Stop over-smiling and over-explaining: Robin DiAngelo’s lessons for ‘nice’ racists

It’s a summery Saturday in America’s capital and the afternoon light is streaming through my living-room windows. At home in my apartment in Washington, DC, I open my laptop and log onto Zoom. Eighteen strangers scattered across the US – in Massachusetts, Arizona, Oregon and California – have also joined the call. One man is dialling in all the way from Brazil. We’re here to spend the next three hours together on a shared mission: to learn how to be less racist.

The online workshop costs $US200 ($282) and is titled, “Nice is Not Enough: Anti-Racist Practice for White People”. Victoria Santos, a racial equity and wellness advocate, welcomes us to the event and asks us to begin with a moment of silence. It’s important to centre our bodies, she says, before plunging into what can be confronting material. Originally from the Dominican Republic, Santos wears her hair in dreadlocks and has a beaming smile. She is the only black person on the call.

She quickly introduces the event’s star speaker, her “dear friend” Robin DiAngelo. “My heart is wide open,” Santos says. “I feel like it’s weeping because I have so much love for her for undertaking this work. And this work is not easy. Robin, love, show your face.”

As requested, DiAngelo pops up on the screen. If you were looking to cast someone to play a therapist in a prestige television drama, she would fit the role perfectly. DiAngelo, a 65-year-old white woman, is wearing glasses and a black turtleneck-style shirt. Her curly hair, until recently brown, is defiantly grey.

She speaks in a soothing, almost hypnotic, voice and is sitting in front of a wall of books. Displayed prominently on the shelf behind her is White Fragility, the book that transformed DiAngelo from a relatively obscure education professor at the University of Washington into America’s most prominent and polarising anti-racism guru. White Fragility sold strongly when it was released in 2018, but its popularity exploded following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020. The sight of a white police officer pressing his knee into a black man’s neck for almost 10 minutes prompted white Americans to engage in an unprecedented bout of introspection about their identity. They were looking for answers, and millions turned to DiAngelo to provide them.

White Fragility – subtitled “Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism” – sold 437,289 copies in the US between May and June in 2020, according to a Forbes analysis. That was a staggering 2300 per cent increase on the previous two months, a surge that propelled it to the top spot on The New York Times bestseller list. In total, the book has sold an estimated two million copies worldwide in all formats, making it a rare blockbuster publishing phenomenon.

Nearly two years later, the topic of how to talk about race remains at the centre of American discourse, regularly tripping up the country’s best-known media figures. The View host Whoopi Goldberg was recently suspended for saying the Holocaust was not “about race”, while podcasting phenomenon Joe Rogan apologised for using the N-word on his show.

DiAngelo’s emergence as America’s high priestess of anti-racism boosted her profile and swelled her bank balance. She appeared as a guest on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. The Democratic Party invited her to speak to its House of Representatives caucus for insights on race relations. Corporate giants like Amazon and Unilever hired her to educate their employees about systemic racism and white privilege, as did the University of Sydney and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

It also made her a magnet for scorn. To her critics, DiAngelo is the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with the ultra-woke, identity politics-obsessed modern Left. Writing in The Atlantic, John McWhorter, a black linguistics professor at Columbia University, blasted White Fragility as “a racist tract” that “diminishes black people in the name of dignifying us”. Journalist Matt Taibbi, writing on Substack, accused DiAngelo of “pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom”. White Fragility, he wrote, may be “the dumbest book ever written”.

In July 2021, DiAngelo followed up White Fragility with a sequel-of-sorts, titled Nice Racism. The book homes in on a provocative thesis: that left-leaning, supposedly tolerant white people do the most daily harm to people of colour, not overt racists. “I’m assuming everyone on this call is a progressive white person, and what I mean by that is that you believe deeply in racial justice,” DiAngelo tells the group. “Yet we perpetrate racial harm.”

White progressives may do this by not bothering to learn how to pronounce unfamiliar names. Or by marvelling at a black person’s afro or braided hair. Maybe they enjoy films about racism whose heroes are “white saviours”.

Some well-meaning white people, DiAngelo says, are guilty of “over-smiling” when they encounter black people in public places like the supermarket. “Over-smiling allows white people to mask an anti-blackness that is foundational to our very existence as white,” she writes in Nice Racism.

