White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

The Author’s Note provides two key ideas that frame DiAngelo’s text. The first section is about identity politics, which she describes as “the focus on the barriers specific groups face in their struggle for equality” (xiii). Since all fights for equality between groups have come through identity politics, White Fragility uses this concept to explore what it means to be white in the United States and how white people can challenge racism.

The second key idea explained in the Author’s Note is the complexity of racial identities: Though DiAngelo bisects the population into “white and people of color” (xv), she acknowledges that multiracial people live outside this binary. Further complicating racial identity is “the concept of saliency” (xvi): Different identities are more important or visible in different contexts.

DiAngelo describes how white supremacy and racism have led to rampant inequality in the United States. This system insulates white people, causing them to take their privilege for granted. Since white people are protected from thinking about or processing the racism around them, they have difficulty handling racial stress; when a white person’s comfort is challenged by even “the mere suggestion that being white has meaning” (2), the result is “