Robin DiAngelo Quotes

We don't know anything about racism. We've never experienced it. If words can make a difference in your life for seven minutes, how would it affect you if you heard this every day of your life?

I wish Americans understood that race is a social construct, even if we don't want it to be.

As much as I'd love to believe that we are 'post-racial' - an idea that really gained traction after the election of Barack Obama in 2008 - I can never escape the fact that in the world I am perceived as a 'black man' and, in certain parts of the world, as a 'black gay man.'

Race is still real and you got to recognize it.

No one who's white thinks he's innocent. No one who's black thinks he's guilty.

My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong.

If faux liberal white guys want to support and defend Obama, by all means please do so. But I would suggest they try to limit that support to matters of policy and not perspectives on race.

If you're black in America, race is a factor in your life. Start with that assumption.

Liberal whites are the greatest enemy of African Americans.

I don't think people in America understand race, and how deep the hooks of whiteness there are in our consciousness.

If you’re talking about American history, you’re talking about race.

Racial identity is simply forbidden to whites in America and across the entire Western world. Black children today are hammered with the idea of racial identity and pride, yet racial pride in whites constitutes a grave evil.

Normally, 'black responsibility' is a forbidden phrase for a black leader -- not because blacks reject responsibility, but because even the idea of black responsibility weakens moral leverage over whites.

White America's live under this accusation that they're racist, they need to prove that they're not racist. In order to prove that you're not racist, you need to take over the fate of black people and say, go with us, we'll engineer you into the future, we'll engineer you into equality.

I'm a black man in the United States, and there's no two ways about that. I have a shared common experience with other black men, and through that, there's an automatic understanding.

I don't think any of us that are white can ever fully understand what it's like to be a black person in America today.

Disguising your own origins is a deeply American impulse, but that doesn't make it any less compromising. The way I live my life is to try to foreground the tensions and paradoxes of being a white person who's interested in racial justice and reconciliation, rather than disguise or obliterate them.

I wanted people to begin dialogue about racism, about colorism. I wanted people to really become honest about our beliefs, about racism and how it exists in America today.

I resent that I have to prove that I'm black.

There are not grades of racism. There's racism.

So many white people don't want to talk about race; it's uncomfortable. Many reason that slavery happened more than a century ago, and people alive today had nothing to do with it. But the particulars of these stories, from slavery to segregation to civil rights and mass incarceration, are at the marrow of life in America today.

We need to make sure that we have an honest, honest conversation and that we engage honest practices around how racism operates in this country. It's not just about people being mean to each other.

I've seen and always been extremely aware of racism... casual racism, serious racism... all of that.

Many white people sense that they are being blamed for the sins of white slave owners and imperialists merely through some lineage of ethnicity. Activists' constant stress on white privilege can lead to an unhealthy defensive posture of white victimhood.

The biggest thing is we need to stop acting like racism don't exist.