Robin DiAngelo spends more time than your average white female thinking about race. Professionally, DiAngelo teaches classes on social justice at the University of Washington’s School of Social Work and travels around the state giving diversity workshops. She laughs about how much the topic suffuses her life: When she’s not conducting workshops, she attends talks about race, panels about race, events focusing on race. Her focus makes sense. She’s the mind behind “white fragility,” the idea that white people in the United States often grow up without having to talk or think about race and fail to build up the tolerance needed for discussions of any depth on the topic. When confronted with this understandable weakness, they often lash out or withdraw—the fragility in question.
The concept entered the zeitgeist in the era of All Lives Matter but has taken on special weight in the Trump era. In fact, DiAngelo credits Trump’s election victory as a backlash to eight years of white discomfort under a Black president. “The same people who have controlled everything continue to control everything,” she says. “To be able to continue to wield that control, they played on white fragility.”
DiAngelo likes to start her workshops by showing a series of images from religion and pop culture: God, Jesus, politicians, celebrities. She often includes the casts of popular aspirational TV shows like Friends, Seinfeld, Sex and the City, and Girls. “I inundate them with everyday images,” she says, guiding participants to think about how such images might shape the American consciousness. “I make it undeniable.”
By “it,” she means systemic racism. She’s careful to define her terms here, acknowledging that racism was used in the past to refer to overt actions like cross burning or slurs, but stressing that it is now commonly used to refer to a society that sees “white as superior, white as ideal, white as the cultural norm.” In the Trump era, she contends, these concepts are more relevant than ever. What’s to be done in a world of travel bans, border walls, and hate crimes? DiAngelo is calling on white people “to build our capacity to bear witness.”