White Fragility with Robin DiAngelo

Aurora: So Kelly, what is White Fragility?

Kelly: Well white fragility is basically the norm for how white people quote-unquote talk about race. Like have you ever noticed how white people tend to respond very defensively when they’re talking about race? Or that these conversations don’t even happen because talking about race feels really uncomfortable for white people? And we’re not used to feeling uncomfortable. And I admit I have done all of those things.

And guess what? I have done all of these things.

Aurora: You are not alone, Kelly — White tears are real.

Kelly: Oof, I wasn’t going to show those to you for a while, Aurora. Remember after I read the book and I came into yoga and just looked at you and was like, “Don’t talk. I’m sorry. I need to do better. Thank you. I love you.” That was it. Then the work starts, right?

Aurora: Yes, it does.

Kelly: Robin DiAngelo is amazing because she’s brought this conversation about white fragility to the mainstream and she doesn’t stop there. She constantly challenges white people to acknowledge their racism and to do better.

Aurora: I mean reading Robin’s book was honestly so validating and having this conversation with her was beyond because that moment we had that brief conversation before the start of yoga class –

Kelly: It was a shift.

Aurora: Huge. Because so often, Kelly, I am made to feel like my frustration talking to white people is all made up and in my head. And so I’m so excited to share this conversation with you all!

Kelly: Me too! But before we jump in, as a disclaimer there are some cuss words in this episode.

Aurora: Here we go.

Interview:

Kelly: Hi, Ms. Robin, how are you? It’s Kelly and Aurora.

Aurora: We are so excited to have you join us today. We’d love for you to tell us who you are and.

Robin: My pronouns are she/her. I am a white cis gender able bodied but hearing impaired bisexual but in a long term committed relationship or marriage – heterosexual marriage – so I don’t tend to identify outside of that given the day in and day out. I move through the world with heterosexual privilege. I am an atheist. Although I was raised Catholic and I grew up poor and working class and I’m currently middle or upper class.

Aurora: Thank you.

Kelly: Thank you so much. And we would love to know how would you explain your work?

Robin: I am a former academic so I have a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction and within that Multicultural Education, Whiteness Studies, Critical Discourse Analysis. But I’m someone who came late to academia. So I was out in the field doing the work for quite a while before I put theory behind what I had observed and so I now write and speak full time and my objective is to make structural racism and everyday dynamics of white racism in particular very clear and visible for white people so that we might stop engaging in them.

Kelly: So what was that moment when you went back to school was it the chicken or the egg that you had experience with racism or whiteness and then when you went to school you wanted to study certain areas of it – or how did that happen?

Robin: Well I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in sociology. I was 34 years old. No one in my family ever been to college. Okay now I’ve got this college degree. I was waiting tables. I was sure that I needed a college degree if I was going to do anything more than that. But once I had it I wasn’t positive how to use it. So I was working with the career center at the university I had gone to and one day they said, you know we have a job with your name all over it and it’s Diversity Trainer. I’ve never heard of a Diversity Trainer. This was the 90s but when I read the description I just thought well isn’t that the coolest job possible and aren’t I completely qualified to go in and side by side with people of color challenge racism. I mean after all I’m a vegetarian, so I couldn’t possibly be racist. And I applied for the job and I got the job and when I tell that story in the way I tell it I’m making a couple of points which is I was a classic white progressive and I thought it wasn’t about me – it was about being open minded. Which of course I was open minded and I can easily you know teach other people to be open minded. I wasn’t remotely qualified for the job and I was in for the most profound learning of my entire life. On to two key levels. The first one is this was a federally mandated 16 hour training for government workers. It was not fun remotely. And they put us out in interracial teams. So the first for the first time in my life my racial worldview was being challenged in a sustained way by a consistent number of people of color. And part of being white is I could be that far in life and never have had that experience. I was certified as highly educated in terms of a bachelor’s degree never discussed systemic racism and I was like a fish being taken out of water. I mean I wouldn’t have been able to tell you I had a racial worldview right. I was just a Heinz 57. I was just white bread. I was just a human. So that was part one and part two was going into these workplaces that were overwhelmingly white. I’m just going to be really direct white people we can be so mean.

