White Fragility (18 page)

Interrupting racism takes courage and intentionality; the interruption is by definition not passive or complacent. So in answer to the question “Where do we go from here?,” I offer that we must never consider ourselves finished with our learning. Even if challenging all the racism and superiority we have internalized was quick and easy to do, our racism would be reinforced all over again just by virtue of living in the
culture. I have been engaged in this work in a range of forms for many years, and I continue to receive feedback on my stubborn patterns and unexamined assumptions. It is a messy, lifelong process, but one that is necessary to align my professed values with my real actions. It is also deeply compelling and transformative.

This brief list cannot do justice to the scores of excellent resources available to anyone willing to take the initiative to seek them out; it is intended as an entry point.

Alexander, Michelle.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
New York: New Press, 2010.

Anderson, Carol.
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.
New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.

Biewen, John.
Seeing White.
Podcast bibliography. Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University, 2015.
http://podcast.cdsporch.org/seeing-white/seeing-white-bibliography
.

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo.
Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America.
4th ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013. First published 2003.

Brown, Dee.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
New York: Open Road Media, 2012.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi.
Between the World and Me.
New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015.

——. “The Case for Reparations.”
Atlantic,
June 2014.

Dyson, Michael Eric.
Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to a White America
. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2017.

Feagin, Joe R.
The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing.
New York: Routledge, 2013.

Gaskins, Pearl Fuyo, ed.
What Are You? Voices of Mixed-Race Young People.
New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1999.

Irving, Debby.
Waking Up White: And Finding Myself in the Story of Race
. Boston: Elephant Room Press, 2014.

Kamenetz, Anya. “Resources for Educators to Use in the Wake of Charlottesville.”
NPR,
August 14, 2017.
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/08/14/543390148/resources-for-educators-to-use-the-wake-of-charlottesville
.

Kendi, Ibram X.
Stamped from the Beginning.
New York: Nation Books, 2016.

Lee, Stacey.
Unraveling the “Model-Minority” Stereotype: Listening to Asian American Youth.
New York: Teachers College Press, 1996.

——.
Up Against Whiteness: Race, School, and Immigrant Youth.
New York: Teachers College Press, 2005).

Loewen, James W.
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong,
rev. ed. New York: New Press, 20018.

Menakem, Resmaa.
My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies.
Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017.

Mills, Charles W.
The Racial Contract
. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Moore, Eddie, Ali Michael, and Marguerite W. Penick-Parks.
The Guide for White Women Who Teach Black Boys.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2017.

Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Andzaldúa, eds.
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color.
New York: State University of New York Press, 2015.

Morrison, Toni.
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.
New York: Random House, 1992.

Oluo, Ijeoma.
So You Want to Talk About Race.
Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2018.

Raising Race Conscious Children. Home page.
http://www.raceconscious.org
.

Sensoy, Özlem, and Robin DiAngelo.
Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Critical Social Justice Education,
2nd ed. New York: Teachers College Press, 2017.

Shaheen, Jack G. “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People.”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
588, no. 1 (2003).

Singleton, Glenn.
Courageous Conversations About Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools.
2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2014.

Tatum, Beverly.
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria: And Other Conversations About Race,
Twentieth anniv. rev. ed. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

Van Ausdale, Debra, and Joe R. Feagin.
The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.

Wise, Tim.
White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son.
Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press/Counterpoint, 2010.

Chisholm ′72: Unbought and Unbossed.
Shola Lynch, dir. and prod. REAL-side, 2004.
http://www.pbs.org/pov/chisholm
.

A Class Divided.
William Peters, dir. and prod. Yale University Films for
Frontline,
PBS. WGBH Education Foundation, 1985.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/class-divided
.

The Color of Fear.
Stirfry Seminars, 1994.
http://www.stirfryseminars.com/store/products/cof_bundle.php
.

Cracking the Codes: The System of Racial Inequity.
World Trust, 2013.
https://world-trust.org
.

Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years 1954–1965.
Season 1. DVD. Produced by Blackside for PBS, 2009.
https://shop.pbs.org/eyes-on-the-prize-america-s-civil-rights-years-1954-1965-season-1-dvd/product/EYES600
.

