Robin DiAngelo Quotes
White fragility doesn't always manifest in overt ways; silence and withdrawal are also functions of fragility.
DiAngelo, Robin. White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Beacon Press, 2018.
Reconstruction was the period in the South after the Civil War. The change that emancipation brought to the white South was traumatic, and there was a constant struggle between those who wanted the Blacks to be integrated into Southern Society—and those Southerners who wanted to create a society that would be as close to slavery as possible, So the Klu Klux Klan and other terrorist organizations formed and with lynching and other intimidation, much of the initial progress of Reconstruction was rolled back and did not get reinstated until the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed in 1964.
After Lyndon Johnson led the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Republican’s reached out to the Southern Racists who felt betrayed by the Democratic Party, and their Southern Strategy succeeded so that the overt racists of the nation became Republicans instead of Democrats. At the same time, liberal Republicans felt estranged from the “party of Lincoln” and over the years the Republicans drive out the liberals and then the moderates. The racists and white Supremacists became more and more influential in setting the policies, norms and language of the party and soon White identity code phrases became part of much of the Republican rhetoric. This offended liberals, and Blacks. The Republican rhetoric became more and more extreme in order to get enough votes from white males and some whit females while that demographic was shrinking as a percentage of the U. S. population. Roy felt that this made for an enthusiastic and rabid base, but the Republicans could no longer produce a majority coalition, and had one victory of the presidency with only George W. Bush who actually last the popular vote but won in the Electoral College.
Robin Jeanne DiAngelo is an American author, consultant, and facilitator working in the fields of critical discourse analysis and whiteness studies. She formerly served as a tenured professor of multicultural education at Westfield State University and is currently an Affiliate Associate Professor of Education at the University of Washington. She is known for her work pertaining to "white fragility", an expression she coined in 2011 and explored further in a 2018 book titled White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.
