RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksThe book represents a triumph in telling together the stories of settler violence and racism that had traditionally eluded historians. Johnson’s insistence on rooting today’s racism in yesterday’s conquest of indigenous people and enslavement of kidnapped people from Africa makes The Broken Heart of America a book for our times ... a major contribution to African American studies, but in ways careful to take expansion and anti-Indian violence into account as well ... a striking illustration of the connections of militarism and racism.
Robin J Diangelo
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksIn the book under review here, DiAngelo mostly lets readers figure out what white fragility is by trickling out interesting concrete examples, often from her workshop experiences ... White Fragility fascinatingly reads as one-part jeremiad and one-part handbook. It is by turns mordant and then inspirational, an argument that powerful forces and tragic histories stack the deck fully against racial justice alongside one that we need only to be clearer, try harder, and do better ... In tone and content, the book jars against itself. The can-do spirit of the workshop and primer knocks against the sober accounts of the utter embeddedness of white advantage in structures of both political economy and of personality and character. Such jarring is not indefensible. We live in contradictions and we do what we can ... White Fragility reads better as evidence of where we are mired than as a how-to guide on where we are on the cusp of going. Its pessimistic half convinces more than its optimism ... There is no firm sense of the politics that might be productively attached to the attack on white fragility and white supremacy to which DiAngelo is passionately committed ... White Fragility may— if taken as panacea rather than as a useful corner of a big problem — be too pessimistic as well as too cheery ... White Fragility—indeed any single book—cannot conjure up such movements. But it does much help us to get there.
