White Fragility: Why it’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism — by Robyn D’Angelo

As a middle-class white guy, here’s my takeaway from D’Angelo’s effort: the way we talk about racism in the United States is deeply flawed. We are taught to think of racism as something that is done in a discrete act by a bad person. We don’t talk about racism as a system. The outcome of framing racism as only something that degenerates do/benefit from inevitably sets up an us vs. them split. When someone who isn’t overtly racist in their actions or beliefs stumbles into a situation where they are rightly questioned about their unintentional racist behavior, they immediately point to the neo-Nazis, the skinheads, and the KKK members and say I’m not that! I’m not racist! Defensiveness sets in, people dig in their heels and the conversation can never move forward. What is needed is for racism to be discussed just as we discuss any other “-ism”: socialism, communism, environmentalism, capitalism, Catholicism, etc. These systems can all be talked about in terms of their historical origins, the current winners and losers within each structure, how the systems are propagated and supported across time, and so on.

To have the vast majority of white Americans say “I’m not racist!” [and have that be true, according to our own self-defined meaning of the term] and expect the “race” conversation to end there is a position of privilege. Any subsequent conversation or line of questioning can then be cast as “playing the race card,” which, as we all know, is grounds for immediate dismissal of concerns. And so the world continues to spin. Pretty much exactly how it was before.

A very readable and engaging book. Five stars. Go track down a copy here: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1103800510