In 2018, Robin DiAngelo, an academic and anti-racism consultant, published the surprise best-seller White Fragility. The book, which argues that white people tend to undermine or dismiss conversations about race with histrionic reactions, climbed best-seller lists again last summer, when the murder of George Floyd and the surging Black Lives Matter movement forced American institutions to address structural racism. Major corporations, such as Amazon and Facebook, embraced the slogan Black Lives Matter and brought DiAngelo in to speak. Millions of Americans began to consider concepts such as systemic racism and look anew at the racial disparities in law enforcement, and DiAngelo became a guide for many of them.
DiAngelos success was not entirely without controversy: critics claimed that her definition of white fragility was broad and reductive and that DiAngelo, who is white, condescended to people of color. Carlos Lozada, of the Washington Post, wrote, As defined by DiAngelo, white fragility is irrefutable.... Either white people admit their inherent and unending racism and vow to work on their white fragility, in which case DiAngelo was correct in her assessment, or they resist such categorizations or question the interpretation of a particular incident, in which case they are only proving her point. In The New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh wrote that DiAngelo makes white people seem like flawed, complicated characters; by comparison, people of color seem good, wise, and perhaps rather simple. This narrative may be appealing to its target audience, but it doesnt seem to offer much to anyone else.
Last month, DiAngelo published a new book, Nice Racism, which argues that even well-intentioned white progressivesthe types of people who might read DiAngelos workare guilty of inflicting racial harm on people of color. She writes that the odds are that on a daily basis, Black people dont interact with those who openly agitate for white nationalism, but they do face a different danger: In the workplace, the classroom, houses of worship, gentrifying neighborhoods, and community groups, Black people do interact with white progressives. She continues, We are the oneswith a smile on our faceswho undermine Black people daily in ways both harder to identify and easier to deny.
I recently spoke by phone with DiAngelo about Nice Racism. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed whether her work includes structural critiques of racism, why she has become so popular over the past year, and whether its possible to disagree with her and not be a racist.
How important is attending workshops like the ones you run and talk about in the book if America is going to become less racist?
Im not sure that it has to be a workshop, but it does have to be education in some form or format, because were not educated in this country on our racial history, and of course workshops are an excellent way to gain that education. If they are not followed up and sustained by continuing conversations, then theyre not very effective. Stand-alone, onetime workshops I dont think are effective.
What is the goal of your work, if white people, as you say, are never going to be completely free of racism?
Less harm, to put it bluntly. I am confident that as a result of my years in this work, I do less harm across race, and that is not actually a small thing. That could translate to one hour longer on somebodys life, because the chronic stress of racism, for Black people and other people of colorliterally, it shortens their lives. I would definitely like to do less harm.
Your work starts from the premise that history and society have made all white people racist. But I was trying to figure out whether you were making a structural critique or offering structural solutions to racism, in part because so much of the book is about workshops.
The foundation of the United States is structural racism. It is built into all of the institutions. It is built into the culture, and in that sense weve all absorbed the ideology. Weve all absorbed the practices of systemic racism, and thats what I mean when I say we are racist. I dont mean that individuals have conscious awareness of anti-Blackness, or that they intentionally seek to hurt people based on race. Thats not what Im referring to when I make a claim like all white people are racist. What I mean is that all white people have absorbed racist ideology, and it shapes the way we see the world and the way we see ourselves in the world, and it comes out in the policies and practices that we make and that we set up.
What needs to change structurally?
Well, the homogeneity alone at the top guarantees that advantage would be built into those systems and structures by the people in the position to build them in. This doesnt have to be conscious or intentional, but, if significant experiences and perspectives are missing from the table, theyre not going to be included. If a group of architects is around a table designing a building and all of them are able-bodied, theyre simply going to design a building that accommodates the way they move through the world. Its not an intentional exclusion, but it will result in the exclusion of people who move differently.
You have to have multiple perspectives at those tables, and you cant just take the additive approach, like, Oh, well, we included some more diversity, if you dont also address power. Thats what I wanted to say. You can have policies that appear to be neutral, but, because we dont account for just centuries of social discrimination, the impact of those policies will not be neutral.
Your book is a critique of individualism, by which you mean, as you put it, Our identities are not separate from the white supremacist society in which we are raised, and our patterns of cross-racial engagement are not merely a function of our unique personalities. What is the problem with individualism?
Individualism cuts the person off from the very society that the concept of individualism is valued in. Thats the great irony, right? If we were in a more community-oriented or collective-oriented society, we wouldnt value being an individual the way that we do. We have been conditioned to see that as the ideal, that every one of us is unique and special and different, and if you dont know somebody specifically you cant know anything about them.
Of course, on one hand, thats true, right? I dont know everybodys experience and life stories and so on, and we are also members of a social group. By virtue of our membership in this social group, we could literally predict whether you and I were going to survive our birthand our mothers also. Its like saying, you know, upon my birth, it was announced, Female, and then I have been completely exempt from any messages about what it means to be female. We wouldnt say that, because we know that the moment I am pronounced female, an entire set of deep cultural conditioning is set into place.
I dont think anybody would say, My gender has had no influence whatsoever on my life. When it comes to race, we want to take ourselves out of any kind of collective experience. These are observable, describable, measurable patterns. Does every single person fit every pattern? Of course not, but there is a rule that the exception of course makes visible.
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Robin DiAngelo Wants White Progressives to Look Inward - The New Yorker