If you're white, this book is most likely going to be a hard read for you. If you consider yourself "colorblind," or not a racist, this book is the litmus test to challenge your convictions. We have decades to go as a nation to reach true equality, if we ever even can. (I think we can, but it is still going to take a nearly superhuman effort to overcome the mountain of obstacles we have placed on our own path as white people.)

Great book. Will expand your understanding of race in America and facilitate making change for the better. After you read, check out the 1 star reviews to see numerous examples of white fragility in action.

White FragilityRobin Diangelo’s White Fragility is worth the read, yet, I feel the horses have already left the barn in regard to this books target audience and it’s timeliness.Diangelo correctly identifies that the culture in America of Racism/white culture is deeply engrained in the United States. It is “systemic, societal, institutional, and omnipresent” in our society. Our movies, television programming, literature, schools, government, etc is for the most part white for whites, and there are distinct advantages that come along with that whiteness of our overall culture.This might be a part of an argument to use against someone who says slavery ended over a hundred and fifty years ago, time to get over it. But the peels of the onion (racial prejudice) go much deeper, and in my opinion, the author misses the boat on this issue. She appears to focus on the professional levels, where whites do not understand the isolation felt by blacks, and gives good examples on how to interact and learn for whites. As a matter of fact, her examples of dealing with racial issues on individual basis can easily be transcribed into situations on how to deal with all our fellow men and women.White Fragility will offend many white people, if they were to read the book, and if that is its intention, it has succeeded. Too many people of all races and genders at this time are hustling to just scrape out an existence. The system of meritocracy does not bode well for those who choose not to climb aboard, as white biased as it might be, and the advantages the white bastions of our society have in achieving higher levels of success. I don’t think that in the dog eat dog world in which we live, that whites will give that up.Robin Deangelo’s White Fragility is a good book, that relentlessly pounds at the culture in our country as white centric, and I agree with her thesis. She touches on basic prejudices we all have, black and white, as well as our inclinations to be judgmental. She attempts to give advice, most of which is good, in order for whites to better understand and appreciate blacks, yet falls far short of answering the question of how blacks can exit the self perpetuating destructiveness that permeates their “culture,” whether initiated by whites or not.I’m open for discussion if anybody wants to comment on my review. Personal experience and recent reading do not make me an expert on the topic of White Fragility, but have opened my mind further to this issue.

This book represents a valiant and successful effort at defining, describing and dissecting white racism; a phenomenon that does not even exist for most of those assumed to be affected by it.

Robin Diangelo's book makes a lot of assumptions about "people" in general and specifically, "black" people. Given that she is not one of them, how can she make statements about how "affected they are by racism that they have to live with every day?" I happen to be a "black" person and I don't have the issues that she refers to. Speaking on her own behalf, I she makes the same generalizations and some misleading assumptions about "white" people. The first one is that "white people find it so hard to talk about racism." Bottom line is that the book doesn't comport with the America that I've experienced and I've lived in many very integrated circles of people throughout my 56 year life. Surely there are some people and some places who will have the experiences she refers to, but to paint the U.S. with that broad a brush mischaracterizes our country.