White Fragility, Chapter Two

In the second chapter of White Fragility, the author Robin Diangelo, emphasizes how white people are the superior race in society. I am not saying that I like the reality behind it, but that is just how things are in our world today, and how it has been for the longest time. White dominance has been around for the longest time, since our country gained its independence. Even before that, when European immigrants began colonizing North America. They brought over slaves from Africa through the Triangular Trade. Since then, white people have seen black people as a race inferior to them, and all other races to be inferior to them as well. There is something that Diangelo mentioned that caught my attention. She derives this quote from a historian, Ibram Kendi, who claims that “‘The beneficiaries of slavery, segregation, and mass incarceration have produced racist ideas of Black people being best suited for or deserving of the confines of slavery, segregation, or the jail cell. Consumers of these racist ideas have been led to believe there is something wrong with Black people, and not the policies that have enslaved, oppressed, and confined so many Black people’” (Diangelo 17). From my understanding, black people would not be in this situation today if it were not for Europeans bringing them into the world as slaves or as white people’s property. They did not choose the position they were put into back then, and they did not know being a part of this would continue today.

In addition, Diangelo describes how white people chose to be “white” and how they determined if a person would be considered white. Diangelo explains how white society since the seventeenth century has engrained in their minds that their race would be the dominant one. Even after slavery was abolished, white people still figured out ways to discriminate against black society through harsh laws, segregation, Jim Crow Laws, etc. White people had the ability to decide who was white. Based off looks. They decided the standards and laws that people had to follow. They are the ones with authority; they are the ones who “control all major institutions of society and set the policies and practices that others must live by” (27). And they chose superiority.

I like how she explains that different white-looking races were able to “melt” and be accepted into society. She states that “In reality, only European people immigrants were allowed to melt, or assimilate, into dominant culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, because, regardless of their ethnic identities, these immigrants were perceived to be white and thus could belong” (18). Because of the color of their skin, European immigrants were acknowledged as white although their racial background would say something different. Even today, if you see somebody with a fair peachy skin tone, another person would be quick to think they are white. Because of this, they get to be treated as a white person and gain the advantages of being white. Meanwhile, a black person is seen as dirty, ghetto, a criminal, and most likely to live poorly.