Robin DiAngelo Quotes

We are not post-racial. And in many ways we don't even know how to have a conversation about being post-racial. Until we get out of that old-school way of thinking about race and opportunity and the ability to transcend some of the past of this country, then we're going to be stuck in the 20th-century conversation about race.

Many people are afraid to talk about race because it's so emotionally loaded. We don't have the vocabulary to talk about it. Every day, our vocabulary seems more and more inadequate.

Today's white majority is largely silent about the race question.

The effort we make in trying to get white people to let us alone or invest in us is looking pretty futile…. I am a reluctant separatist

Part of the desire to live in a post-racial world includes the desire not to have to talk about racism, which includes a false perception that if you are talking about race, then you're perpetuating the notion of race. I reject that.

It was definitely during the Obama administration that talking about racism, or calling it out, suddenly seemed taboo. It seemed like talking about race was somehow summoning the evil of racism.

Black people don't know what white people are talking about when they talk about a Sister Souljah moment. I tell them it's the moment you meet a proud, beautiful black woman you can never forget.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again.

It's not surprising to me that in a country born of racial genocide, the issue of race is still an open wound on the American soul. We haven't dealt with it.

Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.

As far as I'm concerned, and this is a big theme of mine, I'm not interested in white people loving me. It's an unrealistic expectation. Black people don't love anybody but themselves.

I think black Americans expect too much from individual black Americans in terms of changing the status quo.

We're not so much anti-black as we are pro-white.

There was nothing postracial about my experience, and there still isn't.

The race question in America has often been about race, but it has equally often been about power.

I think that, as a white person stepping into doing any sort of anti-systematic-racism type of work, asking yourself, 'What is your intention?' needs to happen on a consistent basis. Check yourself. Check yourself. Check yourself, like, constantly.

It really bothers me when people say we live in a postracial America.

I say stupid white men are always the problem. That's never going to change.

Our communities are being destroyed by racial tension - and we're too polite to talk about it.

There's a long tradition of black folks pleading with white people. It's a tradition that emerges from political necessity, so I get it; I'm just not very interested in it.

Feminists must denounce the use of white insecurity - whether in relation to white womanhood, white neighborhoods, white politics, or white wealth - to justify the brutal assaults against black people of all genders.

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.

Much of America is petrified to bring up race, especially in public forums - the media, in particular.

If you don't address race, then people are like, 'Why don't you talk about the elephant in the room?' But you have to do it right. It can't be gimmicky.