Seeing Whiteness

Long before the widespread success of the 2018 book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, Robin DiAngelo was breaking with white solidarity and writing, speaking, and teaching on the relationship among white supremacy, structural racism, and white identity. In this volume, DiAngelo has gathered a selection of her groundbreaking works leading up to White Fragility. Speaking as a white person to her fellow white people, she seamlessly blends the personal with the political. The result is an engaging and provocative analysis of the sociopolitical forces of race that shape our lives. Taking up familiar ideologies such as individualism and meritocracy, she breaks down how these concepts function to protect and obscure structural racism. Collectively, these essays show how racism infuses our society and its institutions; it is a system that goes well beyond individual intentions or conscious acts of meanness. By changing the question from if we are part of systemic racism to how each of us plays a part, DiAngelo’s body of work provides a transformative framework for white identity and antiracist action.

Featured Essays:

Chapter 1: My Class Didn’t Trump My Race: Using Oppression to Face Privilege

Chapter 2: Why Can’t We All Just Be Individuals?

Chapter 3: "My Feelings Are Not About You": Personal Experience as a Move of Whiteness (with David Allen)

Chapter 4: Getting Slammed: White Depictions of Race Dialogues as Arenas of Violence (with Özlem Sensoy)

Chapter 5: Nothing to Add: A Challenge to White Silence in Racial Discussions

Chapter 6: White Fragility

Chapter 7: White Fragility Accessible

Chapter 8: “We Put It in Terms of 'Not-Nice': White Antiracists and Parenting (with Sarah Matlock)

Chapter 9: Respect Differences? Challenging the Common Guidelines in Social Justice Education

Chapter 10: Leaning In: A Student’s Guide to Engaging Constructively With Social Justice Content (with Özlem Sensoy)

Chapter 11: Showing What We Tell (with Darlene Flynn)

Chapter 12: “We Are All For Diversity, But…”: How Faculty Hiring Committees Reproduce Whiteness and Practical Suggestions for How They Can Change (with Özlem Sensoy)