White fragility : why it's so hard for white people to talk about racism

For a book whose entire theme is the response of white people to being called racist, it does an amazing job of ignoring entirely the consequences that even a mere accusation of racism, much less admitting (with gratitude?!) to racism will have on a white person.

People in general are unwilling to admit they are wrong or that they are bad; this is the source of near-endless bullet lists DiAngelo plagues us with in an apparent attempt to fill the page count. White people in truth are wary of admitting to even a momentary, fleeting racist thought in large part because they are terrified of what happens to them if they acknowledge it, consequences which are very real and which woke liberal thinkers are more and more trying to make only capable of being applied to white people (even though whiteness and therefore white people somehow don't exist).

The idea that white tears are unwelcome because they are somehow a calculated move to bring attention back to white women is incredibly dehumanizing; even calling them white tears is dehumanizing in the same way that saying there's "black sweat" on a shirt or calling what a surgery patient gets on your scrubs "black blood" is dehumanizing.

Whiteness must be real in some sense. We can't go on pretending it is "entirely made up and you're really Italian/Irish" while also somehow magically knowing who is and isn't white. Race is tied at least in part to biology, and that is the fundamental basis for all of this identifying who is and isn't problematic and who can speak for whom. The existence of a good/bad binary is the necessary logical result of insisting -- as she thinks she is creatively doing -- that a spectrum exists instead, along which you can choose to be more or less racist or white; what might astound her is that spectra have two ends, and by necessity those poles, since she's cautioning us to head only in one direction on it and not the other, is good and bad. Surprise!

And to occupy a bubble protected from any consequences of admitting "yes I am incurably racist" would have, while telling us that racial prejudice inevitably and permanently clouds our vision as white people, while also telling us she has managed to overcome that as a white woman herself and that she alone has the objective view we should all adopt, is the unimpressive feat of projection and bulverism that DiAngelo manages to achieve here.

1 star only because 0 is not an option.

I’m torn on this one. She mentions early on that it’s meant to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive, in terms of actually ending or putting a dent in the racist status quo.

But then she offers again and again the prescription of raising awareness and/or whites accepting criticism from POC.

Her description of the phenomena of fragility is unbelievably clear-eyed; any POC will immediately recognize everything she points out. I want to give 5 stars based on this alone, but it seems like a misguided book in terms of actually addressing the problem considering the material conditions of racialized, autocratic institutions that control life in the US today.

Is simply trying to get whites to understand the substance of racism going to get them to renege their material benefits in the zero-sum game of power in these inegalitarian institutions? I feel like they’ll just revert back to overt racism. Power needs to be taken from the racist elites by force with mass, cooperative action.