WHITE FRAGILITY is an exploration of how and why white people use outsized emotional reactions to maintain racial inequality and protect our social positions.

This book slid a lot of things into focus for me. I want to highlight a few terms I’d never heard before that helped put patterns I’ve seen into context for me.

The first is the concept of “racial stamina,” which is the idea that generally, white people have never had to build up our capacity to withstand discomfort when discussing race. Therefore, we tend to shut down and do whatever it takes to end the situation before we really deal with the matter at hand.

The second is the idea of “aversive racism,” or the way white progressives still hold racist thoughts that surface in daily actions, yet we cannot admit to this as it breaks the mental image that we are good people.

Every white person in the United States should read this book. It can be a tough read - it’s never easy to face your own shortcomings - but we owe it to ourselves and to people of color to educate ourselves in an effort to stop perpetuating systems of oppression.