DiAngelo says that all people not perceived as white – including Asians, Indigenous people and Hispanics – experience racism. But most of her work focuses on interactions across the white-black racial divide. She believes white people harbour a particularly profound sense of internalised superiority about black people, reflecting their status as the “ultimate racial other”.

DiAngelo asks us to write a brief description of ourselves – including our racial identity – in the Zoom chat box. Everyone identifies as white (one woman also identifies as Hispanic, and a man as Native American) with middle-aged women especially well-represented. As a naturally wary journalist, I suspect I’m the most sceptical member of the group. To fully embrace DiAngelo’s worldview, you have to do more than accept that racism exists and is a significant force in society. You have to believe that racism is everywhere, circulating at all times.

On her website, DiAngelo says the core tenets of her approach include that “racism is the foundation of Western society” and “the question is not if racism is at play, but how is it at play” in our social interactions. These strike me as remarkably sweeping, even simplistic, assertions. But I try to approach the session with an open mind, curious about what will unfold. I wonder if this will be simply an exercise in self-flagellation for guilty white people – or something more useful.

DiAngelo is aware some may regard it as problematic that she, rather than a person of colour, is leading such a session. She says her point of difference is that she offers “an insider’s perspective” on whiteness. Her goal is to blow the whistle on the ways white people – even those with the best intentions – manifest racism in their day-to-day lives.

DiAngelo begins with a story from her own life. She was in her early 30s and visiting San Francisco with her partner. They went out to dinner with some of her partner’s friends. DiAngelo had never met them before, and when she arrived at the restaurant she discovered they were black.

“At that point in my life I didn’t really know any black people,” she tells us. “I was rarely around black people. I was immediately very excited. I felt a deep urgency to let them know that I was not racist. I proceeded to tell them how
racist my family was. I told them every ignorant comment, every joke that I could ever remember my family making, followed by, ‘Can you believe they said that?’ ” Although her partner’s friends looked uncomfortable, DiAngelo forged ahead with the embarrassing stories about her racist family.

It’s clear what DiAngelo is doing: she’s telling an unflattering story to humanise herself and help the rest of us feel comfortable exposing our own vulnerabilities. But I feel my initial scepticism hardening. I’ve seen white people behave awkwardly around darker-skinned people by, for example, immediately asking them which country they come from. DiAngelo’s behaviour at the dinner strikes me as far more extreme and eccentric. I wonder how many white people would act so anxiously when meeting people of a different race for the first time.

But for DiAngelo, the story demonstrates one of the common “moves” white people often deploy when meeting people of colour: rushing to prove they are not racist. “I was and am a classic white progressive,” she tells the group. “I thought I was showing them that. What I was doing was manifesting nice racism.”

Academic Robin DiAngelo has been accused of “pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom”.Credit: Djeneba Aduayom/AUGUST/Raven & Snow

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A week before the workshop, I speak to Robin DiAngelo over Zoom from her home in Seattle, Washington. Since the coronavirus pandemic began, she’s taken to doing almost all her workshops and media interviews online. Because of the hostile reaction her work has attracted, I was prepared for her to be on guard and ultra-serious. It turns out she is a relaxed and engaging interlocutor with a self-deprecating sense of humour (“I’m a vegetarian, I’m a leftie,” she says with a knowing glint in her eye at one point during our conversation).

DiAngelo chooses her words carefully but doesn’t shy away from making bold, controversial statements. For example, she commonly says in her lectures that all white people are racist. “It seems to trigger an explosion of white fragility, so I have to be diplomatic and strategic about it,” she says. By saying all white people are racist, she doesn’t mean that all white people harbour a conscious dislike of people of colour and want to hurt them. What she means is that “all white people have a racist worldview, have absorbed racist ideology, and benefit from and collude in a racist system – especially if they are not actively challenging it”.

DiAngelo lives with her husband, Jason, in a three-bedroom bungalow in Seattle, purchased before White Fragility became a bestseller. Life wasn’t
always so stable and comfortable. DiAngelo grew up in San Jose, California, in a family she describes as desperately poor and dysfunctional. Her father was a construction worker and mother a switchboard operator. They divorced when DiAngelo was two, and her mother began raising her and her two sisters alone.

