In White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo explained how racism is a system into which all white people are socialized and challenged the belief that racism is a simple matter of good people versus bad. In Nice Racism, her follow-up work, she draws on her background as a sociologist and over 25 years working as an anti-racist educator, to move the conversation forward. Writing directly to white people as a white person, DiAngelo identifies many common white racial patterns and breaks down how well-intentioned white people unknowingly perpetuate racial harm.
A powerful new book from the author of White Fragility reveals why profound racism is often found in supposedly liberal spaces ... Citing deeply revealing and recurring anecdotes from her career as an anti-racist educator, DiAngelo analyses how white Americans who deem themselves inoculated against racism uniquely embody racist practices, including herself ... DiAngelo pertinently distinguishes anti-racist strategies from the valued currency of white friendliness ... Highly instructional, with pertinent questions for white readers who consider themselves sufficiently 'woke' or have felt 'attacked' in discussions around race, Nice Racism interrogates the machinery of white progressiveness and how these gears actually work ... Most potent though is DiAngelo’s urgency to get the reader to consider whiteness: its illusions, promises, assumptions and casual narratives of self-importance.
DiAngelo suggests that the animosity of many progressives towards her first book underlines that fragility – a failure to own either the power or vulnerability inherent in racial privilege ... The author’s style is to combine typically condescending accounts of her own encounters with white progressives (often while in the role of trainer and facilitator of anti-racist workshops across the US) with analytical exposition. Throughout the book, she assumes the role of an omniscient narrator of anti-racist truth, which grates ... she describes situations in which she herself does all of these things and without any sense of irony or awareness ... There’s a sense of deep internal contradiction running through DiAngelo’s writing that emerges from such discrepancies and which is at odds with the wealth she has accrued as an authority on anti-racism.