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

This book is riddled with historical inaccuracies, such as black women being denied the vote until 1964, poor arguments, and a lack of any decent citations. This book did inspire me though. If something this bad can be published, anyone can write a book.

According to this author, those that are identified as white (not necessarily those who identify AS white) are guilty of racism and must be prepared to be tongue-lashed by her. It is curious that somehow denigrating a person by their skin color is not racist when done by a person of the same appearance. It is a popular book for those that need more of a reason to feel bad about themselves.Ironically, the subject is timely and through reading other sources of information on institutionalized racism, I have noticed many examples of this. The articles were well written and effective in that I was not made to feel that anything I did or said was automatically suspect and therefore invalid. A state of paralysis is not one from which change can occur.

I anticipated after reading this book that I would gain a better understanding of why it is hard to talk about racism. However, the majority of the book focuses on generalizations about various groups of people.

I didn’t even want to give one star but that was my lowest option to rate this book. I disliked the book immensely, and not because I’m fragile as the author wants you to believe if you don’t agree with her ideas. I understood and even agreed with some of her thoughts on underlying unconscious racism and societal differences. What I dislike is her way of going about cutting down one group to raise another, her brush off of the serious advances society has made in race relations, and disregard to personal responsibility of actions but instead paints it as us against them. It’s a very destructive concept and does more harm than good. The underlying message to highlight how race has, and still, plays a role in society is important and should have been written as an article rather than this long nauseating book of constant barrage.

If you’re seeking insight on how to understand and fight against escalating exploitation and oppression by the US ruling class, look elsewhere. This book is a polemic, a work of guilt-tripping ideology, given to sweeping and unsubstantiated statements about “white supremacy” and “racism”. If this book were to use the religious language of the Puritans, “whiteness” would be the “original sin”.As a Unitarian-Universalist I am appalled by such ideology because I am dedicated to our first principle -“the inherent worth and dignity of every person”, regardless of social status or category. This includes not just “people of color” but the legions of “whites” who have suffered terribly despite the supposed safety net of “whiteness”. Unfortunately, ruling class whites are often condescending toward working class whites, and this book is no exception. When they are not ignored or treated rudely (DiAngelo) they may be called names like “deplorables” (Hillary Clinton) or even then unbelievably insulting “white trash” (the title of a book by Nancy Isenberg). And just think of all the derogatory names that are used for the homeless, who again are mostly white.Here’s an example of DiAngelo’s rude disrespect: An Italian American explained “that once Italians were once considered black and discriminated against, so didn’t I think white people experience racism too?” (p. 12). Instead of acknowledging and honoring the truth he spoke from his own lived experience, she changes the topic, accusing him of “refusing to examine his own whiteness today”. This is typical of the mental gymnastics that DiAngelo employs to evade the truths she hears that are “inconvenient” for her ideology of “whiteness”. In an earlier era Irish Americans could have said the same thing, and this has always been a felt-in-the-gut truth for poor whites.Although DiAngelo has an academic background, she unapologetically violates the canons of good scholarship, See, for example, the third essay of Todd Eklof in “The Gadfly Papers”, or the work of Johnathan Church, such as his article in Areo magazine on how “white-fragility-theory-mistakes-correlation-for-causation”. Instead she conveys an attitude of self-assured superiority, a provocateur who declares herself to be proud of her “identity politics”, dismissing criticism from “whites” as a product of their “white supremacy” or “racism” and labeling it “white fragility”. Brain-washed by such ideology, she is oblivious to how insulting terms the like “white supremacy” fuel the cultural wars, hence political gridlock, hence giving a free reign to predatory capitalism and escalating inequality.DiAngelo never acknowledges how her ideology “whiteness” serves two unsavory political purposes. The most obvious one is to divert attention from the color-blind nature of today’s predatory capitalism – how vulnerable whites are targeted far more than blacks simply because the whites have so much more to lose. The second becomes obvious once we reflect on the time-tested strategy of ruling classes to stay in power by “divide and conquer” tactics aimed at the populace. In the US, “racism” itself was born as such a construct in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, serving to divide white and black workers and turning the latter into dehumanized slaves. Today the cultural wars comprise a similar divide and conquer strategy, but this time dividing the white ruling class from its working class to create political gridlock. Here I use the term “ruling class” in its broadest sense, as roughly the top 10% to 20% of the population in income or wealth who have a college education, while using the rough definition of “working class” as those without a college degree, or about 2/3 of the population. As we learned in 2016, the political consequences can be dire indeed when progressives abandon their fundamental principles and the working class to embrace the self-serving strategies of the ruling class.