Kelly: I think we’re mean to each other a lot, too. And I’m like we’re mean to each other and then we’re even meaner to people of color.

Robin: Yeah I mean you just barely scratch on that thin veneer of you know progressiveness and this really like resentment and meanness and contempt erupts. So I was like a deer in headlights in the beginning. But years of bad years of that I just got better and better. Like how do we pull this off? What’s happening here? And I got better at articulating how we pull it off. You know as an insider I have a knowledge of it that people of color can’t have. People of color I think understand what it means to be white and understand white fragility far more than I do and ever will. And I have a piece of the puzzle that people of color can’t have right as an inside. So I got better at articulating that and eventually when that contract was over I recognized what an extraordinary opportunity. I mean most white people avoid talking about racism and I did it every day. I’m going to go get my PhD. I just want to put all that credibility and theory behind what I’ve observed and disseminate that at a higher level.

So I don’t think of it as a moment. I think about it as a process and it is a lot like water dripping on a rock. That’s how I see it for most white people. It has to be sustained. You know I didn’t get it the first time. The second time I might get a piece of it, I might see it and then it just slips away. We can never be complacent that our learning is finished and we know all we need to know. I mean every force every social force out there is pushing against us seeing this. And those forces are seductive right. There are social penalties for seeing and naming racism and breaking with white solidarity. So if we don’t put something in place to keep us accountable and to keep checking our arrogance and our lack of humility then we we just going to slide right back in.

Kelly: Yes. Yes.

Aurora:That was very deep, right?

Kelly: Well because it’s heavy.

Aurora: It’s very heavy. It’s very accurate, Robin, in the sense as a person of color, we see it. But yet we are we are labeled as the crazy ones. The ones that are not conforming, the ones that are being too emotional. We’re the ones that are making everything about race. And so there are times in having grown up in the corporate environment and probably participated more than I care to share in the well intentioned diversity programs and initiatives training, I am struck by how little has changed.

Robin: Yeah. Yeah.

Aurora: And so when you talk about the system, you talk about this solidarity across white people – And maybe this is where I’ll segway into what prompted me to buy many copies of your book.

Kelly: Many? Define many.

Aurora: Like over 30 copies of your book. And handed out to all of my white girlfriends and to several of my white peers.

Kelly: In the book we’re talking about is White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People to Talk About Racism.

Aurora: And when I read your book as a person of color I nearly cried flipping through every page because you so succinctly articulated everything I had been feeling, everything that I had experienced,and everything that I had so desperately been trying to tell. All of my closest girlfriends that quote considered themselves open, liberal, and woke her – and what I astutely tried to package in a way that it could be heard in the 25 years that I traversed corporate America. And literally it fell on deaf ears.

Robin: Yeah.

Kelly: She kept asking us, “Why when Robin writes it do you listen and when I said it you didn’t?”

Aurora: And again I’m going back to your point, it’s like water dripping on rocks – I’ve been having this conversation all of my life. I think most people of color have been having because as you well know, Robin, we’re very comfortable talking about race. We talk about race all the time, right? It’s just part of our vernacular, it’s just part of our subject topic. And I had friends come up to me after reading the book saying, “Oh my God why didn’t you ever tell me?”

Robin: Yeah.

Aurora: And I’m like, “I did. Many, many, many times.”