What she means is that “all white people have a racist worldview, have absorbed racist ideology, and benefit from and collude in a racist system – especially if they are not actively challenging it”.

They were evicted frequently, forcing them to move between run-down rental properties four to five times a year. Sometimes the only thing to eat at home was oatmeal. DiAngelo says that if any of the children got sick, her mother would beat them because she could not afford to take them to the doctor. In fourth grade, DiAngelo recalls a teacher embarrassing her by holding up her hands to her classmates as an example of poor hygiene.

“I have never understood people who say, ‘We were poor but we didn’t know it because we had lots of love,’ ” DiAngelo writes in Nice Racism. “The stress of poverty made my household much more chaotic than loving.” But as bad as things were, she knew they could be worse. “I was acutely aware that I was poor, that I was dirty, that I was not normal, and that there was something ‘wrong’ with me,” she writes. “But I also knew that I was not black. We were at the lower rungs of society, but there was always someone on the periphery, just below us.”

No one in DiAngelo’s family had ever been to college, and the idea of getting a degree was not on her radar. After finishing high school, she waited tables and gave birth to a daughter. Then, frustrated with life as a 30-year-old single mother, she enrolled in a bachelor of arts, majoring in history and sociology. It turned out she was a star student, and she graduated from the University of Seattle as class valedictorian. DiAngelo says her life story exemplifies the concept of white privilege: she was able to transcend her working-class identity in a way people of colour cannot when it comes to their race.

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In the 1990s, Washington’s state government was successfully sued for racial discrimination, leading the federal government to mandate 16 hours of racial bias education for the state’s public servants. This led to a boom in demand for diversity trainers, and DiAngelo became one.

Such training has become even more common since then, despite its effectiveness being highly disputed. In a 2018 paper summarising the academic research into diversity training, sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev found that “hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s suggest that anti-bias training does not reduce bias, alter behaviour or change the workplace”. Any positive effects from such training tended to dissipate within a few days, they found. One likely reason diversity training fails, Dobbin and Kalev argued, is that people tend to react negatively to overt attempts to control their thoughts and behaviour.

DiAngelo took an entirely different lesson away from the resistance she encountered in the workshops she was conducting. “It was the most profound learning experience of my life,” she tells me. “Most white people avoid talking about racism at all costs. And here I was walking into rooms of mostly white people every day, side-by-side with people of colour, to try to talk about racism. The hostility and the meanness we encountered was stunning and became utterly predictable.”

She found that many workshop participants would deploy what she calls a range of “defensive moves” when forced to reflect on their white identity. They would lash out in anger, become suddenly silent or burst into tears. Following a session in which the participants were especially adversarial, DiAngelo stumbled across a phrase to describe what she had experienced. “It came out of my mouth in a moment of frustration, ‘Oh my god, this white fragility.’ ”

In 2011, she outlined the concept in an article for the International Journal of Critical Pedagogy. Like most academic articles, she assumed it would be read only by graduate students and university professors. That’s what happened until, three years later, a culture writer at The Stranger, a Seattle newspaper, referenced white fragility in a piece exploring a controversy over white actors performing in The Mikado, the Gilbert and Sullivan musical set in Japan.

DiAngelo’s concept suddenly went viral, jumping from academia to the mainstream and eventually landing her a book deal. “It exploded worldwide,” she says. “I got emails from people around the world saying I had put language to something they’d either experienced or something they recognised they had done.”

That’s the gratifying part of her work. The most hurtful is the often vituperative response it attracts. “I am well aware that this is the most charged topic of our society, and anybody who is public and visible on this topic is going to get a reaction,” she says. “But so much of what’s out there about me is personal. It’s been intense to a degree I did not expect.”

In his Atlantic review of White Fragility, John McWhorter argues that the book infantilises black people by suggesting they are so exquisitely sensitive that white people must constantly be on guard about what they do or say. Other critics argue that DiAngelo’s intense focus on interpersonal dynamics is a mostly trivial distraction from the major policy changes on education, housing and policing needed to reduce racial inequality. Most hurtful, DiAngelo says, is the common implication that she is an opportunistic “grifter” cynically profiting off white guilt and black disadvantage.

