White Fragility Quotes

Politeness as filtered through fragility and supremacy isn't about manners; it's about a methodology of controlling the conversation. ~ Mikki Kendall

I was co-leading a workshop with an African American man. A white participant said to him, "I don't see race; I don't see you as black." My co-trainer's response was, "Then how will you see racism?" He then explained to her that he was black, he was confident that she could see this, and that his race meant that he had a very different experience in life than she did. If she were ever going to understand or challenge racism, she would need to acknowledge this difference. Pretending that she did not noticed that he was black was not helpful to him in any way, as it denied his reality - indeed, it refused his reality - and kept hers insular and unchallenged. This pretense that she did not notice his race assumed that he was "just like her," and in so doing, she projected her reality onto him. For example, I feel welcome at work so you must too; I have never felt that my race mattered, so you must feel that yours doesn't either. But of course, we do see the race of other people, and race holds deep social meaning for us. ~ Robin DiAngelo

White people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview because it is the bedrock of our society and its institutions. Regardless of whether a parent told you that everyone was equal, or the poster in the hall of your white suburban school proclaimed the value of diversity, or you have traveled abroad, or you have people of color in your workplace or family, the ubiquitous socializing power of white supremacy cannot be avoided. The messages circulate 24-7 and have little or nothing to do with intentions, awareness, or agreement. Entering the conversation with this understanding is freeing because it allows us to focus on how--rather than if--our racism is manifest. When we move beyond the good/bad binary, we can become eager to identify our racist patterns because interrupting those patterns becomes more important than managing how we think we look to others.

I repeat: stopping our racist patterns must be more important than working to convince others that we don't have them. We do have them, and people of color already know we have them; our efforts to prove otherwise are not convincing. An honest accounting of these patterns is no small task given the power of white fragility and white solidarity, but it is necessary. ~ Robin DiAngelo

When you believe niceness disproves the presence of racism, it's easy to start believing bigotry is rare, and that the label racist should be applied only to mean-spirited, intentional acts of discrimination. ~ Austin Channing Brown

To continue reproducing racial inequality, the system only needs for white people to be really nice and carry on – to smile at people of color, to go to lunch with them on occasion. To be clear, being nice is generally a better policy than being mean. But niceness does not bring racism to the table and will not keep it on the table when so many of us who are white want it off. Niceness does not break with white solidarity and white silence. In fact, naming racism is often seen as not nice, triggering white fragility. ~ Robin DiAngelo

This is partly what makes the fragility of whiteness so damn dangerous. It ignores the personhood of people of color and instead makes the feelings of whiteness the most important thing... White fragility protects whiteness and forces Black people to fend for themselves. ~ Austin Channing Brown

White means the strength of fragility and the fragility of the passage of time. ~ Martin Margiela

White fragility is the belief that even the slightest pressure is seen by white folk as battering, as intolerable, and can provoke anger, fear, and, yes, even guilt. White fragility, as conceived by antiracist activist and educational theorist Robin DiAngelo, at times leads white folk to argue, to retreat into silence, or simply to exit a stressful situtation ~ Michael Eric Dyson

Even now; with a thousand little voyages notched in my belt. I still feel a memorial chill on casting off. ~ E.B. White

A true knowledge of ourselves is knowledge of our power. ~ Hale White

The gender gap looks at this point like it's going to favor the president, particularly among white suburban women. I certainly think it's going to be an issue. But I think the single most important thing in this election will be turnout. ~ Anna Quindlen

If you have twenty guys in the room and you just bring in one girl, you change the entire mood and everyone plays different. ~ Jack White

Holy Terror: Lies the Christian Right Tells Us to Deny Gay Equality. ~ Mel White

If I had not immersed myself in books, in stories and legends, in newspapers, in reports, if everything communicable had not grown up in me, I should have been a nonentity, a collection of uncomprehended events. (And that might have been a good thing, then I should have thought of something new.) That I can see, that I can hear, are things I do not deserve; but my feelings, those I truly deserve, these herons over white beaches, these wanderers by night, the hungry vagabonds that take my heart as their highroad. I wish I could call out to all those who believe in their unique brains and the hard currency of their thoughts: be of good faith! But these coins which you clink together have been withdrawn from circulation, only you don't know it yet....Admit that when you really pay, with your lives, you do so only beyond the barrier, when you have said farewell to everything that is so dear to you--to landing-places, flying-bases, and only from there do you embark on your own path and your journey from imagined stop to imagined stop, travellers who must not be concerned with arriving. ~ Ingeborg Bachmann

