Seeing Whiteness

Long before the widespread success of the 2018 book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism, Robin DiAngelo was breaking with white solidarity and writing, speaking, and teaching on the relationship among white supremacy, structural racism, and white identity. In this volume, DiAngelo has gathered a selection of her groundbreaking works leading up to White Fragility. Speaking as a white person to her fellow white people, she seamlessly blends the personal with the political. The result is an engaging and provocative analysis of the sociopolitical forces of race that shape our lives. Taking up familiar ideologies such as individualism and meritocracy, she breaks down how these concepts function to protect and obscure structural racism. Collectively, these essays show how racism infuses our society and its institutions; it is a system that goes well beyond individual intentions or conscious acts of meanness. By changing the question from if we are part of systemic racism to how each of us play a part, DiAngelo’s body of work provides a transformative framework for white identity and antiracist action.

Featured Essays:

Chapter 1: My Class Didn’t Trump My Race: Using Oppression to Face Privilege

Chapter 2: Why Can’t We All Just Be Individuals?

Chapter 3: My Feelings Are Not About You: Personal Experience as a Move of Whiteness (with David Allen)

Chapter 4: Getting Slammed: White Depictions of Race Dialogues as Arenas of Violence (with Özlem Sensoy)

Chapter 5: Nothing to Add: A Challenge to White Silence in Racial Discussions

Chapter 6: White Fragility

Chapter 7: White Fragility Accessible

Chapter 8: “We Put It in Terms of “Not-Nice”: White Antiracists and Parenting (with Sarah Matlock)

Chapter 9: Respect Differences? Challenging the Common Guidelines in Social Justice Education

Chapter 10: Leaning In: A Student’s Guide to Engaging Constructively With Social Justice Content (with Özlem Sensoy)

Chapter 11: Showing What We Tell (with Darlene Flynn)

Chapter 12: “We Are All For Diversity, But…”: How Faculty Hiring Committees Reproduce Whiteness and Practical Suggestions for How They Can Change (with Özlem Sensoy)

Robin DiAngelo is an affiliate associate professor of education at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her publications include Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, Second Edition (with Özlem Sensoy), which received book awards from both the American Educational Studies Association and the Society of Professors of Education.

Contents (Tentative)

Foreword

Introduction

1. My Class Didn’t Trump My Race: Using Oppression to Face Privilege Multicultural Perspectives, 2006

2. Why Can’t We All Just Be Individuals?
InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 2012

3. “My Feelings Are Not About You”: Personal Experience as a Move of Whiteness
Robin DiAngelo and David Allen
InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 2005

4. Getting Slammed: White Depictions of Race Discussions as Arenas of Violence
Robin DiAngelo and Özlem Sensoy
Race & Ethnicity in Education 2004

5. Nothing to Add: A Challenge to White Silence in Racial Discussions
Journal of Understanding and Dismantling Privilege, 2012

6. White Fragility
International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 2011

7. White Fragility Accessible
Good Men Project, 2015

8. “We Put It in Terms of “Not-Nice”: White Anti-Racists and Parenting
Sarah Matlock and Robin DiAngelo
Journal of Progressive Human Services, 2015

9. Respect Differences? Challenging the Common Guidelines in Social Justice Education
Democracy in Education, 2014

10. Leaning In: A Student’s Guide to Engaging Constructively With Social Justice Content
Robin DiAngelo and Özlem Sensoy
Radical Pedagogy, 2014

11: Showing What We Tell
Robin DiAngelo and Darlene Flynn
Journal of Understanding and Dismantling Privilege, 2010

12. “We Are All for Diversity, But . . .”: How Faculty Hiring Committees Reproduce Whiteness and Practical Suggestions for How They Can Change
Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo.
Harvard Educational Review, 2017

Index

About the Author