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Chapter 5
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in White Fragility, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
White Fragility
White Supremacy
Racism and the Good/Bad Binary
Individualism, Objectivity, and Meritocracy
Summary
Analysis
Talking about white people as a group is important because it interrupts individualism. But talking about people of color as a group can be problematic because it collapses many racial groups into one generic category. This chapter, DiAngelo says, will explore anti-Black sentiment specifically. These feelings arise in white people when passing Black strangers on the streets, seeing stereotypical depictions in the media, and hearing warnings and jokes between white people.
This anti-Black sentiment has roots in white supremacy, as maintaining white supremacy—the belief that white people are superior and the practices that stem from that belief—is contingent on the belief that other groups are inferior. The instances cited here are examples of how this manifests today.
Themes
Whiteness has always been predicated on Blackness—creating an “inferior” Black race simultaneously created the “superior” white race. Scholars have argued that white people project onto Black people the aspects that they don’t want to own in themselves: white masters of slaves described them as lazy, even as they did backbreaking work. Today, white people often depict Black people as dangerous, despite the fact that white people have perpetrated more violence against Black people.
Not only do white people create the narrative of Black people as an “inferior” race, but they also create and control the narratives that reinforce that idea, like the idea that Black people are lazy or dangerous despite the work Black people did as slaves or the violence that white people commit.
Themes
White resentment endures about affirmative action. Black people have been discriminated against in hiring since the end of slavery. In the late 1960s, affirmative action was instituted to remedy this discrimination. There is a lot of misinformation about affirmative action: people commonly believe that Black people are given preferential treatment in hiring and that a specific number of people of color must be hired to fill a quota. But these beliefs are untrue: affirmative action is a tool to ensure that quality minority candidates are given the same employment opportunities, and there are no quotas.
The misinformation about affirmative action is another example of how white people shape narratives that benefit white supremacy. They spread the myth that affirmative action counters ideas of meritocracy—believing that it upends the idea that the most qualified person for the job should be hired. In reality, affirmative action tries to prevent qualified minority candidates from experiencing discrimination.
Themes
Ironically, white women have been affirmative action’s greatest beneficiaries. No employer is required to hire an unqualified person of color, but employers (meaning state and governmental agencies; affirmative action doesn’t apply to private companies) must be able to articulate why they didn’t hire a qualified person of color. Affirmative action has been systematically chipped away at, and African Americans continue to be the most underrepresented group at the organizational leadership level. And yet white people still carry outrage at how unfair affirmative action has been to them.
That white women have been the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action shows that white people’s anger over affirmative action is misplaced. This is another example of white fragility, as white people use their outrage over the policy to deflect from white supremacy, racism, and the discrimination people of color continue to experience in hiring.
Themes
Get the entire White Fragility LitChart as a printable PDF.
Other research illustrates white people’s disdain for African American people, from the school-to-prison pipeline, to mass incarceration, to white flight. One can see anti-Black sentiment in rejoinders to Black Lives Matter, the justification of brutality towards Black children and adults, and the comparison of the “alt-right” movement with the Black Panther Party. One can see it in how society buries the trauma Black people have experienced historically by dehumanizing Black people. One sees it in the constant discussion of the white working class in the 2016 presidential election with no concern for the Black working class, who remain on the bottom of every social and economic measure.
These are more examples of how white supremacy is both integral to the United States’ policies, its social landscape, and its narratives. In terms of the school-to-prison pipeline and mass incarceration, disciplinary policies in schools criminalize students of color, which ultimately funnels them to prison because law enforcement is already a part of their lives. Mass incarceration is a system whereby prisons and the government benefits from those in prison—predominantly minorities—through unpaid labor done in the prisons. The narratives cited here include the ideas that violence, mistreatment, or ignoring Black people is justified.
Themes
DiAngelo believes that white people fundamentally hate Blackness because it reminds them that they are capable and guilty of perpetrating harm. White people thus justify Black people’s treatment through the beliefs that Black people are inherently undeserving. One sees this in the indignation at NFL players who kneel during the national anthem. One sees it in the outrage of the crowd of white progressives at a Bernie Sanders rally when they were asked to grant four and a half minutes of silence to honor Michael Brown, an unarmed black man shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri.
Again, the book illustrates how white people perpetuate white supremacy even to this day, using widely known examples like the kneeling NFL players to illustrate how the outrage against them is misdirected white supremacy. Noting the Bernie Sanders rally is particularly striking because it shows that even white people who consider themselves progressive can still uphold white supremacy.
Themes
White people also use Black people to feel warm-hearted and noble, as in the “white savior narrative”—the idea that white people can “save” Black people through their kindness and generosity. DiAngelo uses the example of The Blind Side, a hugely popular movie from 2009. The film is based on the true story of the Tuohy family, who rescued Michael Oher from poverty and helped him go on to become an NFL player.
The Blind Side is an example of how narratives based in white supremacy can largely go unnoticed and even celebrated in the culture, but further inspection illustrates that these narratives are problematic and reinforce negative stereotypes.
Themes
Although the movie was popular with white audiences, all of the Black characters reinforce negative racial stereotypes: Oher as a childlike gentle giant in poverty, his drug-addicted single mother with children from unknown fathers, an incompetent welfare worker, and the gang members in Oher’s crime-ridden neighborhood. The movie makes it clear that the only way Oher can be saved is through a white family’s benevolence and bravery. It further emphasizes that Oher is lacking in intellectual abilities, while his talent derives from “protective instinct.”
Each of these points illustrate how the film reinforces Black people’s negative stereotypes, like drug use or poverty, contrasted with the Tuohys’ affluence and benevolence. The specific reference to “protective instinct,” is also notable, because while it seems outwardly positive, it reinforces that Oher is only good at something instinctual while he lacks intelligence or other capabilities.
Themes
The film, told from the white perspective, reinforces the idea that white people are Black people’s saviors, and that individual Black people can overcome their circumstances with white people’s help. It also suggests that Black neighborhoods are inherently dangerous and criminal, and that virtually all Black people are poor, incompetent, and unqualified. The fact that the Tuohy’s are the “good whites” who deal with individual bad white people they encounter in other places also reinforces the good/bad binary.
In addition to the film’s stereotypical narratives, it also reinforces the good/bad binary that DiAngelo has addressed throughout the book. The Tuohys are “good whites” who are not racist because of their generosity and willingness to take Oher into their home. The other white people who criticize or judge the Tuohys, by contrast, are bad, immoral people. But this reinforces the false idea that only bad people can be racist.
Themes