In Whose Honor?
Jay Rosenstein, dir. On
POV
(PBS), premiered July 15, 1997.
http://www.pbs.org/pov/inwhosehonor
.

Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible.
World Trust, 2007.
https://world-trust.org
.

Race: The Power of an Illusion.
Larry Adelman, exec. prod. San Francisco: California Newsreel, 2003.
http://www.pbs.org/race/000_General/000_00-Home.htm
.

Reel Bad Arabs.
Jeremy Earp, dir. Media Education Foundation, 2006.
http://freedocumentaries.org/documentary/reel-bad-arabs
.

The Revisionaries.
Scott Thurman, dir. Making History Productions, 2012.
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/revisionaries
.

13th.
Ava DuVernay, dir. Netflix, 2016.
https://www.netflix.com/title/80091741
.

I thank Idabelle Fosse, Reagen Price, Marxa Marnia, Christine Sax-man, Shelly Tochluk, Aisha Hauser, Tee Williams, Dana Buhl, Kent Alexander, Sincere Kirabo, Malena Pinkham, Myosha McAfee, Resmaa Menakem, Devon Alexander, Darlene Flynn, Erin Trent-Johnson, Glen Singleton, Reverend John Crestwell, Özlem Sensoy, Deborah Terry, and Jason Toews for their invaluable contributions to various aspects of this work.

Thank you to the many people of color whose brilliance and patience has mentored me over the last twenty-five years. You understand white fragility and its roots in white identity far more than I ever will.

To my editor at Beacon Press, Rachael Marks, you were a dream to work with! My sincerest thanks for your perceptive feedback and encouragement.

CHAPTER 1: THE CHALLENGES OF TALKING TO WHITE PEOPLE ABOUT RACISM

1.   Angela Onwuachi-Willig,
According to Our Hearts: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).

2.   Larry Adelman,
Race: The Power of an Illusion,
video (San Francisco: California Newsreel, 2003); Heather Beth Johnson and Thomas M. Shapiro, “Good Neighborhoods, Good Schools: Race and the ‘Good Choices' of White Families,” in
White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism,
ed. Ashley W. Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (New York: Routledge, 2003), 173–87.

CHAPTER 2: RACISM AND WHITE SUPREMACY

1.
   Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza,
The History and Geography of Human Genes
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

2.
   Richard S. Cooper, Jay S. Kaufman, and Ryk Ward, “Race and Genomics,”
New England Journal of Medicine
348, no. 12 (2003): 1166–70.

3.
   Resmaa Menakem,
My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
(Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017).

4.
   Thomas Jefferson,
Notes on the State of Virginia; with Related Documents,
ed. David Waldstreicher (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2002).

5.
   Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander L. Gilman, “Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism,” in
The “Racial” Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future,
ed. Sandra Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).

6.
   Ta-Nehisi Coates,
Between the World and Me
(New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015).

7.
   Ibram X. Kendi,
Stamped from the Beginning
(New York: Nation Books, 2016).

8.
   Thomas F. Gossett,
Race: The History of an Idea
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Noel Ignatiev,
How the Irish Became White
(New York: Routledge, 1995); Matthew Frye Jacobson,
Whiteness of a
Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

9.
   John Tehranian, “Performing Whiteness: Naturalization Litigation and the Construction of Racial Identity in America,”
Yale Law Journal
109, no. 4 (2000): 817–48.

10.
Ignatiev,
How the Irish Became White;
Jacobson,
Whiteness of a Different Color;
David Roediger,
The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class,
rev. ed. (1999; New York: Verso, 2003).

11.
Roediger,
Wages of Whiteness
.

12.
For an astute analysis of this “bargain” between working-class whites and owning-class whites, see Lillian Smith,
Killers of the Dream
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1949).

13.
J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “‘A Structure, Not an Event': Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity,”
Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association
5, no. 1 (2016),
https://doi.org/10.25158/L5.1.7
.

