Top 100 Robin DiAngelo Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “While implicit bias is always at play because all humans have bias, inequity can occur simply through homogeneity; if I am not aware of the barriers you face, then I won’t see them, much less be motivated to remove them. Nor will I be motivated to remove the barriers if they provide an advantage to which I feel entitled.”

— Robin DiAngelo

2. “Exclusion by those at the table doesn’t depend on willful intent; we don’t have to intend to exclude for the results of our actions to be exclusion.”

— Robin DiAngelo

3. “The key to moving forward is what we do with our discomfort. We can use it as a door out – blame the messenger and disregard the message. Or we can use it as a door in by asking, Why does this unsettle me? What would it mean for me if this were true?”

— Robin DiAngelo

4. “Our lack of understanding about implicit bias leads to aversive racism.”

— Robin DiAngelo

5. “Putting our effort into protecting rather than expanding our current worldview prevents our intellectual and emotional growth.”

— Robin DiAngelo

6. “Discrimination is action based on prejudice. These actions include ignoring, exclusion, threats, ridicule, slander, and violence.”

— Robin DiAngelo

7. “It’s been said that racism is so American that when we protest racism, some assume we’re protesting America.”

— Robin DiAngelo

8. “If privilege is defined as a legitimization of one’s entitlement to resources, it can also be defined as permission to escape or avoid any challenges to this entitlement.”

— Robin DiAngelo

9. “I repeat: stopping our racist patterns must be more important than working to convince others that we don’t have them. We do have them, and people of color already know we have them; our efforts to prove otherwise are not convincing. An honest accounting of these patterns is no small task given the power of white fragility and white solidarity, but it is necessary.”

— Robin DiAngelo

10. “When I start from the premise that of course I have been thoroughly socialized into the racist culture in which I was born, I no longer need to expend energy denying that fact. I am eager – even excited – to identify my inevitable collusion so that I can figure out how to stop colluding!”

— Robin DiAngelo

11. “People of color may also hold prejudices and discriminate against white people, but they lack the social and institutional power that transforms their prejudice and discrimination into racism; the impact of their prejudice on whites is temporary and contextual.”

— Robin DiAngelo

12. “Today we have a cultural norm that insists we hide our racism from people of color and deny it among ourselves, but not that we actually challenge it. In fact, we are socially penalized for challenging racism.”

— Robin DiAngelo

13. “We have a deep interest in denying the forms of oppression which benefit us.”

— Robin DiAngelo

14. “Not having a group consciousness, whites often respond defensively when grouped with other whites, resenting what they see as unfair generalizations. Individualism prevents us from seeing ourselves as responsible for or accountable to other whites as members of a shared racial group that collectively benefits from racial inequality.”

— Robin DiAngelo

15. “Scholars have argued that whites split off from themselves and project onto black people the aspects that we don’t want to own in ourselves. For example, the white masters of enslaved Africans consistently depicted the Africans as lazy and childlike, even as they toiled at backbreaking work from sunup to sundown. Today, we depict blacks as dangerous, a portrayal that perverts the true direction of violence between whites and blacks since the founding of this country.”

— Robin DiAngelo

16. “Many people of color have assured me that they will not give up on me despite my racist patterns; they expect that I will have racist behavior given the society that socialized me. What they are looking for is not perfection but the ability to talk about what happened, the ability to repair. Unfortunately, it is rare for white people to own and repair our inevitable patterns of racism. Thus, relationships with white people tend to be less authentic for people of color.”

— Robin DiAngelo

17. “When a racial group’s collective prejudice is backed by the power of legal authority and institutional control, it is transformed into racism, a far-reaching system that functions independently from the intentions or self-images of individual actors.”

— Robin DiAngelo

18. “You asked me here to help see your racism, but by god, I’d better not actually help you see your racism.”

— Robin DiAngelo

19. “It is white people’s responsibility to be less fragile; people of color don’t need to twist themselves into knots trying to navigate us as painlessly as possible.”

— Robin DiAngelo

20. “But my silence is not benign because it protects and maintains the racial hierarchy and my place within it. Each uninterrupted joke furthers the circulation of racism through the culture, and the ability for the joke to circulate depends on my complicity.”

— Robin DiAngelo

21. “All systems of oppression are adaptive; they can withstand and adjust to challenges and still maintain inequality.”

— Robin DiAngelo

22. “Authentic antiracism is rarely comfortable. Discomfort is key to my growth and thus desirable.”

— Robin DiAngelo

23. “Mills makes two points that are critical to our understanding of white fragility. First, white supremacy is never acknowledged. Second, we cannot study any sociopolitical system without addressing how that system is mediated by race. The failure to acknowledge white supremacy protects it from examination and holds it in place.”

— Robin DiAngelo

24. “White fragility functions as a form of bullying; I am going to make it so miserable for you to confront me – no matter how diplomatically you try to do so – that you will simply back off, give up, and never raise the issue again.”

— Robin DiAngelo

25. “A racism-free upbringing is not possible, because racism is a social system embedded in the culture and its institutions.”

— Robin DiAngelo

26. “Toni Morrison uses the term race talk to capture ‘the explicit insertion into everyday life of racial signs and symbols that have no meaning other than positioning African Americans into the lowest level of the racial hierarchy.’ Casual race talk is a key component of white racial framing because it accomplishes the interconnected goals of elevating whites while demeaning people of color; race talk always implies a racial ‘us’ and ‘them’.”

