White Supremacy Playbook: Whiteness as Innocence

DiAngelo is not the best source to learn from, and she does pithy quotes decently well.

Source: DiAngelo, Robin J. White Fragility: Why It’s so Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. Boston: Beacon Press, 2018, pp. 62–63.
"Because we are not raised to see ourselves in racial terms or to see white space as racialized space, we position ourselves as innocent of race.
[...]
Because people of color are not seen as racially innocent, they are expected to speak to issues of race (but must do so on white terms). This idea—that racism is not a white problem—enables us to sit back and let people of color take very real risks of invalidation and retaliation as they share their experiences. But we are not required to take similar cross-racial risks. They—not we—have race, and thus they are the holders of racial knowledge. In this way, we position ourselves as standing outside hierarchical social relations."

November 5, 2023