The goal of my work is to make visible the inevitable racist assumptions held, and patterns displayed, by white people conditioned from living in a white supremacist culture.
Robin DiangeloRead
It became clear over time that white people have extremely low thresholds for enduring any discomfort associated with challenges to our racial worldviews.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights how white people often struggle to confront discomfort when facing challenges to their racial beliefs.
In this quote, Robin DiAngelo suggests that many white individuals have a limited capacity to tolerate the discomfort that arises when their racial perspectives and beliefs are questioned or challenged. This inability to endure such discomfort can result in defensiveness and denial, preventing meaningful engagement with issues of race and privilege. Over time, this pattern can hinder progress towards understanding and addressing systemic racism.
Themes
RaceDiscomfortPrivilegeWorldviewChallenges
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in discussions about racial sensitivity training in workplaces.
More from Robin Diangelo
All quotes βWhites often respond defensively when linked to other whites as a group or 'accused' of collectively benefiting from racism, because as individuals, each white person is 'different' from any other white person and expects to be seen as such.
Robin DiangeloRead
One of the most important misunderstandings for white people to get over to move forward is this idea that racism is a good-bad proposition - that if we're good we can't be part of it, that being uncomfortable means you're a terrible person. We have to let go of that and understand it as a system we all live in.
Robin DiangeloRead
You have to be in accountable relationships across race. Accountable means that they're authentic, they're sustained, and that you do talk about racism, and you are able to be given feedback.
Robin DiangeloRead
This is what I have learned: Any white person living in the United States will develop opinions about race simply by swimming in the water of our culture. But mainstream sources - schools, textbooks, media - don't provide us with the multiple perspectives we need.
Robin DiangeloRead
White consciousness is deeply anti-black, and that's for progressives and conservatives.
Robin DiangeloRead
Similar quotes
This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.
Henry David ThoreauRead
Our lives can only be lived forward and understood backwards. Living a life and understanding it occupy different dimensions.
Hanif KureishiRead
Racism is taught in our society, it is not automatic. It is learned behavior toward persons with dissimilar physical characteristics.
Alex HaleyRead
In the human heart one generation of passions follows another; from the ashes of one springs the spark of the next.
Francois De La RochefoucauldRead
When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous
Albert EinsteinRead
Wrath, unlike love, is not one of the intrinsic perfections of God. Rather, it is a function of God's holiness against sin. Where there is no sin, there is no wrath-but there will always be love in God. Where God in His holiness confronts His image-bearers in their rebellion, there must be wrath, or God is not the jealous God He claims to be, and His holiness is impugned. The price of diluting God's wrath is diminishing God's holiness.
D. A. CarsonRead