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

But because of our society’s emphasis on individuality, many of us are unskilled at reflecting on our group memberships. To understand race relations today, we must push against our conditioning and grapple with how and why racial group memberships matter.

Even though participants of color repeatedly state that whites’ refusal to acknowledge racial difference and power dynamics actually maintains racial inequity, white participants continue to insist that not talking about difference is necessary for unity.

I repeat: stopping our racist patterns must be more important than working to convince others that we don’t have them. We do have them, and people of color already know we have them; our efforts to prove otherwise are not convincing. An honest accounting of these patterns is no small task given the power of white fragility and white solidarity, but

The language of violence that many whites use to describe antiracist endeavors is not without significance, as it