14.
Stuart Hall,
Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices
(London: Sage, 1997).

15.
For a more detailed accounting of this documentation, see Robin DiAngelo,
What Does It Mean to Be White? Developing White Racial Literacy
(New York: Peter Lang, 2016).

16.
Marilyn Frye,
The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory
(Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1983).

17.
David T. Wellman,
Portraits of White Racism
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

18.
Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondence Through Work in Women's Studies,” in
Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology
, ed. M. Anderson and P. Hill, 9th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2012), 94–105.

19.
Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,”
Harvard Law Review
106, no. 8 (1993): 1744.

20.
George Lipsitz,
The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 1.

21.
Ruth Frankenberg, “Local Whiteness, Localizing Whiteness,” in
Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism
, ed. Ruth Frankenberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 1.

22.
Charles W. Mills,
The Racial Contract
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 122.

23.
Ibid., 1.

24.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,”
Atlantic,
June 2014,
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631
.

25.
Mills,
The Racial Contract,
40.

26.
Haeyoun Park, Josh Keller, and Josh Williams, “The Faces of American Power, Nearly as White as the Oscar Nominees,”
New York Times,
February
26, 2016,
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/02/26/us/race-of-american-power.html
; “All Time Box Office: Worldwide Grosses,” Box Office Mojo, 2017,
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/
; US Department of Education, Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, Policy and Program Studies Service,
The State of Racial Diversity in the Educator Workforce. Diversity
(Washington, DC: July 2016),
https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/highered/racial-diversity/state-racial-diversity-workforce.pdf
; “Number of Full-Time Faculty Members by Sex, Rank, and Racial and Ethnic Group, Fall 2007,”
Chronicle of Higher Education,
August 24, 2009,
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Numberof-Full-Time-Faculty/47992/
.

27.
Harrison Jacobs, “Former Neo-Nazi: Here's Why There's No Real Difference Between ‘Alt-Right,' ‘White Nationalism,' and ‘White Supremacy,'”
Business Insider,
August 23, 2017,
http://www.businessinsider.com/why-no-difference-alt-right-white-nationalism-white-supremacy-neo-nazi-charlottesville-2017-8
.

28.
Derek Black, “‘The Daily' Transcript: Interview with Former White Nationalist Derek Black,” interview by Michael Barbaro,
New York Times,
August 22, 2017,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/podcasts/the-daily-transcript-derek-black.html
.

29.
Lee Atwater, interview with Alexander P. Lamis, July 8, 1981, quoted in Alexander P. Lamis,
The Two-Party South
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). The interviewee was originally described as an anonymous insider; Atwater was not revealed as the person interviewed until the 1990 edition of the book. This interview was also quoted in Bob Herbert, “Impossible, Ridiculous, Repugnant,”
New York Times,
October 6, 2005. Interpolations in original.

30.
Joe R. Feagin,
The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing
(New York: Routledge, 2013).

31.
Beverly Daniel Tatum, “Breaking the Silence,” in
White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism
, ed. Paula S. Rothenberg, 3rd ed. (2001; New York: Worth Publishers, 2008), 147–52.

CHAPTER 3: RACISM AFTER THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

1.
   Martin Barker,
The New Racism: Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe
(London: Junction Books, 1981).

2.
   Eduardo Bonilla-Silva,
Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America,
4th ed. (2003; Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).

3.
   Ibid.

4.
   John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, and Laurie A. Rudman, eds.,
On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years After Allport
(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005); Anthony G. Greenwald and Linda Hamilton Krieger, “Implicit Bias: Scientific Foundations,”
California Law Review
94, no. 4 (2006): 945–67.

5.
   Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on
Labor Market Discrimination,”
American Economic Review
94, no. 4 (September 2004): 991–1013.

6.
   Gordon Hodson, John Dovidio, and Samuel L. Gaertner, “The Aversive Form of Racism,”
Psychology of Prejudice and Discrimination (Race and Ethnicity in Psychology)
1 (2004): 119–36.

7.
   Lincoln Quillian and Devah Pager, “Black Neighbors, Higher Crime? The Role of Racial Stereotypes in Evaluations of Neighborhood Crime,”
American Journal of Sociology
107, no. 3 (November 2001): 717–67.

