White Fragility

Almost every white person has either heard of or read Robin DiAngelo’s book “White Fragility.” In it, DiAngelo talks about what people of color have been saying for centuries: white people completely fall apart when the issue of race comes up. This might look like getting defensive, denial, starting to cry, or ending the conversation. Whatever it might look like for us, we all exhibit fragility. And it doesn’t just come up during conversations about race; fragility also prevents us from going all-in on racial justice work and being anti-racist in our lives.

This work is hard. It’s uncomfortable. It requires that we take a good hard look at how we’ve contributed to racism and when we see it; it’s not pretty. We experience feelings of guilt, shame, sadness, anger. Human nature causes us to turn away and avoid it all. And being white, we can opt out of racial justice work at any time. Or maybe we only do the work that’s comfortable, which is rarely the type of work that actually dismantles racism. 

Either way, fragility is dangerous. Doing the bare minimum or doing nothing at all means that racism persists, causing all kinds of harm to people of color, including death. 

So we know that fragility is bad, but how did we get so fragile in the first place?