Robin: Well there’s there’s so much in what you just said. I want to pull out a few threads. The first one you open saying that you were moved to tears or almost moved to tears and I have had other people of color respond that way because we are constantly telling you that what you’re experiencing is not happening and that you’re not experiencing it. The gaslighting is maddening. And finally someone is saying, “No you aren’t crazy. It’s not you it is us. It is happening.” The why not listening to you. So I have lots of thoughts about that. The first one is that I tell white people, if you have a cross racial relationship and you’re not talking about race the relationship is probably not as deep as you think it is precisely for that reason – in particular black and brown people talk fairly openly about race. I mean that not all peoples would color in a big picture way talk openly about racism. But in my experience generally indigenous, Black and latinx people do. And so if they’re not talking to you about it somewhere you conveyed that you can’t hear it. do. And I would imagine that for those friends of yours that are white when you said that I have tried to talk to you about it. But there’s often a point where you just stop because actually it’s more upsetting to try yet again and not be heard, right? And so the white person thinks well there’s no issue here because you know she’s not saying there’s an issue. For me that’s a red flag of an issue. And some of the reasons that we don’t listen to you but we listen to me is that white people ironically are granted human objectivity and we are particularly granted human objectivity on race, which of course if you understand white supremacy that’s hilarious with air quotes around it. You know, that we are unbiased that you play the race card that you have a chip on your shoulders, that we will be the arbiters of whether racism has occurred and whether your experiences are legitimate or not. I mean the arrogance is, you know, astounding and tragic. And then probably at the bottom of it all I really don’t think we can move forward from the dominant paradigm, which says that racism is intentional, conscious acts of meanness that you know they have to be conscious in order to count in the white mind apparently they have to be intentional in order to count in the white mind hence: “Well I didn’t mean to so get over it.” And so, as long as we understand it as conscious acts of malcontent across race, we’ve pretty much exempted virtually all white people from the society we live in. And we’ve guaranteed that it’s going to be virtually impossible to talk to the average white person about the inevitable absorption of a racist worldview that we get from literally swimming in racist water, from living in a society in which racism is the foundation and the bedrock. It is the norm. It is not an aberration, right. All of our institutions and our educational institutions in particular fabulously and in effect, efficiently reproduce racial inequality. I mean and honestly all white people know that. You know, who doesn’t know that schools are unequal.

Kelly: Yeah.

Robin: You know, we know this but we also at the same time refuse to acknowledge that we that we know this. So this idea that it’s basically someone in a white hood just it exempts basically everyone. And I want to make a last point here. I think white progressives cause the most daily hostility and toxicity to people of color. Well intended, open minded white progressives like Kelly and me. Because I imagine, Aurora, that running into a Richard Spencer that would be terrifying, but odds are you’re not running into Richard Spencer on a daily basis. On a daily basis, you’re interacting with me. I’m your co-worker. And to the degree that I think I’m good to go, you know, I’m just gonna carry on you know perpetrating all kinds of unaware micro aggressions and slights and indignities and yet erupt in defensiveness if you try to point that out because my identity is rooted in this idea that only mean people could ever do those things and. Then I’m gonna I’m gonna hear it as a question of my moral character. Oh and one last thread is individualism. I mean even right now there are white people listening to me thinking, well here’s why I’m an exception to everything she’s saying and she doesn’t know this about me and if she just knew that I was also an Ashkenazi Jew of European heritage or that I’m non binary queer person or that I grew up poor or that I you know speak four languages..I was in Teach for America…I’ve traveled the world…I grew up in the military. I could go on and on and on about all the exceptions white people apply to themselves. And my response to that is nothing could and nothing did exempt any white person from the racist society we live in and we have to change the question from if I’ve been shaped by that society – of course because we’re going to answer “No of course not” – we have to change the question from if to how. How have I? All of these things I think are so special and unique about me, how did they set me up into the racist structure I live in because they did. Kelly and I might have been set up differently because maybe she’s middle or upper class and I was raised poor, working class. We still both got set up and it’s on us to figure out how to.

Kelly: Totally set up, Robin. When I read your book I felt like I was getting my clothes taken off in front of a giant audience. All these little things that we do as white people. We smile with like a weird smile with our teeth not showing or – we all do it. And you like rip the Band-Aid off and you’re like, this is what we do. This is why we do it. What are we gonna do about it? My question is how do we get to your book? It was handed to me. If it wasn’t handed to me, where would I be? I’d be driving my SUV picking up my three kids from school. So what? You know, how do I how do I get to there.

Aurora: So before you answer, Robyn, like a funny story is that my husband kept saying, “Why are you buying all these books? Why can’t people buy their own damn copy of White Fragility?” And so fast forward a year later, it’s like do you see why. Because they wouldn’t have picked up the book. And you know my into your point my girlfriends are smart they’re brilliant. Kelly is an incredible avid reader of hard stuff. But yet to her point, had I not given her the book it wouldn’t have been anywhere on her wish list.

Kelly: By the way Aurora and I would have race conversations all the time. And what I tried to describe to her was, I heard Robin, like, in my soul because I thought when you and I were talking that we were talking about that white person over there.

