Why Blacks Are Tired of Hearing about White Fragility…and Why It Matters

Contemporary race relations remain reminiscent of the 1960s and don’t feel much changed from when I was in high school. Conversations about the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, the Black Lives Matter movement and Make America White Again politics echo the same thought patterns. As racism continues to force itself into our national discourse, whites remain unwitting students in a course on racial dynamics — some with a growing level of white guilt, others with a defensiveness that ironically manifests itself in behaviors that reinforce racist practices.

This phenomenon, termed “white fragility,” is explained in Robin DiAngelo’s New York Times best-selling book of the same name, in which she describes the unexamined racial identity of white people and how they disassociate themselves from racism. DiAngelo’s analysis, born out of decades of anti-racism work as a white woman, attempts to equip whites with the tools they need to understand their active part in perpetuating racism and to provide insights for people of color to better understand their interactions with whites. White Fragility, rooted in a social-justice perspective, employs an enlightened (although dated) and prescriptive understanding of the interface of racial identity and racial dynamics. In doing so, the concept suffers from some…