Quotes from Robin DiAngelo

What I do used to be called 'diversity training,' then 'cultural competency' and now, 'anti-racism.' These terms are really useful for periods of time, but then they get coopted, and people build all this baggage around them, and you have to come up with new terms, or else people won't engage.

Like a nontechnical user trying to understand a technical problem, our racial illiteracy limits our ability to have meaningful conversations about race.

A fundamental but very challenging part of my work is moving white people from an individual understanding of racism - i.e. only some people are racist and those people are bad - to a structural understanding.

This is one of the most effective adaptations of racism over time - that we can think of racism as only something that individuals either are or are not 'doing.'

I grew up poor and white. While my class oppression has been relatively visible to me, my race privilege has not. In my efforts to uncover how race has shaped my life, I have gained deeper insight by placing race in the center of my analysis and asking how each of my other group locations have socialized me to collude with racism.

The goal of my work is to make visible the inevitable racist assumptions held, and patterns displayed, by white people conditioned from living in a white supremacist culture.

Human beings can only make sense of the world through the lens they were socialized to make sense of it through.