
White Fragility
Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
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Narrated by:
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Amy Landon
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By:
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Robin DiAngelo
Penguin presents the audiobook edition of White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo.
Anger. Fear. Guilt. Denial. Silence.
These are the ways in which ordinary white people react when it is pointed out to them that they have done or said something that has - unintentionally - caused racial offence or hurt. After, all, a racist is the worst thing a person can be, right? But these reactions only serve to silence people of colour, who cannot give honest feedback to 'liberal' white people lest they provoke a dangerous emotional reaction.
Robin DiAngelo coined the term 'White Fragility' in 2011 to describe this process and is here to show us how it serves to uphold the system of white supremacy. Using knowledge and insight gained over decades of running racial awareness workshops and working on this idea as a Professor of Whiteness Studies, she shows us how we can start having more honest conversations, listen to each other better and react to feedback with grace and humility. It is not enough to simply hold abstract progressive views and condemn the obvious racists on social media - change starts with us all at a practical, granular level, and it is time for all white people to take responsibility for relinquishing their own racial supremacy.
©2019 Robin DiAngelo (P)2019 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...




















Critic reviews
Must read
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Not the best voice actor though. don't let that stop you from opening your world view though!
Not the best voice actor, but book changed my life
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An awesome understanding of white fragility!
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The reader is supposedly a person but sounds like a robot. Most of the time she is understandable, but when she gets to long sentences – especially those with complex sentence structure and parenthesis like this one – the lack of appropriate expression is problematic. I recommend reading in 1.25x speed.
Important read, but reader is robotic
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A must read for all
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good book. bad narration.
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What I take extreme exception to is the attempted redefinition of important terms: racism itself, and white supremacy. The book identifies itself as clearly belonging to the body of academic work that is characterized by the term Anti-Racism, and seeks to redefine racism to specifically refer to an institutional system that serves to maintain white authority. While I will readily acknowledge the need to define such a system as it exists in white-majority countries, it is entirely inappropriate to restrict the meaning of so useful a term, especially to restrict it to so narrow a definition that only has real significance in the United States. This Orwellian imposition of the redefinition of so important and useful a term on the entire anglophone world is entirely unacceptable, and frankly quite galling.
This book is myopically American, it considers no history prior to 1776, apart from one reference to the commencement of slavery in the British American colonies. It paints racism as an evil that can only be committed by white people with little real acknowledgement that the patterns presented as “racist” and supporting of “white supremacy” (by the definitions provided) are behaviours adopted by majority groups in most countries throughout the world, regardless of whether the majority group is white. This points to another key problem with the book: it sees race in only the broadest terms and fails to realise the deeply racist sentiments that can be expressed by one people, one ethnic group, to another even if they happen to share the same or similar skin colour. For example: the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the Armenian genocide from 1915 to 1917. Both events were characterized by deep-seated racist hatred of the other group and resulted in the deaths of millions. By attempting redefine racism to meet the demands of modern diversity considerations in America, must we consign the remainder of the English-speaking world to the absence of this very necessary term to describe events that are unambiguously racist? I would also hasten to remind the reader, that the anglophone world is not restricted to the standard list of English-speaking countries noted in this book (the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa), but also includes numerous countries where people of colour are the majority population such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Ghana. Should we apply the same ideologies in those contexts as well? The author would do well to realise that there is a much broader and more complex world beyond the United States, that doesn’t accept the laughably simple dichotomy of white vs black in race relations.
An Important Message Wrapped in Troubling Ideology
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For those wishing to inform themselves on racism, give this ago but first ready up on Critical Race Theory and it’s problems.
Much love everyone.
Crude assumptions with little empirical research
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Encouraging differences
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