Robin: Yep.Well you know it’s worthy of note that Aurora as a woman of color is paying for the book and giving it to white people. I just want to pull that out and have us notice that, right.

Kelly: Yes.

Robin: Not just the emotional labor but in that case there’s financial cost.

Kelly: Yes!

Aurora: So back to Kelly’s question. How do we other than a person of color buying the book. For their friend – their white friend. How do we move this forward Robin?

Robin: Well I can I can tell you some strategies. I mean in some ways that’s the million dollar question, right. How do we how do we change this? I try to point the finger inward rather than outward, right. And so while you can argue – and people manage to – it is harder to argue with somebody saying, this is an insight that I got about myself, right. And in saying that I am offering a counter narrative to whatever the person is saying, but it helps bring the defensiveness down. So if I were to say, “I’ve got to tell you – you know here’s all the reasons I thought that this does not apply to me and this, like, completely tore the lid off of that. And you know here’s the insight that I got.” That would probably go further than, “You really need this.”

Kelly: Totally.

Robin: It’s a strategy I use also when somebody says something clearly problematic, right. Certainly I could say, “Well that is racist.” You know, and there are moments when you have to be that clear in your integrity, but it’s not always the most strategic way to go about it. So I will often say, you know, “I can totally relate to that thought. I’ve had that thought myself.” Right. OK right there I identify with you I relate to you – hopefully down comes the defensiveness and, “I have had this extraordinary opportunity to talk to people who are on the other side of that thought and it has really changed the way I understand, you know, the impact of that. And now when I hear you say that I see the face of my beloved friend Aurora and I’ve seen the pain that that thought causes her.” OK so if I just said something and you said that to me trust me I’d never say it again.

Kelly: True.

Robin: And I might sheepishly try to backpedal, “Oh no, no, I know, I know.” You know it might be uncomfortable. I might be a little bit defensive. But it’s a little bit harder to carry on than if you just say that’s racist and then I can just like react really strongly.

Kelly: Every so often I come across a girlfriend who who does want to learn so much more and do the inquiry work. And where would you direct them?

Robin: Well I think that I my voice is one voice. It’s one that is fairly consistently missing in the sense of white people being pushed to look at ourselves, right. So most white people think about race and race work and race education as learning from people of color. It’s very hard for us to see our own lives in racial terms. And I think a lot of white people think it’s people of color aren’t present and we’re not talking about them, then there’s no “race” happening, right. And so it’s really important to push white people to have to answer the question, what does it mean to be white? How has your race shaped your life? And in my experience most white people can’t answer that question. And our inability to answer that question is not benign. It’s not neutral and it’s not innocent. Because I bring that lack of critical awareness to the table with me. And people of color are interacting in overwhelmingly white environments know that most white people can’t answer that question. And if I can’t tell you what it means to be white I cannot hold what it means not to be white. I cannot validate or affirm an alternative experience. And that means people of color can’t be their authentic selves. They can’t bring their experiences to us and talk to us about it because we have no critical thinking we have no skills to navigate the conversation and we have no emotional stamina to withstand the discomfort of that conversation. And so people of color have to endure because things tend to get worse for them not better when they try to talk to us about what they’re experiencing from us and from our environments. So you have to consistently grapple with your own racialization and you can’t do that in isolation. You have to also listen and take leadership and guidance from people of color. We need all the pieces of the puzzle right. If you only listen to people of color you won’t – you’ll of course get some awareness – but you also have to have kind of someone who shares your identity challenge you. It’s way harder to deny when I say it because you know and I know that we both experience it. So I guess make sure you’re getting as many voices as you can. So read everything you can. Attend everything you can. If you want to know how racism works and how white people protect our positions within a racist society just start talking to white people about racism.

Kelly: That’s the truth.

Robin: Right. I mean you just start doing it pay attention. I mean not only will you be pushed up against all your conflict avoidance patterns – you’ll be pressed up against all your you know maybe lifetime of not being able to think critically about this. You’ll build your skills there, but you will just kind of get an earful on how we manage to pull off living profoundly separate and unequal lives and claiming that our race has no meaning. And I think I’m effective at what I do because I have tried to talk to people for years and years and years and I know all the moves and all the tricks and all the narratives and I preempt them, right. That book is effective because I know, OK we have to start here, right. Apparently most many white people don’t even understand socialization. We actually think we could be, you know, objective and open minded and exempt from the forces of socialization just because we say we are. So you got to start there, right. And then you got, you know, what happens when you back one group’s socialization with legal authority you know and you just have to scaffold it.

