‘White Fragility’ Is Everywhere. But Does Antiracism Training Work?

In early June, Robin DiAngelo addressed 184 Democratic members of Congress who had gathered, by conference call, for what the party leadership had named a “Democratic Caucus family discussion on race.” It was 10 days after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, gave introductory remarks, and soon DiAngelo began. “For all the white people listening right now, thinking I am not talking to you,” she had a message: “I am looking directly in your eyes and saying, ‘It is you.’” She cautioned the white officeholders not to think that because they marched in the 1960s, or served a diverse district, or had a Black roommate in college, they were exempt from self-examination. Until they reckoned with the question of “what does it mean to be white,” they would “continue to enact policies and practices — intentionally or not — that hurt and limit” Black lives.

The invitation to speak to the caucus was just one in a deluge for DiAngelo. Before Floyd’s killing, she was a leading figure in the field of antiracism training or, as she sometimes describes it, antiracism consciousness raising. It’s a field shared by nonwhite and white trainers, and DiAngelo, who is 63 and white, with graying corkscrew curls framing delicate features, had won the admiration of Black activist intellectuals like Ibram X. Kendi, author of “How to Be an Antiracist,” who praises the “unapologetic critique” of her presentations, her apparent indifference to “the feelings of the white people in the room.” In 2018, when she published her manifesto, “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism,” Michael Eric Dyson provided the foreword. She is “wise and withering,” he wrote, “in her relentless assault on what Langston Hughes termed ‘the ways of white folks.’” “White Fragility” leapt onto the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, and next came a stream of bookings for public lectures and, mostly, private workshops and speeches given to school faculties and government agencies and university administrations and companies like Microsoft and Google and W.L. Gore & Associates, the maker of Gore-Tex.

But as prominent as DiAngelo was then, she has become, since Floyd’s death, a phenomenon. As outraged protesters rose up across the country, “White Fragility” became Amazon’s No. 1 selling book, beating out even the bankable escapism of the latest “Hunger Games” installment. The book’s small publisher, Beacon Press, had trouble printing fast enough to meet demand; 1.6 million copies, in one form or other, have been sold. And as countless companies and institutions put out statements denouncing racism and expressing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and committing themselves to inclusivity, DiAngelo’s inbox was flooded with urgent emails: requests to deliver (virtually because of the pandemic) workshops and keynotes at Amazon, Nike, Under Armour, Goldman Sachs. The entreaties went on: Facebook, CVS, American Express, Netflix.

Corporate desperation was matched by unrestrained media enthusiasm. Jimmy Fallon had DiAngelo as a guest on “The Tonight Show” in mid-June and commented, “Wow … wow,” as she spoke, and CNN chose to intersperse a repeated close-up of DiAngelo’s white face — and her instructions to white people on how to begin to battle their racism — with a montage from the protests. Instagram bore tens of thousands of posts about “White Fragility,” a great many of them pictures taken by white readers, with the book as part of a tableau, lying just so on an impeccably ironed bedspread or on a burnished wooden tray between a votive candle and a cup of tea, as if to advertise serenity along with righteousness. Some posts, though, took a different tone: “To be unpicking my privilege, my supremacy, my colonized mind. That’s tough enough. But to be faced with blank looks from fellow whites. That’s the real rusty razor to the carotid artery.”

The surge of attention, DiAngelo told me, made her at once leery and hopeful. She worried that the posts were “performative,” the book “just a badge.” Yet, she said, “there’s a sense of scales falling from people’s eyes,” mostly because of the killings of Floyd and, before that, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, but also, she believed, because of the work she and her antiracism colleagues have been doing. She felt a similar mix about the ASAP emails from corporations. “The very urgency itself says you don’t have a very deep understanding of how hard this work is, and how long it takes and how ongoing it needs to be,” she said. “Racism is not going to go away by August, so how about we do it in August?”

I’d been talking with DiAngelo for a year when Floyd was killed, and with other antiracism teachers for almost as long. Demand has recently spiked throughout the field, though the clamor had already been building, particularly since the election of Donald Trump. Glenn E. Singleton, a Black trainer whose firm, Courageous Conversation, has been giving workshops for over two decades, saw a 105 percent rise in business between November 2016 and February 2020. Bookings plummeted because of Covid-19, and then, with the Floyd protests, he said, he experienced “extraordinary” demand. Darnisa Amante-Jackson, another important Black voice in the sector, started the Disruptive Equity Education Project four years ago and was hired by school districts and charter-school networks in 15 states. She is now receiving a new level of interest, especially from corporations “eager,” she said in June, “to be authentic to the B.L.M. messaging they’re putting out.” As their teaching becomes more and more widespread, antiracism educators are shaping the language that gets spoken — and the lessons being learned — about race in America.

Last July, in San Francisco, I attended three of DiAngelo’s sessions. “I wasn’t raised to see my race as saying anything relevant about me,” she declared to a largely white crowd in the Mission district’s 360-seat Brava Theater. Her audience had paid between $65 and $160 per ticket to hear her speak for three and a half hours. The place was sold out. “I will not coddle your comfort,” she went on. She gestured crisply with her hands. “I’m going to name and admit to things white people rarely name and admit.” Scattered Black listeners called out encouragement. Then she specified the predominant demographic in the packed house: white progressives. “I know you. Oh, white progressives are my specialty. Because I am a white progressive.” She paced tightly on the stage. “And I have a racist worldview.”

