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Using you library account (students have ONEAccess accounts--student ID number is the library card #, and birth year is their "pin"). There ARE audiobooks and eBooks available!

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The Charlotte Mecklenburg Library is one of America's leading urban public libraries, serving a community of more than one million citizens in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.

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Each "shelf"/column deals with a specific topic / content from Robin DiAngelo's book. Look through posts--reply to anything that intrigues you, or add new posts with things YOU want to discuss.

If you want to ADD a discussion post, click on the + icon at the bottom of the shelf.

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You can "like" posts, and you can reply to posts.
To reply, simply start typing in the box where "Add comment" is labeled underneath the original post.

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After the first two general shelves, the shelves will be organized by chapter. There is a shelf dedicated for general discussion at the end.

Posts are ordered chronologically, so the oldest posts are at the top. Each "shelf" (column) has its own scroll bar for you to see ALL posts for each category.

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As of the creation of this padlet, YES, you should be able to post anonymously (forgive me if this is incorrect, I'm new at this!).

If you want to identify yourself, you are more than welcome to do so in at the beginning of your reply or post. Bear in mind that this site is public.

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If the posts feature profanity, padlet will automatically censor words with emojis.

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Question 3: Will my posts or comments be deleted?

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Question 3: Will my posts or comments be deleted?

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Posts that are off topic may receive comments regarding where that question or commentary would be better placed to ensure it receives the proper attention from community members). If posts are entirely off topic or inappropriate (see note regarding anonymity, they will be deleted by the moderator).

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Any other questions? Drop them below! :)

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Any other questions? Drop them below! :)

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You can download White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo on Audible. It's free if it's your first Audible download with an Amazon Prime account.

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The book is scheduled to be back in stock on June 30. https://www.amazon.com/White-Fragility-People-About-Racism/dp/0807047414

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Can order online. Book is unavailable at the Morrison, Arboretum & Carolina Place store locations (as of 6/19/2020).

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Many activists have spoken out on various platforms regarding the irony of Robin DiAngelo's book being a bestseller and leading resource. A white woman has the #1 bestseller, with Black authors like Dr. Ibrim X. Kendi and Ijeoma Oluo being in spots #2 and 3. Is this ironic? Is the entire premise for a "social justice" discussion using this particular book offensive?

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Carlos Lozada of The Washington Post wrote this criticism of White Fragility. If you'd like, read the article and discuss its merits below.

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By Robin DiAngelo. Beacon Press. 169 pp. $16.

"Race relations are profoundly complex," Robin DiAngelo writes in "White Fragility," a book that, two years after a best-selling debut, is having a new burst of popularity and urgency. In the midst of a nationwide debate on institutional racism and police violence, Americans are binge-reading (or at least bulk-buying) recent texts on race to help them grapple with that complexity. Alongside books such as Ibram X. Kendi's "How to Be an Antiracist," Carol Anderson's "White Rage" and Ta-Nehisi Coates's "Between the World and Me," DiAngelo's "White Fragility" - the No. 1 bestseller on the New York Times nonfiction list this week, and The Post's No. 4 - is officially now part of a new canon.

Except it doesn't deserve that distinction. Even as it introduces a memorable concept, "White Fragility" presents oversimplified arguments that are self-fulfilling, even self-serving. The book flattens people of any ancestry into two-dimensional beings fitting predetermined narratives. And reading DiAngelo offers little insight into how a national reckoning such as the one we're experiencing today could have come about. In a "White Fragility" world, nothing ever changes, because change would violate its premise.

The killing of George Floyd and the widespread protests that followed have brought into the open, yet again, the systems of racism embedded in powerful Americans institutions such as law enforcement. Reimagining those institutions so they earn the trust of all Americans is the work of today but also of generations to come, an arduous and complicated effort. In DiAngelo's telling, however, race relations in America are actually not "profoundly complex," as she initially puts it, but simple and binary. White people should be regarded not as individuals but as an undifferentiated racist collective, socialized to "fundamentally hate blackness" and to institutionalize that prejudice in politics and culture. People of color, by contrast, are almost entirely powerless, and the few with influence do not wield it in the service of racial justice. People of color rarely emerge as fully formed characters in these pages, except to provide opportunities for white Americans to engage in an "authentic exploration of racial realities" - that is, to help them know when they are doing better.

But white people don't like to engage, as DiAngelo has often gleaned in her capacity as a diversity consultant for companies and other organizations. Whenever they are told that their race affords them systemic advantages, or that they can't help being racist or benefiting from racism, or that their behavior is racially "problematic," white people respond with anger, denial, guilt or tears - with white fragility. "Their responses are so predictable I sometimes feel as though we are all reciting lines from a shared script," she writes.

