in the larger systems of racism, they will not do the critical work required of them to begin undoing white supremacy.

Upon its release, White Fragility earned both praise and criticism across American racial and political spectrums. Both the controversy and admiration surrounding the book’s precepts and prescriptions only intensified in the wake of the 2020 police killing of George Floyd and the worldwide protests that followed, as the book shot to the top of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. While many white and Black journalists and scholars praised the book for its keen diagnosis of cross-racial communication dynamics, others consider the book productive within only a very limited framework. At The New Republic, journalist J. C. Pan writes, “[DiAngelo’s] practical suggestions for what white people might do to combat racism amount to little more than personal introspection and self-improvement” (Pan, J. C. “Why Diversity Training Isn’t Enough.” The New Republic. 7 Jan. 2020). At The Independent, journalist Justin Lee takes this a step further, arguing that White Fragility’s approach reinforces class divides. Citing the work of Columbia University sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, Lee writes,

White elites drive the discourse and promote an endlessly broadening definition of racism, which requires education and, more importantly, enculturation to understand. Working class white people who can't keep up with shifting norms are labeled racist by the gatekeepers of those norms, who thereby safeguard their own class privilege (Lee, Justin. “Reading ‘White Fragility’ and cancelling your friends won’t make you an anti-racist.” The Independent. 3 Jul. 2020).

In reviewing the public response to White Fragility, however, it is worth considering the scope of the book. Unlike other landmark 21st-century books on racial justice like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow or Carol Anderson’s One Person, No Vote, White Fragility does not grapple with policies or broad national initiatives that might lead to a true reckoning surrounding race in America. She openly begins from the precept that the United States is a deeply racist country, a conclusion she supports with a range of metrics, each of which shows racially disproportionate outcomes in employment, incarceration, infant mortality, and access to healthcare. While there is no shortage of proposed solutions to alleviate these outcomes of systemic racism and to attack white supremacy at the source, DiAngelo chooses not to engage with these solutions, limiting her scope to how white people can navigate personal and professional interactions with people of color. In short, she operates under the assumption that systemic racism and white supremacy are here to stay, and that to be a white person in this racist society is to be complicit and invested in its negative outcomes for people of color.

DiAngelo emphasizes the processes that lead to white people ignoring race and racism and benefitting from white privilege. In turn, when white people refuse to learn about whiteness and white supremacy, they perpetuate the system of racism. The existence of white fragility revolves around the ignorance of the average white person, who maintains white comfort at a dangerous cost to people of color. In some ways, white progressives cause more damage than their more conservative peers: White progressives believe they already understand the issue and may have a harder time unpacking their beliefs.