Summary

DiAngelo looks at the way in which whites now classify racism along the binary of good/bad. After the Civil Rights era, racism became associated with malicious, violent, white Southerners, while those in the North who were open-minded and progressive were thought to be free of racism. By casting racism along these lines, racism is not disposed of but is perpetuated. White defensiveness about racism is rooted in the idea that racism is carried out in individual actions by malicious whites rather than that it is an all-pervasive system. The good/bad binary obscures the structural nature of racism and dissolves whites' responsibility to do anything about it. The author tells the story of a white educator who was part of an equity group telling a story in which she came to agree with a Black mother who claimed she didn't understand children of...