Such reactions "reinstate white equilibrium" by repelling the challenge against racism and maintaining white dominance in the racial hierarchy, DiAngelo writes. "White fragility is not weakness per se. In fact, it is a powerful means of white racial control and the protection of white advantage."

In her training workshops, DiAngelo witnesses white fragility at work. She finds it in the white schoolteacher who, after imitating the speech pattern of a black parent, recoils when DiAngelo asks her to tell the story differently. In the Italian American who argues that white people experience racism too, because his own ancestors suffered discrimination. In the white woman who contends that because she grew up in a country with few black people, she had not developed racist feelings; when DiAngelo challenges that self-image, the woman is angered and vows to never participate in such programs again. These episodes occur because "the smallest amount of racial stress is intolerable," the author explains.

DiAngelo provides a vital service in pushing white Americans to interrogate their own role in structures of racism. One irony of the book, however, is that many of the people she condemns for white fragility were at least attempting to carry out such an interrogation, participating voluntarily in the author's seminars with some semblance of good faith. The schoolteacher, for instance, was explaining how a black parent had protested that she did not understand children of color, and the teacher finished her story by concluding that the parent was right. But after DiAngelo's intervention ("I am offering you a teachable moment," the author told her), the teacher decided to quit the group. Once intimidated by such episodes, DiAngelo says she now finds them unpleasant but also "rather amusing." DiAngelo's setbacks as consultant led to her success as author; what fails in person works in print. "I have found that the only way to give feedback without triggering white fragility," she decides, "is not to give it at all."

Review of 'Self-Portrait in Black and White' by Thomas Chatterton Williams

White fragility is the sort of powerful notion that, once articulated, becomes easily recognizable and widely applicable. (DiAngelo, for instance, uses it to explain Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election.) But stare at it a little longer, and one realizes how slippery it is, too. As defined by DiAngelo, white fragility is irrefutable; any alternative perspective or counterargument is defeated by the concept itself. Either white people admit their inherent and unending racism and vow to work on their white fragility, in which case DiAngelo was correct in her assessment, or they resist such categorizations or question the interpretation of a particular incident, in which case they are only proving her point.

Any dissent from "White Fragility" is itself white fragility. From such circular logic do thought leaders and bestsellers arise.

This book exists for white readers. "I am white and am addressing a common white dynamic," DiAngelo explains. "I am mainly writing to a white audience; when I use the terms us and we, I am referring to the white collective." It is always a collective, because DiAngelo regards individualism as an insidious ideology. "White people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy," DiAngelo writes, a system "we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves." And even if, for just a moment, white people could perceive and challenge the racist attitudes they have long internalized, their racism "would be reinforced all over again just by virtue of living in the culture." Step outside the human-resources training session, and you're infected once more.

Progressive whites, those who consider themselves attuned to racial justice, are not exempt from DiAngelo's analysis. If anything, they are more susceptible to it. "I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color," she writes. "[T]o the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived. None of our energy will go into what we need to be doing for the rest of our lives: engaging in ongoing self-awareness, continuing education, relationship building, and actual antiracist practice."

Anti-racism: You may be doing it wrong. Here's why.

It is a bleak view, one in which all political and moral beliefs are reduced to posturing and hypocrisy. In fact, the more that white progressives oppose racism, the more fragile they are. "White people's moral objection to racism increases their resistance to acknowledging their complicity with it," DiAngelo argues, drawing her circle ever tighter. And if you're a white person who finds that logic unreasonable - well, we all know what that means.

To her credit, DiAngelo does not exempt herself from racism and fragility. "I know that I have blind spots and unconscious investments in racism," she writes. But she also emphasizes her close relationships with black people. "I have friends who are black and whom I love deeply. I do not have to suppress feelings of hatred and contempt. . . . I see their humanity."

Even so, her conversations with actual black people have a stilted awkwardness to them. After DiAngelo makes an inappropriate joke in a work meeting - suggesting that a company's white employees might be afraid of a black woman's braided hair - she hears that another black woman present had been offended. DiAngelo reconsiders her behavior in consultation with a white friend who has "a solid understanding of cross-racial dynamics," and then approaches the offended woman. "Would you be willing to grant me the opportunity to repair the racism I perpetrated toward you in that meeting?" DiAngelo asks. She urges white readers not to burden people of color with the sole responsibility to speak to racial issues, yet she concludes that only a person of color can tell DiAngelo whether she "doing well" in addressing racial transgressions. People of color are always vulnerable and always wise, even if never entirely real.

The wide appeal of "White Fragility" is understandable. People suddenly rethinking their past indifference to racial injustice have a text that explains them collectively without faulting them individually. Others, who have long decried systemic racism and implicit bias, have found an advocate who confronts such forces from within. "Though I am centering the white voice," DiAngelo explains, "I am also using my insider status to challenge racism"- a sort of whiteness whistleblower.

