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

DiAngelo’s core arguments rest on defining racism as an adaptable, flexible structure. In fact, DiAngelo argues that the only reason “racism can still exist [is] because it is highly adaptive” (40), morphing over time as needed to maintain white supremacy. When DiAngelo asks: “How have we managed not to know, when the information is all around us?” (144), she is referring to the ways that the system of white supremacy has carefully shifted around white people to keep them from knowing. In other words, white people remain complicit because systemic racism adapts to maintain power. Just as it did in the past, the current system reproduces racial inequality (153), even if its methods have shifted from explicit animus against Black people to widespread incarceration and disenfranchisement carried out under the guise of color-blindness.

Race is a socially constructed set of categories that mostly defy genetic or biological rules. Scholarship on race defines it as based on external characteristics that “are unreliable indicators of genetic variation between any two people” (15). This is because race science was “driven by…social and economic interests” (16) which supported slavery and colonization in the Americas. Without the construct of race, the United States’ social, political, and historical landscape would have been profoundly different.