Robin DiAngelo Quotes

There’s a lot of ways that white women undermine women of color, and black women in particular.

If I have no idea how my race shapes me, I am probably not going to be open to any feedback about how your race shapes you.

You have to be in accountable relationships across race. Accountable means that they’re authentic, they’re sustained, and that you do talk about racism, and you are able to be given feedback.

For a lot of white people, just suggesting that being white has meaning will trigger a deep, defensive response. And that defensiveness serves to maintain both our comfort and our positions in a racially inequitable society from which we benefit.

As white people in this society, we are socialized from the time that we’re born to see ourselves as superior, to see white people and things associated white people as superior. At the same time, I’m encouraged to never admit to that. I’m taught that racism is very bad and immoral.

It became clear over time that white people have extremely low thresholds for enduring any discomfort associated with challenges to our racial worldviews.

This is what I have learned: Any white person living in the United States will develop opinions about race simply by swimming in the water of our culture. But mainstream sources – schools, textbooks, media – don’t provide us with the multiple perspectives we need.

As a social concept, ‘white’ is profound in its meaning. It means people who either come from or appear to come from Europe, but it’s necessarily a construct of oppression.

Racism has two primary functions: the oppression of people of color, which most people recognize, but also the simultaneous elevation of white people. You can’t hold one group down without lifting the other up.

Whiteness is dynamic, relational, and operating at all times and on myriad levels. These processes and practices include basic rights, values, beliefs, perspectives and experiences purported to be commonly shared by all but which are actually only consistently afforded to white people.

White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress.

The goal of my work is to make visible the inevitable racist assumptions held, and patterns displayed, by white people conditioned from living in a white supremacist culture.

Mainstream dictionary definitions reduce racism to racial prejudice and the personal actions that result. But this definition does little to explain how racial hierarchies are consistently reproduced.

For white people, their identities rest on the idea of racism as about good or bad people, about moral or immoral singular acts, and if we’re good, moral people, we can’t be racist – we don’t engage in those acts.

Most white people cannot answer the question, ‘What does it mean to be white?’ with any depth or complexity.

There is no human objectivity.

The most effective adaptation of racism over time is the idea that racism is conscious bias held by mean people.

Denying that race matters is irrational in the face of segregation and all of the other forms of obvious racial inequity in society… Maintaining this denial of reality takes tremendous emotional and psychic energy.

The default of our society is the reproduction of racial inequality. I mean, that’s what it does; that’s what it’s been doing for hundreds of years.

Most people, certainly faculty, believe that if they’re for social justice, it’s automatically integrated into whatever they do.

A fundamental but very challenging part of my work is moving white people from an individual understanding of racism – i.e. only some people are racist and those people are bad – to a structural understanding.

Many of us actively working to interrupt racism continually hear complaints about the ‘gotcha’ culture of white anti-racism. There is a stereotype that we are looking for every incident we can find so we can spring out, point our fingers, and shout, ‘You’re a racist!’

I don’t believe it’s humanly possible to be free of bias.

Although racism does, of course, occur in individual acts, these acts are part of a larger system that we all participate in. The focus on individual incidences prevents the analysis that is necessary in order to challenge this larger system.

White fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.

We whites who position ourselves as liberal often opt to protect what we perceive as our moral reputationsrather than recognize or change our participation in systems of inequity and domination.

Human beings can only make sense of the world through the lens they were socialized to make sense of it through.

While individual whites may be against racism, they still benefit from the distribution of resources controlled by their group.

White consciousness is deeply anti-black, and that’s for progressives and conservatives.

Whites have not had to build the cognitive or affective skills or develop the stamina that would allow for constructive engagement across racial divides.

People of color understand what it means to be white more than I ever will.

I have spent years studying what it means to be white in a society that proclaims race meaningless, yet is deeply divided by race.

While having friends of color is better than not having them, it doesn’t change the overall system or prevent racism from surfacing in our relationships. The societal default is white superiority, and we are fed a steady diet of it 24/7. To not actively seek to interrupt racism is to internalize and accept it.

One of the most important misunderstandings for white people to get over to move forward is this idea that racism is a good-bad proposition – that if we’re good we can’t be part of it, that being uncomfortable means you’re a terrible person. We have to let go of that and understand it as a system we all live in.

We have always policed the bodies of people of color, and black people in particular. The Jim Crow South is a classic example. White flight in the North. School segregation. Gerrymandering.

One cannot understand how racism functions in the U.S. today if one ignores group power relations.

White fragility doesn’t always manifest in overt ways; silence and withdrawal are also functions of fragility.

White people are very wily when it comes to race. We will do everything that we can to get out from under the idea of race.