Aurora: I think of scaffolding. You just have to build it. One of the areas that Kelly and I with a couple of other friends have looked to scaffolding is white women. You know, I think that the patriarchy has us at times zoning and focusing on white males and I think that our election – the numbers that were cast during the election, 2016 election proved to us that there is an incredible opportunity with white women. You know I always say to folks I feel that when I look at my career I think the perpetuation of micro aggressions and harm was equally executed by white males as it was by white women. You know being oblivious and unconscious to it was equally the same.

Robin: I’m really clear that white women do not land any more lightly on people of color. I actually think that when white women do not back people of color – and we have no consistent history of backing people of color – I think the hurt and the betrayal is but potentially deeper.

Aurora: It is.

Robin: Because we yeah we have a potential way through sexism and patriarchy and sadly all too often white women use it as a way out. We claim a universal sisterhood which there is not. Not in the here and now on the physical plane where we live. There is no more universally woman’s experience and there is a universal human experience. And so we kind of elevate the white woman as the representative of all women or are hurt and resentment about sexism and patriarchy gets in the way – and you know, “What about me? What about me” You know, I am proudly an angry feminist. It breaks my heart that young women don’t want to identify as feminists, right. And I’ve been thinking about sexism and patriarchy for most of my life. That wasn’t the cutting edge for me is to focus on where I’ve been oppressed. You know, I’m quite clear where I’ve been oppressed the cutting edge for me is, well where are you colluding with someone else’s oppression? Right. How has your your oppression actually set you up to collude with somebody else’s? How are you benefiting from somebody else’s? That’s not easy and I’m just very clear that I can walk into a room filled with men and experience so much sexism and arrogance and superiority and entitlement from them and then be sitting in a room filled with white women running those same patterns at the few people of color in that room. So again we have to use it as a way in and whenever there is a piece of racism I don’t understand. Let’s say, Aurora, you’ve given me some feedback. I’m feeling defensive about it. I don’t get it. I will often turn the roles around and I’ll say, “Now imagine that a man just said to you what you’re thinking of saying back to Aurora.” “Oh ok I get it.” It’s been so useful for me. So again we have to use it as a way in there’s just simply no way that it has exempted us from racism.

Aurora: I hear you on that. Are you absolutely on that.

Robin: I also want to say that when I talk about patriarchy and sexism internalized male privilege and entitlement I want to be really clear I’m talking about white men. And that does not mean that men of color don’t have sexist patterns, but out on the street I don’t know that anybody is more vulnerable than a black man. You have to think a little more nuanced about what that looks like and where again maybe in a relationship or in one’s own community. certainly, you know, men of color need to grapple with sexism. But to compare a white man and say a black man out in the larger society as having you know equal levels of male privilege – I don’t think that they do.

Aurora: Well in our news cycle certainly proves and the lives lost has certainly proven that over many of years and as a mother of a boy of color it is – You know, I watched my mother every night worry and wonder if my father was going to make it home alive. And you know when you grow up, that’s just your norm. You don’t even recognize the level of stress and toll that that creates within the construct of your body, your mind. Those experiences are so – unfortunately – they’re so normalized for me. I recognize that most of my white girlfriends, it doesn’t even cross their mind. It’s not even a blip on the radar screen.

Robin: And this is where feminism can help me because I know that as a woman, right. Walking the street is something that, you know, I cannot take for granted that I am safe to walk the street. And I know what it has felt like when men have been like, “Oh really. Oh I never really thought about that.” Right. It’s maddening. It’s also terrifying to me that like, seriously, like, you don’t know that? And how has your not knowing that actually helped protect an environment in which I can’t walk down the street. And so I can use that to say, wow that is not the same – but it’s a similar experience around race and how can I attend to that rather than invalidate it and deny it? What does it mean that I haven’t been raised to understand your father’s experience on the street? Right? So how can I draw from what I know that it’s like when men don’t understand that and then use it to be much more present for you and your father. Does that make sense?

