"After 20 years of talking day in and day out to overwhelmingly white groups of people, I'm really clear that there is a profound anti-blackness in this culture. In the white mind, black people are the ultimate racial other. I used to shy away from 'Oh, don't make it a black-white dichotomy,' but I feel really clear. There are bookends. White is on one end, and black is on the other. Your relationship, where you are positioned between those two bookends is going to shape how you experience your life. Right? The closer you are to whiteness—the term often used is white-adjacent—you're still going to experience racism, but there are going to be some benefits due to your perceived proximity to whiteness. The further away you are, the more intense the oppression's going to be."
Isaac Chotiner at Slate interviews Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.
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