A piece in 2020 in The Washington Free Beacon, “The Wages of Woke: How Robin DiAngelo got rich peddling ’white fragility′ ”, exemplifies the genre.
DiAngelo’s success has certainly brought financial benefits. In 2018 her average speaking fee was $US6200; by 2020 that had risen to $US14,000. She can earn significantly more than that for a few hours of work. The speaking agency that represents her puts her going rate for a keynote speech at $US30,000 to $US40,000. DiAngelo points out she could never have foreseen the demand for her work when she began toiling away in the then unglamorous field of whiteness studies in the 1990s. As well as donating 15 per cent of her income to racial justice charities, DiAngelo conducts free and reduced rate workshops for groups she believes in – like the one I participate in.

DiAngelo says the booing of Sydney Swans star Adam Goodes (above) out of the AFL hit the raw nerve of white fragility – and the footballer paid the price.Credit: Getty Images

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Back in the workshop, DiAngelo asks us to abandon an idea she says white people cherish. Rather than unique individuals, she wants us to see ourselves as members of a white collective. This doesn’t come naturally, she says.

“When you want a white fragility meltdown, start generalising about white people,” she says. Having found that white people recoil from sweeping statements based on their race, DiAngelo makes a point of doing so whenever possible. The second chapter of Nice Racism is titled, “Why it’s OK To Generalize About White People.”

DiAngelo has found this tactic is essential in stopping white people from dismissing racism as someone else’s problem. “I have noticed a pattern among white people which is, ‘If there is any escape hatch on this topic we will take it,’ ” she tells me. One of the hatches white people commonly try to escape through is that they are not from the US and, therefore, what she is saying does not apply to them. “When I travel I will often hear, ‘It’s different here,’ ” she says. “Of course there are differences, but the overall dynamics are the same. It’s on white people outside the United States to do the work and say, ‘How do I translate this?’ rather than, ‘How do I reject this?’ ”

I ask DiAngelo whether anything particularly struck her during a 2018 trip to Australia to promote White Fragility. “Oh yes,” she says, her eyes widening. In many ways, she found Australia’s discourse on race more defensive and less advanced than in the US. “The conversation has been going so much longer here in an open way,” she says of the United States. “The phenomenon can be even more intense in countries that don’t talk about it at all in pretty much any context. There’s less skill, there’s less emotional capacity and more taboos. That all functions to protect systemic racism.”

“When I travel I will often hear, ‘It’s different here,’ ” she says. “Of course there are differences, but the overall dynamics are the same.”

As DiAngelo is talking, several textbook examples of Australian white fragility start surfacing in my mind. How better to describe the sustained booing Sydney Swans AFL star Adam Goodes experienced in 2013 when he protested against a 13-year-old female spectator calling him an “ape” during a game at the MCG? Or the outrage that ensued when, during the AFL’s annual Indigenous round in 2015, he celebrated a goal by miming throwing a spear? I also think of the vitriol Sudanese-born former ABC presenter Yassmin Abdel-Magied suffered when she posted the message “LEST. WE. FORGET. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine ...)” on her Facebook page on Anzac Day in 2017. Many of the commentators who attacked her now rail against the evils of “cancel culture” and claim to be passionate defenders of free speech.

The hounding of former ABC presenter Yassmin Abdel-Magied out of the country could be considered a textbook example of Australian “white fragility”. Credit: Kristoffer Paulsen

Exhausted by the abuse from fans, Goodes quit the game in 2015. In late 2017, Abdel-Magied, who received death threats after her Anzac Day post, fled the country for London because she no longer felt safe in Australia. They hit the raw nerve of white fragility and paid the price.

In my interview with Robin DiAngelo, I find myself recounting a performance by comedian Chris Lilley at the 2006 Logie Awards. Lilley was playing his character Ricky Wong, the Chinese-born physics student and amateur musical theatre performer from his acclaimed series We Can Be Heroes. Wong, in turn, was performing the lead role of Walkabout Man in Indigeredoo: The Musical while wearing traditional Aboriginal body paint, a red loincloth and a dreadlock wig.