Aurora: That does make sense and I also think it makes sense when we think about having women and having this dialogue with women because I think as mothers as daughters, women being challenged there are there are sort of connections right.

So when you talk about people sort of putting themselves in the shoes of a person of color that they know or acquainted to it to one of the biggest questions that Kelly and I ask ourselves – and actually Kelly pushes back on this – is like but how many white people do you know actually know a person of color?

Kelly: Or are close with because if they did then they would care more. But instead – I mean I grew up in a mostly – I don’t want to say mostly – I grew up in a white, white suburb and went to a white, white schools. And we were completely unaware of what your mother was feeling, Aurora. I just love your quote here, Robin, in your reading guide you say “the primary goal for white people working to understand racism is not to learn how racism impacts peoples of color. The primary goal is to recognize how the system of racism shapes our lives how we uphold that system and how we might interrupt it.” That is it. So it’s not by accident that I’m in a mostly white school it’s not by accident that I’m in a white, white neighborhood. None of these things were just like “Poof.” They’re all intentional. They were all mapped out.

Robin: Building relationships I think is a key interruption. And that’s another really important point is that, yes most white people lived segregated lives overwhelmingly. I often say, you know, yeah you work in diverse environment, yeah you live in New York City. Show me your wedding album. Let me look through your wedding photos because that’s who’s really in our lives and in our circles, right. Who sits at your dinner table and not setting your dinner table?

Aurora: And I would offer, who am I seeing on your Instagram feed?

Robin: And that’s key and it still doesn’t free us of racism. Most white people – lives will end as they began: in segregation, cradle to grave with no sense that anything valuable has been lost. That is the deepest message of superiority for me, is that I could go cradle to grave with few if any authentic sustained cross racial relationships and no one ever suggested anything that mattered was missing. So of course challenging that trajectory, building those relationships is a key interruption, but I still perpetrate racism in those relationships. What has built trust for me – why the people of color in my life haven’t given up on me – is all about what happens next when I perpetrate racism and where can we go together when that happens? And if we can’t go there the relationship is probably – one isn’t going to be very authentic. It’s probably not going to last and it certainly wouldn’t be trusting. They trust me because I hang in, I repair and I grow and change from the mistakes. And that’s where white fragility prevents us from growing and changing. It freezes us exactly where we are in our defensiveness. It’s a refusal to grow and change because it’s a refusal to take in and own and take responsibility for and repair what we’ve done.

Kelly: Because I talk about this a lot with friends – people in discussion of race there’s from infancy to collegiate professor and Black women are collegiate professors and most white people are infants in the discussion. So I try to say like imagine like your 3 year old – I have twin 3 year old nephews – imagine if you put them in a college classroom and just let them go free – like what would they do? They would just be tearing up papers running up and down the hall, you know, and the teacher would just be standing there like, “What are you doing?” I think in the conversation of race so much white silence comes up because they’re actually preschool and kindergartners in a college conversation.

Robin: Well I think it grants them a little more – a tad more innocence than I think they have. I think that that’s one piece. What is the impact of playing it quote unquote safe, right. What is the impact of being, “I don’t want to say the wrong thing.” Well how will you find out that what you have to say is the wrong thing if you don’t you know open it up to accountability, right.

Aurora: Bingo.

Robin: it’s a power move.

This is this is where I get my critique of safety and trust, right. So I have an article called “White fragility and the Question of Trust” – I think I actually put a piece of that in the book. Where I just keep hearing white people you know, “We’re going to have across racial dialogue. We’re gonna have a workshop at work,” but we really need to build trust, you know. And I keep asking people, “OK what what do you need to trust will or won’t happen? I show this picture in my sessions of like a conference table in a room just filled with white men and I, you know, kind of walk through, “Imagine you’re the only woman in that group and all the sexism you’d experience and then imagine that, you know, they decide that they need some training on sexism and that you know the training is happening but you know you speak up and you share your experience as a woman and you’re met with silence and, you know, when you leave you ask one of these men that you thought was your friend like why didn’t you say anything in there like why didn’t you back me up. And he looks at you and says, ‘Well I didn’t feel safe.’” Honestly? You’re going to look me in the face as the only woman in that room filled with men and talk to me about safety and who was safe in that room? What does safety mean from a position of social, historical, institutional, cultural power and privilege? You were safe in the room you didn’t want to break with male solidarity and give any of that up and you may not have been comfortable but to use safety when it’s just a conversation about inequality is a perversion of the true direction of historic harm. And that understanding has helped me around challenge white people needing to “feel safe” before they can have a dialogue on racism. I mean, I just call bullshit on that.