The state funneled money to private academies for white students. ~ Isabel Wilkerson

Fear and prejudice put up a terrible fight when they sense change coming. ~ Susan Dorothea White

I recall the rasp of charcoal on newsprint, the chewing-gum stretch of a kneaded eraser, the precarious bite of a razor blade in a new pencil. The vibrancy of fresh watercolors squeezed from a tube. A new sketchbook, cracked open to flawless white. The way the smell of turpentine made me feel simultaneously sick and excited. ~ Kirsten Hubbard

Ding! Ding! Ding! I tapped the brass bell in rapid succession until Violet bustled in from the back room, wearing the blue-and-white pinafore that was the SugarWerks's uniform and a frown that was not. The same age as Nic and I, Violet wore her amethyst hair spiked and a brass gearring stud on the left side of her nose. On one set of knuckles, BAKE was tattooed in elaborate black calligraphy; CAKE was on the other. Today she had an aquamarine bow pinned to the top of her head, a silver cupcake and crossbones marking the spot between the two loops of ribbon. ~ Lisa Mantchev

The fate of this man or that man was less than a drop, although it was a sparkling one, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea. ~ T.H. White

The solution to a pile of mildewed stuff is to rewash it with your regular detergent as well as a cup or two of white vinegar. A note on amounts: for a regular washing, a half cup to a full cup of white vinegar is more than enough to help cut down on smells and serve as a natural fabric softener. But when you're dealing with overpowering smells like mildew, you'll need to up the ante, and being aware of those differences will help you to apply that understanding to various laundering situations you may find on your hands. Baking soda is another option, but I prefer vinegar because I think it works better, ~ Jolie Kerr

In a broader sense, much of this story about the expansion of slavery and how it shaped the lives of black folks and the wider world is driven by the white men who tried to impose their codes on everything around them. ~ Edward E. Baptist

Of course we would all like to "believe" in something, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes, like to lose our tiresome selves; like, perhaps, to transform the white flag of defeat at home into the brave white banner of battle away from home. And of course it is all right to do that; that is how, immemorially, thing have gotten done. But I think it is all right only so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing, and why. It is all right only so long as we remember that all the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines, all the brave signatures in The New York Times, all the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer upon anyone any ipso facto virtue. It is all right only so long as we recognize that the end may or may not be expedient, may or may not be a good idea, but in any case has nothing to do with "morality." Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there. ~ Joan Didion

Semi-colons only prove that the author has been to college. ~ E.B. White

Small Moth ...
She's slicing ripe white peaches
into the Tony the Tiger bowl
and dropping slivers for the dog
poised vibrating by her foot to stop their fall
when she spots it, camouflaged,
a glimmer and then full on-
happiness, plashing blunt soft wings
inside her as if it wants
to escape again. ~ Sarah Lindsay

He could do what all men wanted to, that is, fly ~ T.H. White

One of the reasons I got really fat when I left home was because I thought rich people ate white bread and Spam. I also thought they could get processed meals, because we never did, so that was exciting. ~ Alison Moyet

At a talk I gave at a church months later, I spoke about Charlie and the plight of incarcerated children. Afterward, an older married couple approached me and insisted that they had to help Charlie. I tried to dissuade these kind people from thinking they could do anything, but I gave them my card and told them they could call me. I didn't expect to hear from them, but within days they called, and they were persistent. We eventually agreed that they would write a letter to Charlie and send it to me to pass on to him. When I received the letter weeks later, I read it. It was remarkable.
Mr. and Mrs. Jennings were a white couple in their mid-seventies from a small community northeast of Birmingham. They were kind and generous people who were active in their local United Methodist church. They never missed a Sunday service and were especially drawn to children in crisis. They spoke softly and always seemed to be smiling but never appeared to be anything less than completely genuine and compassionate. They were affectionate with each other in a way that was endearing, frequently holding hands and leaning into each other. They dressed like farmers and owned ten acres of land, where they grew vegetables and lived simply. Their one and only grandchild, whom they had helped raise, had committed suicide when he was a teenager, and they had never stopped grieving for him. Their grandson struggled with mental health problems during his short life, but he was a smart kid and they ~ Bryan Stevenson

