WHITE FRAGILITY: WHY IT'S SO HARD for WHITE PEOPLE to TALK ABOUT RACISM (audiobook) by Robin DiAngelo

Published in 2018 by Beacon Press.
Read by Amy Landon.
Duration: 6 hours, 21 minutes.
Unabridged.

Robin DiAngelo is a diversity trainer. She also happens to be white. She has noticed that it is very common for white participants to react very negatively during these training sessions, often acting very defensively and offering a lot of excuses. In this book, she looks at those excuses and lays out the refutations of those excuses.

The good:

This book offers a very useful definition of racism. Hint: it is not just people acting horribly to other groups of people, it is a whole cultural system that we absorb.

It also offers some practical advice about how to deal with your own prejudices.

The bad:

White Fragility is a repetitive book. It could have easily been edited down by one-third without a loss of any new material.

Another weakness is that it doesn't really offer a list of common racist behaviors that people complain about. For example, I have heard African-Americans complain about white people just reaching out and touching their hair, even petting it. I am sure it is out of harmless curiosity, but it's simply creepy behavior.

*****

In the end, this is a solid place to start discussion.

I listened to this book as an audiobook. It was well-read by Amy Landon. I have no real complaints about her, but I actually recommend that you read it as a paper book so you can highlight areas important or more relevant to you and skip over some of the more repetitive areas.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: WHITE FRAGILITY: WHY IT'S SO HARD for WHITE PEOPLE to TALK ABOUT RACISM.