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

Author’s Note-Chapter 1

Reading Check

1. Identity politics and the complexity of racial identities (Author’s Note)

2. The author (Introduction)

3. To identify themselves as white (Chapter 1)

Short-Answer

1. White fragility refers to the difficulty white people have when handling racial stress. It arises when a white person’s comfort is challenged by even “the mere suggestion that being white has meaning” (2) (Introduction)

2. That they should challenge themselves to have an internal dialogue about that discomfort because the only way to work against white fragility is to build “capacity to sustain the discomfort of not knowing” (14) (Chapter 1)

3. DiAngelo addresses white people in the text, which is important since she is actively choosing to disrupt the racial comfort that most white people experience living in a white supremacist society like that of the United States. Disrupting this comfort, she potentially hopes to undo and challenge (Chapter 1)

Chapters 2-4

Reading Check

1. White superiority (Chapter 2)

2. Discrimination (Chapter 2)

3. Color-blind racism, aversive racism, and cultural racism (Chapter 3)

4. Adaptive racism and the idea that race is a social construct (

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