It is at a fair that man can be drunk forever on liquor, love, or fights; at a fair that your front pocket can be picked by a trotting horse looking for sugar, and your hind pocket by a thief looking for his fortune. ~ E.B. White

Voting is a Constitutional right. Absent any evidence of fraud, all Americans have a protected right to vote, be they rich or poor, black, Hispanic or white, people who live in a big city or in remote rural areas. ~ Juan Williams

Still others want a traditional guitar sound if they call you for guitar. ~ Mark White

Like an ice in a spring river.
I melt and stay.
Sun will vaporise us.
It will take us up into clouds.
And then we both will fall.
Drop by drop.
We'll fall out of the sky.
We'll raise from dew to fog.
Every sunny warm morning.
We'll let the wind pull us with him.
Cooling our selves in forest shadows.
There in silence we'll cool off
One from another.
But in stormy days and nights.
We'll billow and crash.
One to another.
Like crazy and wild.
We'll churn into white foam.
Ashore in sands we'll wait
For the yellow october leaves
Into them we'll fall asleep.
We'll fall into and freeze.

We'll freeze and melt again
And flow and raise and fall again.
Over and over again

Even if we were in separete glasses of water.
We would moove together and whisper.
Even if in the oceans mixed.
We would moove together and sing.

I'm comming to You.
You are blazing.
I'm giving You a rose
It embalms sweet.

...

If I'll ever meet You.
I' ll take our time...
To dance dance dance dance with You... ~ Martins Paparde

It's like we're in the Snow Queen's land,' Lottie breathed, powder catching on her lips as she spoke.
Ellie reached to take her hand and, together, they walked down the steps into the boundless white world beyond. ~ Connie Glynn

Men who have died in battle are rarely good to look upon. No matter how splendid their appearance at the apex of heroism, when the soul has fled it takes all grace and beauty with it. Bowels empty, mouths gape, bellies swell, dead eyes gleam fish-belly white. Nothing visible remains of glory. In the tents of death all men belong to the same tribe. ~ Morgan Llywelyn

White and distant, absorbed in itself, endlessly the sky covers and uncovers, moves and remains. ~ Virginia Woolf

What came to me then was the voice of my paternal grandmother. She had told me once that every time Bego or Irfan returned to Bosnia to visit, they seemed to her like different people. Unrecognizable. She had blamed this on America... I saw a young man sitting alone in a plastic chair, white-knuckle and wide-eyed and zit-faced, happy and perplexed, and I knew why my grandmother couldn't recognize her own son, why I was wielding a stranger's hand. I knew that someone new would get off this plastic chair and board a plane to Los Angeles and that all the while an 18-year-old Ismet would remain forever in the city under siege, in the midst of a war that would never end. (p.18) ~ Ismet Prcic

Funny is like sexy, and they are kind of related. What turns one person on is hilarious to another person. And vice versa. And you can see all of this at the nexus of clowns. Many people think clowns are hilarious. (Many others think clowns are creepy.) But there is a certain percentage of people who think clowns are sexy. Don't believe me, Google "clown porn" right now. I dare you. And if you don't need to Google that, then it's because it is already saved on your browser. So when these dudes say, "Women aren't funny," they are forgetting a classically important addendum: "to me." They should be saying, "Women aren't funny to me." But they don't say "to me" because if you are a man in America, you are considered the norm. (Remember it's the NBA and the W[omen's]NBA, not the WNBA and the M[en's]NBA.) And if you are a white man in America, then you are also considered the norm. ~ W. Kamau Bell

