Adding to the conversation

Nothing is simple, least of all tackling entrenched and systemic, oft-unspoken, legacies of past mistakes that allow many social foundations to stand as they do. But, with debate and considered, open and honest collective involvement it can affect, adapt and grow better approaches and attitudes to tackling white superiority. This book doesn’t have definite answers, nor should it, but it does help raise views and perspectives you may never have had or totally understood or appreciated and, at the very least, adds to the conversation about race.

Despite its ubiquity, white superiority is also unnamed and denied by most whites. If we become adults who explicitly oppose racism, as do many, we often organize our identity around a denial of our racially based privileges that reinforce racist disadvantage for others. What is particularly problematic about this contradiction is that white people’s moral objection to racism increases their resistance to acknowledging their complicity with it. In a white supremacist context, white identity largely rests on a foundation of (superficial) racial tolerance and acceptance. We whites who position ourselves as liberal often opt to protect what we perceive as our moral reputations, rather than recognise or change our participation in systems of inequity and domination.

Robin DiAngelo White Fragility