The Birdcage Symbol Analysis

The birdcage represents interlocking forms of oppression and white people’s ignorance of that oppression. Throughout White Fragility, DiAngelo emphasizes that people of color face different forms of economic and social barriers, like segregation, negative stereotypes in the media, and hiring discrimination. These different forms of oppression interlock like the bars of a birdcage, and they serve to reinforce racism and keep people of color on the bottom of the racial hierarchy like a bird in a cage. This is especially true of the Black working class, who remain “on the bottom of every social and economic measure.”

Borrowing the birdcage analogy from scholar Marilyn Frye, DiAngelo demonstrates that if a person is standing too close to the cage, they might not have a full view of the cage and might believe that taken individually, the bars do not actually impede the bird. But stepping back, a person can see that the bird cannot escape the cage. Similarly, she believes that white people do not have a full view of the “cage” of white supremacy and racism, and she argues that they must take a step back and understand the system as a whole in order to see how racism impacts people of color’s lives on a societal level, not just on an individual one.