Wether you like it or not, life drags you forward. ~ Dee White

Within this restless, hurried, modern world
We took our hearts' full pleasure - You and I,
And now the white sails of our ship are furled,
And spent the lading of our argosy.
Wherefore my cheeks before their time are wan,
For very weeping is my gladness fled,
Sorrow has paled my young mouth's vermilion,
And Ruin draws the curtains of my bed.
But all this crowded life has been to thee
No more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spell
Of viols, or the music of the sea
That sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell. ~ Oscar Wilde

Aren't cops trained to be patient, to use their weapons as a last resort?"
"But this was a white cop, Sarah. And to a white cop, a black man and a gun don't mix. Do you understand where I'm coming from? ~ Mark M. Bello

You either evolve or you don't. I don't like old people on a rock n' roll stage. I think they look pathetic, me included. And the fact that I represent an era means I can't just go out there and do all new stuff. They would all say, 'Sing 'White Rabbit,' and I'd say no? That's rude. ~ Grace Slick

When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad. ~ E.B. White

Always look for the fool in the deal. If you don't find one, it's you. ~ Mark Cuban

These events are swirling around them. In the white community, people felt like they had no control over their neighborhoods, their destiny. In the black community, centuries of government and economic forces were pushing on them. I went in with a kind of arrogance, maybe, that came from living in a very intellectual family, and I left knowing that there was a lot about the way people lived that I didn't know about. ~ Sara Paretsky

Trust in the familiar seems to be matched by wariness of the unfamiliar. Jennifer Richeson of Northwestern University has conducted experiments in which white subjects had to interact in some way with a white or a black man before taking a mental test. Those who dealt with the black man got lower scores on the test, and their brain scans showed what Prof. Richeson called "heightened activity in areas of the brain associated with regulating our thoughts and emotions." She interpreted this to mean that white subjects were struggling with the "awkwardness" or "exhaustion" of dealing with a black man, and that this interfered with their ability to take the mental test.
Researchers at Harvard and New York University had white and black subjects look repeatedly at a series of photographs of black and white faces, all with neutral expressions. Every time the subjects looked at one particular black face and one particular white face they got a mild electric shock. Lie detector-type devices showed that subjects would sweat - a typical stress reaction - when they saw the two faces they associated with the shocks. The researchers showed the photo series several times again, but without the shocks. White subjects quickly stopped sweating when they saw the white face formerly associated with the shock, but continued to sweat when they saw the black face. Black subjects had the opposite reaction, continuing to sweat when they saw the white but not the black face. Mahzarin Banaji, the ~ Jared Taylor

A man's liberal and conservative phases seem to follow each other in a succession of waves from the time he is born. Children are radicals. Youths are conservatives, with a dash of criminal negligence. Men in their prime are liberals (as long as their digestion keeps pace with their intellect). The middle aged run to shelter: they insure their life, draft a will, accumulate mementos and occasional tables, and hope for security. And then comes old age, which repeats childhood - a time full of humors and sadness, but often full of courage and even prophecy. ~ E.B. White

I have always had the deepest respect for Bill Nicholson as a person and as a manager. The Spurs boss is an honest Yorkshireman and you will go a long way before finding a straighter character than that. Bill has never wavered in his determination to give White Hart Lane fans the best. ~ Bill Shankly

I'm a big fan of reality shows. I thought the first one, Dukes of Hazzard, captured white people perfectly. ~ George Lopez

Perhaps I shall not write my account of the Paleolithic at all, but make a film of it. A silent film at that, in which I shall show you first the great slumbering rocks of the Cambrian period, and move from those to the mountains of Wales ... from Ordovician to Devonian, on the lush glowing Cotswolds, on to the white cliffs of Dover ... An impressionistic, dreaming film, in which the folded rocks arise and flower and grow and become Salisbury Cathedral and York Minster ... ~ Penelope Lively

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me will full hands;
How could I answer the child? ... I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
There was the hope Dr. Holden had talked about-the grass was a metaphor for his hope. But thats not all. He continues,
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Like grass is a metaphor for God's greatness or something ...
And then soon after is itself a child ...
And then soon after that,
Or, I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broadzones and narrow zones.
Growing among black folk as among white. ~ John Green

It's that I don't like white paper backgrounds. A woman does not live in front of white paper. She lives on the street, in a motor car, in a hotel room. ~ Helmut Newton