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

When white people feel challenged about whiteness and racism, they respond with a range of emotions and behaviors: White people might feel “attacked, silenced, shamed…judged, angry, scared” (119) and might act out by “crying, physically leaving, emotionally withdrawing, [or] arguing” (119).

DiAngelo illustrates how white fragility looks with a series of anecdotes about her own experiences. She suggests that white fragility is less likely as long as discussions of race and racism remain intangible for a white person; yet naming “some racially problematic dynamic or action happening in the room in the moment” (117) makes white fragility erupt.

When a person responds with white fragility, they make predictable claims to justify their feelings and behaviors and to “exempt the person from further engagement or accountability” (119). For example, a white person might say something like, “I just said one little innocent thing” (119) or “I don’t feel safe” (120). These claims are based on assumptions like “My learning is finished” (121) and “If I am feeling challenged, you are doing this wrong” (121).

These assumptions, behaviors, and emotional reactions protect the white person from learning, allowing white people to silence an otherwise productive discussion, shield themselves, deny race as a problem, and to “maintain white solidarity” (122).

Chapter 10 explores how to talk about whiteness with white people in productive ways. Due to some of the previously outlined beliefs and assumptions held by white people, it is almost impossible to have conversations about race and racism with white people without white fragility entering the room. White people have created unspoken rules for anyone engaging in a conversation about race or racism with white people. These rules “obscure racism, protect white dominance, and regain white equilibrium” (124).

DiAngelo’s guidelines for effective feedback are listening and processing criticism authentically and with humility, and stating gratitude towards the person providing the criticism.

The same conditions that create white fragility create white people’s predictable desire to “build trust” (126) before they talk about racism. Instead, white people should build “stamina to bear witness to the pain of racism [they] cause” (128). An antidote to white fragility and avoidance of engagement is to work with honesty and humility to engage in truly examining their own beliefs and patterns of behavior. 

According to DiAngelo, one very common visible manifestation of white fragility is white women’s tears. She 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. In numerous historical examples, white women who acted distressed brought about the beating or murder of young African American men like Emmett Till.

White women’s tears can completely derail conversations about race and racism in cross-racial settings—“when a white woman cries over some aspect of racism, all the attention immediately goes to her” (134), while others, especially people of color, are ignored or told it is their fault. DiAngelo cites multiple incidences when she saw this dynamic play out.

Though DiAngelo does also comment on white men’s emotional responses in meetings, she highlights the ways that white women’s tears disrupt cross-racial settings in damaging ways. Importantly, white women’s tears catalyze the white men around them to assert “what constitutes pain and whose pain is legitimate” (137). When white women cry, white men bolster them, asserting dominance by supporting and saving them.