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

•Individualism says that everyone can achieve big things regardless of their background. Also people know that to be younger is better than to be older, to be heterosexual is better than to be homosexual

•it’s necessary to think about how your white background/ cultural background makes you connected to a white group/ your cultural group

•if you feel a big discomfort around some ethnic groups, you avoid them and therefore you discriminate

•When a racial group’s collective prejudice is backed by the power of legal authority and institutional control, it is transformed into racism

•While women could discriminate against men in individual interactions, women as a group could not deny men their civil rights. But men as a group could and did deny women their civil rights. The only way women could gain suffrage was for men to grant it to them.

•racism embedded in institutional control becomes the default of the society and is reproduced automatically. Racism is a system

•Individual whites may be “against” racism, but they still benefit from a system that privileges whites as a group. 

•racism is “a system of advantage based on race.”

•Whiteness at various times signifies and is deployed as identity, status, and property

•If we want to measure supremacy we need to calculate the percentage of people of color in powerful groups (managers, governors, professors)

•Did your parents have many friends of color? What images, sounds, and smells did you associate with these other neighborhoods? Were you encouraged to visit these neighborhoods, or were you discouraged from visiting them?

•If you identify as a woman and are married to someone who identifies as a man, you would never say, “Because I am married to a man, I have a gender-free life.”. You know that gender is embedded in social structure

•Discrimination happens when a person has to put aside his own needs for the sake of privileged people

•”I don’t feel guilty about racism. I didn’t choose this socialization”

•”How would I tell you about white racism without triggering your white identity? Can you handle my feedback?”

The idea of racial inferiority was created to justify unequal treatment; belief in racial inferiority is not what triggered unequal treatment. Nor was fear of difference. As Ta-Nehisi Coates states, “But race is the child of racism, not the father.”6 He means that first we exploited people for their resources, not according to how they looked. Exploitation came first, and then the ideology of unequal races to justify this exploitation followed. Similarly, historian Ibram Kendi, in his National Book Award–winning work Stamped from the Beginning, explains: “The beneficiaries of slavery, segregation, and mass incarceration have produced racist ideas of Black people being best suited for or deserving of the confines of slavery, segregation, or the jail cell. Consumers of these racist ideas have been led to believe there is something wrong with Black people, and not the policies that have enslaved, oppressed, and confined so many Black people.”7 Kendi goes on to argue that if we truly believe that all humans are equal, then disparity in condition can only be the result of systemic discrimination.