Anyone reading "White Fragility" along with Kendi's "How to Be an Antiracist" will face contrasting views on how to define and identify racism. Though Kendi endorses systemic interpretations of racism, he warns against branding all white people as racist. "Generalizing the behavior of racist White individuals to all White people is as perilous as generalizing the individual faults of people of color to entire races," he writes. Kendi is also less dismissive of the individual agency of nonwhite people - including the power to be racist themselves. The notion that people of color are too weak, politically and culturally, to be racist "underestimates Black people and overestimates White people," he writes. "It erases the small amount of Black power and expands the already expansive reach of White power."

In Kendi's view, all people are either racist or anti-racist; indifference is complicity. But these identities are not immutable. "We can be a racist one minute and an antiracist the next," he argues. "What we say about race, what we do about race, in each moment, determines what - not who - we are." This vision, unlike DiAngelo's, feels consistent with the political and cultural moment in which both works are gaining attention. A recent Washington Post-Schar School poll finds that an overwhelming proportion of the country supports the ongoing protests against police violence and believes that the problems are systemic. (More than two out of three white respondents agreed.)

That is the sort of transformational possibility absent from DiAngelo's analysis. And yet, if the battle against racism can become less about unchangeable conditions than about tangible actions, less about workshops and more about life, perhaps the reality of white fragility can someday prove as fragile as the construct.

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Review | White fragility is real. But 'White Fragility' is flawed.

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By Robin DiAngelo. Beacon Press. 169 pp. $16. "Race relations are profoundly complex," Robin DiAngelo writes in "White Fragility," a book that, two years after a best-selling debut, is having a new burst of popularity and urgency.

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DiAngelo argues, "Creating a separate and inferior black race simultaneously created the 'superior' white race: one concept could not exist without the other. In this sense, whites need black people; blackness is essential to the creation of white identity," (91). Where do we see this notion sustained in society today? How can anti-racists fight against this?

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In what settings have you witnessed and/or experienced the expectation of white solidarity / racial silence? Specifically, how have you seen this notion of white solidarity present itself in schools?

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Why does DiAngelo consider young white people today to be no less racist than white people in the past? What do you think of her assessment?

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How would you respond to someone who says "Doesn't it all come down to what your parents taught you?" when talking about racist notions and beliefs?

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Why is it so important for white people to "nam[e] our race" as DiAngelo encourages her readers to do in chapter 1? Why is it so problematic for white people to address their race?

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On page 35, DiAngelo asks her readers, "Why is it important to reflect on our teachers in our effort to uncover our racial socialization and the messages we receive from schools?" Does you school or classroom reinforce a racist ideology? Why/why not? What can be done to eliminate/dismantle any racist ideologies?

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What does it mean to say that racism is "a structure, not an event"? How is this distinction helpful when trying to be anti-racist?

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This is always a tough question because no school wants to admit to reinforcing racist ideology, either tacitly or explicitly. However, DiAngelo asks us as individuals to ask uncomfortable questions of ourselves and our participation, tacitly or explicitly, in racist social structures. Because we're asked this as individuals, we should also ask these uncomfortable questions as institutions. In some ways, schools generally, and ours specifically, reinforce this ideology. Broadly speaking, the school-to-prison pipeline exists, but more specifically to our institution we see scholars classes as veritable dumping grounds for "problem students" or under achieving students. These students happen to be majority students of color, which demonstrates a kind of de facto segregation within the school community. The demographics even one level up in Honors classes are vastly white. While our school is making admirable efforts through Communities in Schools, AVID, and pushing students of color to enroll in Honors, AP, and IB, there are still cultural forces, both in communities and in schools themselves, that suppress enrollment in these higher levels. Each day, then, teachers need to have the self-awareness to realize their socialization to mitigate these broad effects that result in academic stratification.

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"When black people are in pain, white people just join book clubs" (perspective piece by Tre Johnson, published in The Washington Post)

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"When black people are in pain, white people just join book clubs" (perspective piece by Tre Johnson, published in The Washington Post)

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People pray near a George Floyd memorial site George Floyd. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

I am 10 and watching my grandfather's back stiffen and shrink as an officer pulls us over on the way home from the mall. I am 16, facedown on the hood of a cruiser in Ewing, N.J. I am 22 and sitting in the back of a car at night with my palms pressed against the driver's seat headrest in an empty lot off a feeder road outside Houston as two officers shine flashlights into our eyes. I am 36 in a Main Line Philadelphia neighborhood, crying in my car when an officer taps my window because someone in a nearby house has called about me. I am 42 and watching the news of George Floyd, the latest racial killing, unspool across TV and social media. And as I watch, I am 10, 16, 22, 36 all over again, all at once.

