In a discussion titled, “Talking About Race,” that took place on Monday at the American Council on Education, Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum and Dr. Robin DiAngelo said that not enough is being done on campuses to push a needed dialogue on this topic forward.
Drs. Robin DiAngelo and Beverly Daniel Tatum engage in a discussion with Lorelle Espinosa, Vice President of Research at ACE.
“When you graduate from an institution of higher learning, you are technically certified as highly educated, and yet you can graduate from virtually any program in this country with absolutely no ability whatsoever to engage with any complexity and nuance in conversations about race,” said DiAngelo, who is the author of White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People to Talk About Racism. “And you can be seen as qualified to teach and lead with no ability to engage with nuance or complexity. I think we need to see that as you’re not qualified to teach or lead.”
DiAngelo, who is an associate professor of education at the University of Washington said that White fragility is commonplace in society, particularly higher education.
“When I first coined that term White fragility, I was trying to put language to a really, really familiar phenomena and that is, how defensive we White people get whenever our positions, our advantages or our racial assumptions are challenged,” she said. “I think it’s a very, very familiar response. So I wanted to name it and offer my theory, if you will, of how we come to be so defensive and how it actually functions to protect the racial hierarchy.”
DiAngelo said that White fragility functions as an “everyday White bullying,” making it miserable and difficult for people of color to talk to them about racist patterns and behavior.
