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A review by joelogsliterature
White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
I believe this is an important book, but I also wonder if it might be too direct too early for much of its audience. If DiAngelo struggles so much to have liberal white women to recognize their place in the edifice of racism, then how would a conservative white man take such a book? I do not mean to say that is the intended audience. Rather my point is that those who might benefit from this are already ostensibly on the side of anti-racism, which is a meager portion of the populace. While it is valuable to identify common misconceptions, to state the obvious that <i>You are almost certainly racist. Even if you are not intentionally or consciously so, even if you have connections with black people, and even if you've faced difficulties yourself</i>, and to use that as a starting point for investigation into genuine remedies toward the amelioration of racism in America—while all of that is valuable, I think it fails to reach the potential of the ideas herein, which might be promulgated more broadly. Still, there is real value in giving reprieve from the worst of racism even if only for a few.
This book is really a starting point for those who are equipped with the prerequisites. Thankfully there is a helpful reading list to follow. I think this would be more striking for those wholly unfamiliar with the titular concept, but that was not at all how I came in. I think in 2025, the notion is commonplace, but it is also frequently watered down to mere frailty, which fails to recognize the pernicious power such fragility holds, both in the tears of white women and in the aggressions of white men. In this way, while most of this book was familiar, still some examples stood out to me: those examples that apply to my own racism. I was not entirely unaware of them, but it is also more comfortable always to push them aside as OK, which is to be more than complicit in this self-regulating façade for the broader racist structures at play.
In any case, this is a reasonably powerful little read. It is example-driven with minimal abstraction, and it pulls from the works of many others, especially Black people who, unlike the author, have direct otherwise inaccessible experience with the frustrations and injustices born of fragility. Remember: If it feels exhausting to approach racism with open humility and recognition like suggested, then imagine how exhausting it is to navigate it perpetually from the other end.
This book is really a starting point for those who are equipped with the prerequisites. Thankfully there is a helpful reading list to follow. I think this would be more striking for those wholly unfamiliar with the titular concept, but that was not at all how I came in. I think in 2025, the notion is commonplace, but it is also frequently watered down to mere frailty, which fails to recognize the pernicious power such fragility holds, both in the tears of white women and in the aggressions of white men. In this way, while most of this book was familiar, still some examples stood out to me: those examples that apply to my own racism. I was not entirely unaware of them, but it is also more comfortable always to push them aside as OK, which is to be more than complicit in this self-regulating façade for the broader racist structures at play.
In any case, this is a reasonably powerful little read. It is example-driven with minimal abstraction, and it pulls from the works of many others, especially Black people who, unlike the author, have direct otherwise inaccessible experience with the frustrations and injustices born of fragility. Remember: If it feels exhausting to approach racism with open humility and recognition like suggested, then imagine how exhausting it is to navigate it perpetually from the other end.