8.
   Toni Morrison, “On the Backs of Blacks,”
Time,
December 2, 1993,
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,979736,00.html
.

9.
   Robin DiAngelo, “The Sketch Factor: ‘Bad Neighborhood' Narratives as Discursive Violence,” in
The Assault on Communities of Color: Exploring the Realities of Race-Based Violence,
ed. Kenneth Fasching-Varner and Nicholas Daniel Hartlep (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).

10.
Joe R. Feagin,
Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression
(New York: Taylor & Francis, 2006); Kristen Myers, “Reproducing White Supremacy Through Casual Discourse,” in Doane and Bonilla-Silva,
White Out,
129–44; Johnson and Shapiro, “Good Neighborhoods, Good Schools,” 173–88; Robin DiAngelo and Özlem Sensoy, “Getting Slammed: White Depictions of Race Discussions as Arenas of Violence,”
Race Ethnicity and Education
17, no. 1 (2014): 103–28.

11.
Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie P. Clark, “Emotional Factors in Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children,”
Journal of Negro Education
19, no. 3 (1950): 341–50; Louise Derman-Sparks, Patricia G. Ramsey, and Julie Olsen Edwards,
What If All the Kids Are White? Anti-Bias Multicultural Education with Young Children and Families
(New York: Teachers College Press, 2006).

12.
Jamelle Bouie, “Why Do Millennials Not Understand Racism?,” Slate, May 16, 2014,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/05/millennials_racism_and_mtv_poll_young_people_are_confused_about_bias_prejudice.html
.

13.
Leslie H. Picca and Joe R. Feagin,
Two-Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage
(New York: Taylor and Francis, 2007).

14.
Ibid.

CHAPTER 4: HOW DOES RACE SHAPE THE LIVES OF WHITE PEOPLE?

1.
   Carole Schroeder and Robin DiAngelo, “Addressing Whiteness in Nursing Education: The Sociopolitical Climate Project at the University of Washington School of Nursing,”
Advances in Nursing Science
33, no. 3 (2010): 244–55.

2.
   Melissah Yang, “Kinds of Shade,”
CNN.com
, September 13, 2017,
http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/13/entertainment/rihanna-fenty-beauty-foundation/index.html
.

3.
   McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege.”

4.
   Patrick Rosal, “To the Lady Who Mistook Me for the Help at the National Book Awards,”
Literary Hub,
November 1, 2017,
http://lithub.com/to-the-lady-who-mistook-me-for-the-help-at-the-national-book-awards
.

5.
   McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege.”

6.
   Ibid.

7.
   The compound closed in 2001 after having been bankrupted by litigation from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

8.
   McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege.”

9.
   Sheila M. Eldred, “Is This the Perfect Face?,”
Discovery News,
April 26, 2012.

10.
Christine E. Sleeter,
Multicultural Education as Social Activism
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), 149.

11.
Unless otherwise noted, the information in this list comes from OXFAM, “An Economy for the 99%,” briefing paper, January 2017,
https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/economy-99
.

12.
Bloomberg Billionaire's Index, 2017,
https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires
.

13.
World Bank,
Annual GDP Rankings,
report, 2017,
http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/GDP-ranking-table
.

14.
Bloomberg Billionaire's Index.

15.
Matthew F. Delmont,
Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation
(Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).

16.
Johnson and Shapiro, “Good Neighborhoods, Good Schools.”

17.
George S. Bridges and Sara Steen, “Racial Disparities in Official Assessments of Juvenile Offenders: Attributional Stereotypes as Mediating Mechanisms,”
American Sociological Review
63, no. 4 (1998): 554–70.

18.
Kelly M. Hoffman, “Racial Bias in Pain Assessment and Treatment Recommendations, and False Beliefs About Biological Differences Between Blacks and Whites,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science
113, no. 16 (2016): 4296–4301.

19.
Zeus Leonardo, “The Color of Supremacy: Beyond the Discourse of ‘White Privilege,'”
Educational Philosophy and Theory
36, no. 2 (2004): 137–52, published online January 9, 2013.