Alexandra Soos

“If your understanding of the cage is based on this myopic view, you may not understand why the bird doesn't just go around the single wire and fly away. You might even assume that the bird liked or chose its place in the cage. But if you stepped back and took a wider view, you would begin to see that the wires come together in an interlocking pattern - a pattern that works to hold the bird firmly in place.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“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. Whites hold the social and institutional positions in society to infuse their facial prejudice into the laws, politics, practices, and norms of society in a way that people of color do not.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“Habitus maintains our social comfort and helps us regain it when those around us do not act in familiar and acceptable ways. .... Thus, white fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress in the habitus becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. .... These behaviors, in turn, reinstate white racial equilibrium.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“Racism is a systematic, societal, institutional, omnipresent, and epistemologically embedded phenomenon that pervades every vestige of our reality. For most whites, however, racism is like murder: the concept exists, but someone has to commit it in order for it to happen.”
― Omowale Akintunde, Multiculturalism and the Teacher Education Experience