Words matter. These are the best Robin DiAngelo Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Most whites live, grow, play, learn, love, work and die primarily in social and geographic racial segregation. Yet, our society does not teach us to see this as a loss. Pause for a moment and consider the magnitude of this message: We lose nothing of value by having no cross-racial relationships.
What I do used to be called ‘diversity training,’ then ‘cultural competency’ and now, ‘anti-racism.’ These terms are really useful for periods of time, but then they get coopted, and people build all this baggage around them, and you have to come up with new terms, or else people won’t engage.
Until white people understand that racism is embedded in everything, including our consciousness and socialisation, then we cannot go forward.
I have found that the only way to give feedback without triggering white fragility is not to give it at all.
While individual whites may be against racism, they still benefit from the distribution of resources controlled by their group.
Mainstream dictionary definitions reduce racism to racial prejudice and the personal actions that result. But this definition does little to explain how racial hierarchies are consistently reproduced.
I have spent years studying what it means to be white in a society that proclaims race meaningless, yet is deeply divided by race.
I think our everyday coded language around ‘good neighborhoods’ and ‘bad neighborhoods’ is what allows for tremendous violence to happen… When you label a neighborhood ‘bad’ and avoid it, then you don’t know and don’t see what goes on there. And there’s no human face to interrupt that narrative.
One cannot understand how racism functions in the U.S. today if one ignores group power relations.
The language of violence that many whites use to describe anti-racist endeavors is not without significance, as it is another example of how white fragility distorts reality.
It became clear over time that white people have extremely low thresholds for enduring any discomfort associated with challenges to our racial worldviews.
People of color understand what it means to be white more than I ever will.
The antidote to white fragility is ongoing and lifelong and includes sustained engagement, humility, and education.
Most people, certainly faculty, believe that if they’re for social justice, it’s automatically integrated into whatever they do.
The default of our society is the reproduction of racial inequality. I mean, that’s what it does; that’s what it’s been doing for hundreds of years.
White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress.
There’s a lot of ways that white women undermine women of color, and black women in particular.
The most effective adaptation of racism over time is the idea that racism is conscious bias held by mean people.
As white people in this society, we are socialized from the time that we’re born to see ourselves as superior, to see white people and things associated white people as superior. At the same time, I’m encouraged to never admit to that. I’m taught that racism is very bad and immoral.
Most white people cannot answer the question, ‘What does it mean to be white?’ with any depth or complexity.
We have always policed the bodies of people of color, and black people in particular. The Jim Crow South is a classic example. White flight in the North. School segregation. Gerrymandering.
Although racism does, of course, occur in individual acts, these acts are part of a larger system that we all participate in. The focus on individual incidences prevents the analysis that is necessary in order to challenge this larger system.
While everyone has racial bias, I reserve the word ‘racist’ to describe the bias that white people have – our collective bias is backed by institutional power.
As part of my work, I teach, lead and participate in affinity groups, facilitate workshops, and mentor other whites on recognizing and interrupting racism in our lives.
A fundamental but very challenging part of my work is moving white people from an individual understanding of racism – i.e. only some people are racist and those people are bad – to a structural understanding.
We whites who position ourselves as liberal often opt to protect what we perceive as our moral reputationsrather than recognize or change our participation in systems of inequity and domination.
Like a nontechnical user trying to understand a technical problem, our racial illiteracy limits our ability to have meaningful conversations about race.
Racism has two primary functions: the oppression of people of color, which most people recognize, but also the simultaneous elevation of white people. You can’t hold one group down without lifting the other up.
White fragility doesn’t always manifest in overt ways; silence and withdrawal are also functions of fragility.
The question that white people need to ask ourselves is not if we were shaped by the forces of racism, but how.
Many of us actively working to interrupt racism continually hear complaints about the ‘gotcha’ culture of white anti-racism. There is a stereotype that we are looking for every incident we can find so we can spring out, point our fingers, and shout, ‘You’re a racist!’
One of the things I try to work with white people on is letting go of our criteria about how people of color give us feedback. We have to build our stamina to just be humble and bear witness to the pain we’ve caused.
Whiteness is dynamic, relational, and operating at all times and on myriad levels. These processes and practices include basic rights, values, beliefs, perspectives and experiences purported to be commonly shared by all but which are actually only consistently afforded to white people.
Human beings can only make sense of the world through the lens they were socialized to make sense of it through.
Denying that race matters is irrational in the face of segregation and all of the other forms of obvious racial inequity in society… Maintaining this denial of reality takes tremendous emotional and psychic energy.