Footage on YouTube shows the celebrities in the crowd laughing uproariously. As the song builds to a crescendo, Olympic gold medallist Cathy Freeman joins the stage. Though neither she nor Lilley may have thought of it this way, she serves as a powerful shield against accusations of racism. After all, if Cathy Freeman is in on the joke, then why should white people be offended by the performance?

DiAngelo makes a living speaking about race. But the story of a white man doing yellow face doing black face on national television renders her momentarily speechless.

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As the workshop approaches its end, DiAngelo asks us to reflect on how race has shaped our lives as white people. “How racially diverse was your neighbourhood growing up?” she begins. “What was it like where the black people lived and how did you know?” Then: “Did your parents have a significant number of black friends? Did they have any black friends?” The questions keep coming: “If you had a wedding and you showed me your album, would I see how integrated your friendship circle is? How often have you been to a funeral that, if it wasn’t all white, was pretty close?”

The cascade of questions is designed to unearth how lily-white our lived experiences have been. “Most of us go cradle to grave in segregation – and from black people in particular – with no sense that anything of value has been lost or is missing,” DiAngelo says.

In my experience, there’s a lot of truth to this. When I moved to New York in 2017, I was struck by how rigidly segregated the supposed cultural melting pot is. I lived in Morningside Heights, home to rarefied Columbia University. Morningside Heights borders the historically significant black neighbourhood of Harlem, but the two neighbourhoods felt like different universes. On the Columbia campus, it was rare to see black students or professors (the only black student in my master’s program was an international student from Kenya). And in racially diverse Washington, DC, it’s noticeable that the city’s bars and restaurants tend to be dominated by either white or black customers.

This is one reason why DiAngelo does not believe that young white people today are any less racist than previous generations. While they may hold progressive views on race and live in multicultural cities, she says most have only superficial relationships with people of colour. “Those who actually have cross-racial friendships tend to have relationships that are conditional,” she writes in Nice Racism. “Their friends of colour must tolerate constant teasing or be dismissed as angry and ‘not fun’ and then abandoned.”

This strikes me as a stunningly broad and bleak generalisation, one that ignores the multitude of healthy cross-racial friendships and romantic relationships you’ll find in countries like the US and Australia. Most young people of colour I know in both countries would certainly not tolerate “constant teasing” by their white friends about their ethnicity.

DiAngelo separates us into small groups for private discussions on what we learnt in the questionnaire. A middle-aged woman in my group says she found herself feeling increasingly uncomfortable as she reflected on how white her social circle is. “Okay, I get it, I get it, shut up,” she says she wanted to tell DiAngelo. A woman in her late 20s is also having an intense emotional reaction to the session. “I believe my parents did the best they could, but I grew up in a place where maybe two people in my whole school were black,” she says. “I didn’t have a black teacher until I went to college. I feel so much shame and I don’t know what to do.”

A third woman, likely aged in her 60s, grew up in racially diverse Los Angeles but now lives in overwhelmingly white Portland, Oregon and feels something significant is missing from her life. A passionate musician, she is considering attending a gospel church to meet black people but is wary of causing offence. The workshop has made them more conscious of their own racial blind spots, but unsure about exactly what to do about them.

As if on cue, DiAngelo turns to solutions – a topic she admits she approaches warily. “The number one question I get is, ‘What do I do?’ ” she says of her workshop participants. “Before I answer that, my question back is, ‘How have you managed to be a fully functioning adult and not know what to do about racism in 2021?’ ” She certainly doesn’t want guilty white people to rush out and try to befriend the first black person they meet. She advises us to consider going out of our comfort zones by joining sporting or cultural groups with significant numbers of non-white members. Even better, we could become active in racial justice organisations.

In Nice Racism, she also recommends that white people meet regularly with an “accountability partner of colour” – a non-white person who can challenge them on any problematic behaviour. Accountability partners should be paid for their time, she recommends, just as one would a professional counsellor.

As the workshop ends, anyone wanting to extend their anti-racist education is invited to join an upcoming three-day “virtual retreat” with DiAngelo. The cost: $US550. The academic literature says a single training session will not transform people’s views on race, and DiAngelo agrees. “This is an ongoing and lifelong process,” she says. “It’s never done. You’re never going to be finished.”

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