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How White People Handle Diversity Training in the Workplace

Robin DiAngelo
GEN
Published in
11 min readJun 27, 2018

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Photo by Beau Lark/Corbis/VCG via Getty

As a former professor and current facilitator and consultant, I am in a position to give white people feedback on how their unintentional racism is manifesting itself. In this position, I have observed countless enactments of white fragility. One of the most common is outrage: “How dare you suggest that I could have said or done something racist!” Although these are unpleasant moments for me, they are also rather amusing. The reason I’m there in the first place is because I have been hired specifically to do just that; I have been asked to help the members of the organization understand why their workplace continues to remain white, why they are having so much trouble recruiting people of color, and/or why the people of color they hire don’t stay. They want to know what they are doing that is unsupportive to people of color.

At this point in my career, I rarely encounter the kind of open hostility that I was met with in my early days as a facilitator. I attribute this change to the years of experience behind my pedagogy. Of course, I am also white, which makes other white people much more receptive to the message. I am often…

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Published in GEN

A former publication from Medium about politics, power, and culture. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Robin DiAngelo
Robin DiAngelo

Written by Robin DiAngelo

Robin DiAngelo is an academic, lecturer, and author of White Fragility: Why It's So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism.

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