Soon she projected facts and photographs onto the screen behind her. No lone image offered anything surprising, yet the series caused a cumulative jolt: the percentage of state governors who are white, of the 10 richest people in the country who are white, of the “people who directed the 100 top-grossing films of all time, worldwide” — all the percentages over 90 — and so on. The onslaught of statistics was followed by a seemingly innocent picture of an all-white wedding celebration (about which DiAngelo asked her white listeners whether their own weddings were or would be just as pale), a photo of an all-white funeral (“from cradle to grave,” she said, white people, no matter how liberal, tend to exist in overwhelmingly white spaces “without anyone conveying that we’ve lost anything — with a deeply internalized absence of any sense of loss”), a screenshot of a Jeopardy board — during the semifinals of the 2014 collegiate championship — where the only category left entirely unselected by the contestants was African-American history (“we don’t know our history,” we “separate it out and see it as their history”), all of this culminating in a photograph showing a female silhouette standing without an umbrella in a torrential downpour. Messages of pre-eminent white value and Black insignificance, DiAngelo pronounced, “are raining down on us 24/7, and there are no umbrellas.” She declaimed: “My psychosocial development was inculcated in this water,” and “internalized white superiority is seeping out of my pores.” And: “White supremacy — yes, it includes extremists or neo-Nazis, but it is also a highly descriptive sociological term for the society we live in, a society in which white people are elevated as the ideal for humanity, and everyone else is a deficient version.” And Black people, she said, are cast as the most deficient. “There is something profoundly anti-Black in this culture.”

Periodically, as DiAngelo made the concept of systemic racism palpable, she asked everyone to team up with seatmates to answer a question. I had found a spot toward the back, between Brendon Woods, the head of the public defender’s office for Oakland and its surrounding county, and Vanessa Rush Southern, senior minister at San Francisco’s First Unitarian Universalist Society. Woods, who is Black, had booked DiAngelo to lecture to his staff two months earlier, as a way to make the office feel safer for Black staff members and better able to wage its legal battles. The points she made in the theater, he’d heard before. He didn’t mind at all. “The first time I was kind of in awe,” he told me later; “the second time I was taking notes.” He felt she was exposing the fathomless depth of what he was working against, of what was embodied in the Alameda County jail, where, though Black people make up 11 percent of the county’s population, about half of the 1,800 inmates are Black. Her portrait of whiteness, he said, drove him all the harder to “really, really promote diversity in my office, and, externally, to get people of color into law school, into power.” He recalled a prosecutor saying to him, about a client, “Go tell your boy to take this deal.” DiAngelo was illuminating all that lay beneath such casual bigotry and bias. “If she was going to be here next week, I would go again.”

Partway through her presentation, DiAngelo asked us, “What are some of the ways your race has shaped your life?” She told us to give our answers to each other and added that if we were white and happened to be sitting beside someone of color, we were forbidden to ask the person of color to speak first. It might be good policy, mostly, for white people to do more listening than talking, but, she said with knowing humor, it could also be a subtle way to avoid blunders, maintain a mask of sensitivity and stay comfortable. She wanted the white audience members to feel as uncomfortable as possible.

In our group of three, Southern, who is white, went first. Like Woods, she was already steeped in DiAngelo’s ideas; Southern had led two church book groups in discussing “White Fragility.” She was fully persuaded that, as she said to me afterward, “we’re all racist in that we’re swimming in a culture that is racist,” and that “we don’t think, as white people, of white as a race that comes with all kinds of conditioning.” Yet, in the moment, in response to DiAngelo’s question, she struggled. She couldn’t articulate much of anything about how she’d been shaped by being white.

I went next. I, too, was ready for everything I heard from DiAngelo. In fact, I knew this very question was coming. Just the day before, I’d been to a session she ran for a fractious city department that agreed to let me watch as long as I didn’t describe the event; the department’s equity team had brought her in to spur white self-awareness. But I had failed to speak about my whiteness as formative. That is, I noted that my color gave me infinite advantages, but the words, while sincere, were passionless. I emphasized instead that three of my five nonfiction books were about race, that I thought about race constantly, that back in junior high my best friend was one of the few Black students in my school, part of an experimental busing program in the early ’70s, and that the way our friendship ended still haunted me, that I’d betrayed him badly.

At some point after our answers, DiAngelo poked fun at the myriad ways that white people “credential” themselves as not-racist. I winced. I hadn’t meant to imply that I was anywhere close to free of racism, yet was I “credentialing”? And today, after a quick disclaimer acknowledging the problem with what I was about to do, I heard myself offering up, again, these same nonracist bona fides and neglecting to speak about the effects of having been soaked, all my life, by racist rain. I was, DiAngelo would have said, slipping into the pattern she first termed “white fragility” in an academic article in 2011: the propensity of white people to fend off suggestions of racism, whether by absurd denials (“I don’t see color”) or by overly emotional displays of defensiveness or solidarity (DiAngelo’s book has a chapter titled “White Women’s Tears” and subtitled “But you are my sister, and I share your pain!”) or by varieties of the personal history I’d provided.

White fragility, in DiAngelo’s formulation, is far from weakness. It is “weaponized.” Its evasions are actually a liberal white arsenal, a means of protecting a frail moral ego, defending a righteous self-image and, ultimately, perpetuating racial hierarchies, because what goes unexamined will never be upended. White fragility is a way for well-meaning white people to guard what race has granted them, all they haven’t earned.