— Robin DiAngelo

27. “Though white fragility is triggered by discomfort and anxiety, it is born of superiority and entitlement. White fragility is not weakness per se. In fact, it is a powerful means of white racial control and the protection of white advantage.”

— Robin DiAngelo

28. “Aversive racism is a manifestation of racism that well-intentioned people who see themselves as educated and progressive are more likely to exhibit.”

— Robin DiAngelo

29. “Discrimination is action based on prejudice.”

— Robin DiAngelo

30. “Racism is a complex and interconnected system that adapts to challenges over time. Colorblind ideology was a very effective adaptation to the challenges of the Civil Rights Era. Colorblind ideology allows society to deny the reality of racism in the face of its persistence, while making it more difficult to challenge than when it was openly espoused.”

— Robin DiAngelo

31. “Whiteness, like race, may not be true – it’s not a biologically heritable characteristic that has roots in physiological structures or in genes or chromosomes. But it is real, in the sense that societies and rights and goods and resources and privileges have been built on its foundation.”

— Robin DiAngelo

32. “There is a difference between agreement and understanding: When discussing complex social and institutional dynamics such as racism, consider whether “I don’t agree” may actually mean “I don’t understand.”

— Robin DiAngelo

33. “On some level, we know that Bill Gates’s son was born into a set of opportunities that will benefit him throughout his life, whether he is mediocre or exceptional. Yet even though Gates’s son has clearly been handed unearned advantage, we cling tightly to the ideology of individualism when asked to consider our own unearned advantages.”

— Robin DiAngelo

34. “How can I say that if you are white, your opinions on racism are most likely ignorant, when I don’t even know you? I can say so because nothing in mainstream US culture gives us the information we need to have the nuanced understanding of arguable the most complex and enduring social dynamic of the last several hundred years.”

— Robin DiAngelo

35. “For those of us who work to raise the racial consciousness of whites, simply getting whites to acknowledge that our race gives us advantages is a major effort. The defensiveness, denial, and resistance are deep.”

— Robin DiAngelo

36. “When I say that only whites can be racist, I mean that in the United States, only whites have the collective social and institutional power and privilege over people of color.”

— Robin DiAngelo

37. “Because whites are not socialized to see ourselves collectively, we don’t see our group’s history as relevant. Therefore, we expect people of color to trust us as soon as they meet us. We don’t see ourselves as having to earn that trust.”

— Robin DiAngelo

38. “The idea of racial inferiority was created to justify unequal treatment; belief in racial inferiority is not what triggered unequal treatment. Nor was fear of difference. As Ta-Nehisi Coates states, “But race is the child of racism, not the father.” He means that first we exploited people for their resources, not according to how they looked. Exploitation came first, and then the ideology of unequal races to justify this exploitation followed.”

— Robin DiAngelo

39. “To be sure, like the rest of race, whiteness is a fiction, what in the jargon of the academy is termed a social construct, an agreed-on myth that has empirical grit because of its effect, not its essence. But whiteness goes even one better: it is a category of identity that is most useful when its very existence is denied. That’s its twisted genius.”

— Robin DiAngelo

40. “While it isn’t comfortable for most whites to talk about racism, we must do so if we want to challenge – rather than protect – racism.”

— Robin DiAngelo

41. “We are unaware of, or do not acknowledge, the meaning of race and its impact on our own lives.”

— Robin DiAngelo

42. “For most of our history, straight white men have been involved in a witness protection program that guards their identities and absolves them of their crimes while offering them a future free of past encumbrances and sins.”

— Robin DiAngelo

43. “Stopping our racist patterns must be more important than working to convince others that we don’t have them. We do have them, and people of color already know we have them; our efforts to prove otherwise are not convincing.”

— Robin DiAngelo

44. “I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color.”

— Robin DiAngelo

45. “Our understanding of ourselves is necessarily based on our comparisons with others. The concept of pretty has no meaning without the concept of ugly, smart means little without the idea of not-smart or “stupid,” and deserving has no meaning without the concept of undeserving.”

— Robin DiAngelo

46. “But whiteness goes even one better: it is a category of identity that is most useful when its very existence is denied. That’s its twisted genius. Whiteness embodies Charles Baudelaire’s admonition that “the loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.”

— Robin DiAngelo

47. “Everyone has prejudice and discriminates, but structures of oppression go well beyond individuals. While women could be prejudiced and discriminate against men in individual interactions, women as a group could not deny men their civil rights. But men as a group could and did deny women their civil rights. Men could do so because they controlled all the institutions.”

— Robin DiAngelo

48. “If, as a white person, I conceptualize racism as a binary and I see myself on the “not racist” side, what further action is required of me? No action is required at all, because I am not a racist. Therefore racism is not my problem; it doesn’t concern me and there is nothing further I need to do. This guarantees that, as a member of the dominant group, I will not build my skills in thinking critically about racism or use my position to challenge racial inequality.”

— Robin DiAngelo

49. “Thus, reflecting on our racial frames is particularly challenging for many white people, because we are taught that to have a racial viewpoint is to be biased. Unfortunately, this belief protects our biases, because denying that we have them ensures that we won’t examine or change them.”

— Robin DiAngelo

50. “I am often asked if I think the younger generation is less racist. No, I don’t. In some ways, racism’s adaptations over time are more sinister than concrete rules such as Jim Crow.”

— Robin DiAngelo