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Robin DiAngelo: White Fragility and Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism

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Dr. Robin DiAngelo is a former Associate Professor of Multicultural Education (Westfield State University) and currently Affiliate Faculty at the University of Washington. Dr. DiAngelo’s scholarship is in Critical Discourse Analysis and Whiteness Studies. In addition to her academic work, she have been a consultant, mediator, and workplace racial equity trainer for over 20 years. Dr. DiAngelo has numerous publications and books, including “What Does it Mean to be White?: Developing White Racial Literacy." Her first book, co-authored with Özlem Sensoy: "Is Everyone Really Equal: An Introduction to Social Justice Education" received the Critic's Choice Award by the American Educational Studies Association and the Education Award from the American Educational Research Association. Her latest book, "White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism" (Beacon Press) has been on the New York Times Bestseller List since it debuted in June 2018. For more information see her website: www.robindiangelo.com.

Some highlights from Ryan Honeyman’s Conversation with Robin DiAngelo include:

  • 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, etc.) 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.

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LIFT Economy is an impact consulting firm whose mission is to create, model, and share a locally self-reliant economy that works for the benefit of all life. 

Ryan Honeyman is a Partner at LIFT Economy and author of The B Corp Handbook: How to Use Business as a Force for Good (Berrett-Koehler Publishers). You can follow Ryan on Twitter @honeymanconsult or email him ryan@lifteconomy.com.