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

“In speaking as a white person to a primarily white audience, I am yet again centering white people and the white voice.”

In this footnote, DiAngelo acknowledges the tension of her position as a white person speaking to a white audience. She makes it clear that she understands that centering both white people’s experience and their understanding seems counter to her project. Yet it is also vital to her project to draw in a wider audience of white people who might exempt themselves from the messages in the book. 

“This highlights the fact that, in a racist society, the desired direction is always toward whiteness and away from being perceived as a person of color.”

In a longer discussion of how multiracial people might fit themselves into the context of White Fragility’s arguments, DiAngelo introduces the critical idea that a white supremacist society will always privilege whiteness and anything perceived as white-adjacent. Later, DiAngelo also uses this argument to illustrate why, for poor or working-class white people, whiteness takes precedence over class: It is seen as a way to escape one’s class position for wealthier, whiter areas and positions.

“White people in North America live in a society that is deeply separate and unequal by race, and white people are the beneficiaries of that separation and inequality.”

This succinctly summarizes the book’s first arguments and definitions: Key to understanding racism and white supremacy is seeing them as systems, not as individual actions or decisions. Yet DiAngelo frequently reminds readers that individual white people are “beneficiaries,” and thus are responsible for examining that privilege and undoing the systems.