Opinion | Why the biggest barrier to overcoming racism is ‘white fragility’
- Have you ever told a white person that something they said sounded racist? You’ll likely get a defensive outrage in response and claims of the opposite
- This ‘white fragility’, a term coined by author Robin DiAngelo in her bestselling book of the same title, causes untold damage to people of colour
It took a nine-minute video of a white man kneeling on a black man’s neck, effectively murdering him, for America to collectively admit that racism is a serious issue in the country.
While the persistence of racism is obvious to many, especially those who experience it, for others the situation may have seemed to be “getting better” – perhaps until now. The ability to capture proof of blatant discrimination on video, and subsequently share it on social media, makes it impossible to deny the scale of the problem.
Once it’s visible and thrust in your face, you can’t deny it. If you do, you’re perpetrating it, especially if you’re white, says Dr Robin DiAngelo, a white American woman, former “diversity trainer” and an associate professor of education at the University of Washington in Seattle.
With clarity and frankness, DiAngelo deconstructs the concept of white privilege and how it allows systemic racism to persist in her bestselling book White Fragility, published in 2018.
