Giving Compass' Take:

• Ryan Honeyman from Next Economy, interviews Robin DiAngelo, and examines why it's difficult for white people to discuss issues of race, racism, and white fragility. 

• How can we start to evaluate and move past our white fragility around speaking about racism? DiAngelo says that racism is a system and is embedded in language. Why is it important to understand race and racism as a system?

• Read about white fragility in teaching and education. 

Robin DiAngelo is a former associate professor of multicultural education at Westfield State University and currently affiliate faculty at the University of Washington. DiAngelo’s scholarship is in critical discourse analysis and whiteness studies. In addition to her academic work, she has been a consultant, mediator and workplace racial equity trainer for over 20 years.

DiAngelo has written numerous publications, including her latest book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism, which has been on The New York Times bestseller list since it debuted in June 2018.

Next Economy's Ryan Honeyman interviewed DiAngelo, and here are some highlights from that conversation:

  • How Dr. DiAngelo first got into this work as a “classic white progressive” who was “clueless about racism.”
  • Why good, open-minded, liberal progressives (who marched in the ’60s) still have a fundamentally racist worldview.
  • How having one or more historically marginalized identities (e.g., being a woman, low-income, LGBTQ, Jewish) does not mean that one understands the experience of racism.
  • Why naming, disrupting and dismantling white supremacy shifts the problem to white people, where it belongs.
  • How the unexamined values of individualism, meritocracy, objectivity and conflict avoidance are part of the dominant culture and lead to problematic outcomes for people of color.

Read the full article about white fragility by Andrew Baskin at B the Change.