Kelly: Right. It’s like reverse racism.

Robin: Yeah it’s just like it’s just such a profound trivialization of who’s really not safe in that room.

So when you know white people enact silence it doesn’t actually matter to me what is informing it. If it is a default, right – in other words, “I’m an introvert. I never talk in groups. Oh I always need to process a little bit longer. I don’t know anything I’ll just listen. I don’t want to dominate.” You give me any rationale that they use, if they’re not thinking strategically like, OK in this moment should I hold back? In this moment would it be important for me to come forward? Like what’s going on in the room? What are the racial and power dynamics at play? What’s my role in it and what would be the most strategic way to engage in this moment? And if I just say well, “You know what? I won’t engage at all.” I’m not paying attention or thinking strategically. What I’m doing is privileging my comfort over oh what I would profess is my integrity.

And there’s probably listeners right now – white listeners – sitting there deciding what they agree with and what they don’t agree with that I’m saying. And so I’m going to offer a question to those listeners who you know are sitting back determining: what qualifies you To disagree with me? Because we’re so incredibly arrogant about this. You know we live such segregated lives.We can get through graduate school never discussing racism. We can be seen as qualified to do anything and never be asked whether we can engage with any nuance in issues of systemic racism. So that’s what I want to push against that complacent arrogance that you are even qualified to disagree with people who have devoted years and years and years and years grappling and making mistakes and taking risks and getting feedback and doing research and et cetera.

Aurora: Thank you Robyn because I think today there was something that you clicked for me as someone who is deeply try to come from a place of love and understanding and open heartedness, but also accountability. It’s about what are you doing today to opt-in to the integrity you have as a human?

Robin: You know and the more you speak up, the more skills you’ll have to do it in a way that moves the conversation forward.

Aurora: Absolutely and I think this is one of the things that Kelly will attest to. She’s like the minute that I woke up and simply said, “I am a racist.” Everything go ten thousand times easier to own.

Robin: It’s so liberating right. It’s just, oh my God. You can stop defending deflecting deny and explaining and so then once you’re just kind of acknowledge that, you can get to work trying to identify what does this look like in my daily life instead of trying to deny.

I just don’t struggle with guilt and, you know, I didn’t choose to be socialized to be racist. I wasn’t given a choice. I do the best I can to take responsibility for the outcome of that socialization. And sometimes when I have an interview people say can you give an example of your white fragility and have to be honest I just don’t have it anymore. Now I can give you examples of my racism, But it’s really rare for me to feel defensive about this stuff.

Kelly: And so to your point you’re the would you say the goal would be to go from white fragility to some sort of white stamina?

Robin: Yes.Stamina, actual humility, curiosity. Change your understanding of what it means to be given feedback on your inevitable and often unaware racist patterns. And then you can begin appreciating that feedback. Recognizing the huge risk it took to be given the feedback and start to see it as a precious moment of trust and respond accordingly.

Kelly: That’s a wonderful opt-in.

Outro:

Aurora: Phew. That was sooo good. Robin Diangelo lays it out! She is so honest and so compassionate — I wish all white people got it like she does.

Kelly: You know we’re trying over here.

Aurora: I see you working.

Kelly: I think I could have talked to her for another four hours.

Aurora: I know me too!

Kelly: We know this was a hard conversation and we’d love to hear from you — find us on Twitter and Facebook @theoptin and let us know what you think about white fragility and how it’s impacted your life.

Aurora: And if you want to read White Fragility and haven’t yet, check out the show notes for links to Robin Dianeglo’s book.

Kelly: Seriously buy it — and white people don’t make your friends of color buy it for you!

Aurora: Music for this episode is by Jordan McCree and The Opt-in is produced by Rachel Ishikawa.

Kelly: Talk soon!

Aurora: Bye.