White Fragility and Racial Equity: What’s Stopping the Conversations [Audio]

B The Change Feb 13, 2019
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Giving Compass’ Take:

• Ryan Honeyman from Next Economy, interviews Robin DiAngelo, examining why it’s difficult for white people to discuss issues of race, racism, and white fragility. 

• How can we start to evaluate and move past our white fragility around speaking about racism? DiAngelo says that racism is a system and that it is embedded in language. Why is it important to understand race and racism as a system?

• Read about white fragility in teaching and education. 

Robin DiAngelo is a former associate professor of multicultural education at Westfield State University and currently affiliate faculty at the University of Washington. DiAngelo’s scholarship is in critical discourse analysis and whiteness studies. In addition to her academic work, she has been a consultant, mediator and workplace racial equity trainer for over 20 years.

DiAngelo has written numerous publications, including her latest book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism, which has been on The New York Times bestseller list since it debuted in June 2018.

Next Economy’s Ryan Honeyman interviewed DiAngelo, and here are some highlights from that conversation:

  • How Dr. DiAngelo first got into this work as a “classic white progressive” who was “clueless about racism.”
  • Why good, open-minded, liberal progressives (who marched in the ’60s) still have a fundamentally racist worldview.
  • How having one or more historically marginalized identities (e.g., being a woman, low-income, LGBTQ, Jewish) does not mean that one understands the experience of racism.
  • Why naming, disrupting and dismantling white supremacy shifts the problem to white people, where it belongs.
  • How the unexamined values of individualism, meritocracy, objectivity and conflict avoidance are part of the dominant culture and lead to problematic outcomes for people of color.

Read the full article about white fragility by Andrew Baskin at B the Change

Interested in learning more about Race and Ethnicity? Other readers at Giving Compass found the following articles helpful for impact giving related to Race and Ethnicity.

  • This article is deemed a must-read by one or more of our expert collaborators.
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    Donors of Color Aim to Advance Racial, Social and Economic Justice

    “Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic justice which make philanthropy necessary.” -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love, 1963 Mr. and Mrs. Roberts (not their real name) are an African American couple in their 70s, retired and loving life. She was a C-suite executive for most of her career; he was a medical doctor. They raised their two children in a large American city and continue to live there. They both grew up in families with modest means, and both their families participated in the Great Migration of African American families from the rural south to the industrial northern Midwest post-World War II. Their parents were postal workers, school teachers and custodial workers. The Roberts worked hard, lived frugally, saved and invested wisely. Now, in their 70s, they enjoy traveling and collecting art. Recently, they made a bequest to a major art museum of art and cash valued at over one million dollars. They are generous philanthropists, giving around $100,000 per year, mostly to projects that help low income students gain access to greater opportunity. Philanthropy as a sector in the U.S. has not always been inclusive or reflective of our increasingly diverse society, but high net worth donors of color like Mr. and Mrs. Roberts represent a large and growing segment of the American philanthropic landscape.

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