E-Reading White Fragility; Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
Author: Robin Diangelo
Publisher: Beacon Press
Publishing Date: 2018
ISBN: B07638ZFN1
Summary:
The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality.
Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, anti-racist educator Robin DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what can be done to engage more constructively.
(From goodreads/wikipedia)
Robin J. DiAngelo is an American academic, lecturer, and author working in the fields of critical discourse analysis and whiteness studies. She formerly served as a tenured professor of multicultural education at Westfield State University and is currently an Affiliate Associate Professor of Education at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is known for her work pertaining to white fragility, a term which she coined in 2011.
In a 2011 academic paper she put forward the concept of white fragility, the notion that the tendency for white people to become defensive when confronted with their racial advantage functions to protect and maintain that advantage. She further promoted the idea through her 2018 book White Fragility: Why It's So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism.
from Wikipedia
Truly, my 0 star rating is made for a book like this. I read this book with open mind, from cover to cover, yet i found it disgusting. For awhile i was curious about so much anger in some think pieces that began to proliferate the net after beginnings of race pogroms, and after reading this thing, well I have my answer. Long before the attention to race, I have always tried to be inclusive in my reading and reviewing life. ( I am sorry that I didn't review a lot of black authors...) And my first awakening of sorts, if one can call it that, comes from waking up white by Debby Irving which taught me a lot. At the same time when I read her book, I realized something: my experiences are not mainstream, and she does address the ethnic minority issue, which I fully appreciate. This author? She lumps all whites together, which I didn't appreciate. She toots her own horn too much and provides very little in the way of solutions or healing even. Her stance? White people have to develop tough skin, have to do their own research and have to know that white equals bad. Damned if we do, damned if we don't. More than anything, I am of opinion that if we truly want to understand other people, we have to demand from middle and high schools to be more inclusive with history and to change historical curriculum. I am currently reading Ronald Takakis book, A Different Mirror, and will highly recommend for people to read that book instead of trash like this. In Takakis book, one truly witnesses the racism and hurdles at work for minorities.
0 out of 5
(0: Stay away unless a masochist 1: Good for insomnia 2: Horrible but readable; 3: Readable and quickly forgettable, 4: Good, enjoyable 5: Buy it, keep it and never let it go.)
