I read this book in September ahead of a workplace discussion that encouraged participants to prepare by reading at least one of two works - How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi was the other option. I arrived at the meeting and discovered I was one of the ten or so participants (and the sole non-facilitator) who had read White Fragility, which placed me in the unexpected role of pseudo-expert on the work; I advocated for DiAngelo's perspective throughout the conversation. It was a challenge, but not an unfamiliar task - TOA reading reviews involve picking out two or three core ideas from a book, and in hindsight I can say that my writing habit had prepared me for this role in the group discussion.
White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo (September 2020)
There were two aspects of this book that I ignored in order to contribute to the discussion. First, DiAngelo's purpose is introductory and she takes a wide-ranging approach to this goal, but she condenses her examples, experiences, and conclusions into a short book. I suspect brevity created problems, primarily because certain important details were likely left out to keep the work at the desired length; the relevance of lost details will condescend to audiences who know better. For example, readers who accept her thought about a better way to present the narrative of Jackie Robinson's legacy will not be among those who are familiar with the details of his courageous career - spikes from sliding opponents, slurs from bigoted fans, and the lingering reluctance of some teams to sign Black players suggest to me that the idea of whites "allowing" him to play baseball retains the incompleteness she seeks to remedy, albeit from a different perspective. The second challenge for me was more straightforward - I was once told by a colleague, casually and almost endearingly, that I have "chink eyes", so let's just say that I'm not in the target audience.
The crucial lesson of this book is not what I've seen appear in a few reviews around the good old information superhighway - all white people are racist. (Quite frankly, I'm stunned that anyone who has known even one white person would entertain or accept this premise.) However, I think the acknowledgement that our society's systems are implicitly biased against minorities (and especially Black and Brown people) is a highly useful lesson for all audiences. White people, by participating in these systems (which in many cases involves little or no choice) perpetuate and reinforce inequalities through acts that would be openly labeled as racist were it not for the support and protection offered by these systems. I think this book is as simple as that, and should not have been complicated any further, because even though I admire DiAngelo's attempt to start and advance the conversation about the idea, it's an impossible task until those in the discussion have understood and accepted the simple premise of systemic racism.
TOA Rating: Three corporate seminars out of four.