I am also experiencing another time loop, though. Once again, as the latest racial travesty pierces our collective consciousness, I watch many of my white friends and acquaintances perform the same pieties they played out after Trayvon, Eric, Sandra, Korryn, Botham, Breonna. They are savvy, practiced consumers of Meaningful Things: They've listened to "Serial" and become expert critics of our broken criminal justice system after just one season. They've watched "Insecure" and can suddenly imagine life as Molly or Issa. They've shared the preordained "amplifying" social media post that just reads "This," followed by a link to something profound from a black voice.

This is all to say that when things get real - really murderous, really tragic, really violent or aggressive - my white, liberal, educated friends already know what to do. What they do is read. And talk about their reading. What they do is listen. And talk about how they listened.

Videos of black men and women being killed by police or vigilantes may serve a role in bringing justice, but they also dehumanize black people. (Video: The Washington Post)

What they do is never enough. This isn't the time to circle up with other white people and discuss black pain in the abstract; it's the time to acknowledge and examine the pain they've personally caused. Black people live and die every day under the burdens of a racism more insidious than the current virus that's also disproportionately killing us. And yet white people tend to take a slow route to meaningful activism, locked in familiar patterns, seemingly uninterested in really advancing progress. Theirs is still a world of signs and signaling, where actions like joining book clubs - often based in some "meaningfully curated" readings that are probably easy to name: " White Fragility," " How to Be an Anti-Racist," " Between the World and Me," maybe even " All About Love " - take precedence.

White people are speaking up at protests. How do we know they mean what they say?

But those actions are fraught: Book clubs, for instance, are comfortable gatherings of friends who are unlikely to nudge one another to the places of discomfort that these books, at their best, demand. Who wants to damage a relationship over something as abstract and removed as racism? Learning about new perspectives and the ideas underlying them is great; wanting to discuss them among friends in safe spaces is understandable. But outside the window are people marching to the beat of a different drum.

Social media has become the marketplace for these kinds of performances. It's where people write long posts about the need to examine white privilege, to "name white supremacy," and to either proudly denounce family members or call them in to conversations. And yes, there are the virtual book clubs with names like " Anti-Racism Book Club," "White People Reading Book Club" or "Combating Whiteness Book Club." It's all impossible to miss, thanks to the way the algorithms of my feeds leap to attention when American racism is at its highest. Sometimes I'm even tagged, texted or invited to join in. On more than one occasion, I've been asked to attend discussions with earnest titles along the lines of "White People Townhall" or "We Need to Talk About Race" or "Combating Whiteness." On other occasions, I've been solicited for resources ("trying to build a resource list for white allies to read so tagging some people who might have suggestions").

Because I've been here before, I know what happens next. In a handful of Sundays, my social media feeds will no longer have my white allies "This"-ing, or unpacking their whiteness or privilege, or nudging their kids to put down their tablets and march. Their book clubs will do what all book clubs do: devolve into routine reschedulings and cancellations; turn into collective apologies for not doing the reading or meta-conversations about what everyone should pretend to read next; finally become occasional opportunities to catch up over wine. It is hard and harmful to know that all of this keeps them in a comfortable place, even if doing just a little feels like a reach when the Race Alarms are sounded.

I'm your black friend, but I won't educate you on racism. That's on you.

Right now, many of my black friends are also experiencing the temporary phenomenon of the Outreach: a surge of "checking in" texts and emails, gifts, meals, and private DMs giving - and sometimes even seeking in the same message - support.

This is the racial ouroboros our country finds itself locked in, as black Americans relive an endless loop of injustice and white Americans keep revisiting the same performance, a Broadway show that never closes, just goes on hiatus now and then. This is our own racial ouroboros. The chaos we see now stems in part from the chaos foisted upon us for generations. The injustice we protest isn't rooted in just police killings; it lives also within housing and school choices; social and professional networks; the defunding of nonwhite organizations; the demotion and firing of black employees; the microaggressions and slights that happen at dinner parties, restaurants, cafes and concerts.

I'd like to think that well-meaning, invested white people are really gathering to talk about books to instruct themselves on how they can do more and do better, but it's hard to believe that that's really what most of them are working toward. You've had access to instruction about black humanity, freedom, mobility, happiness and health since we were brought here. It stretches as far back as slave songs and Phillis Wheatley poems and carries through Black Lives Matter activism. You've had your chance to say "This," over and over again. Now act.

Police killing black people is a pandemic, too

The right acknowledgment of black justice, humanity, freedom and happiness won't be found in your book clubs, protest signs, chalk talks or organizational statements. It will be found in your earnest willingness to dismantle systems that stand in our way - be they at your job, in your social network, your neighborhood associations, your family or your home. It's not just about amplifying our voices, it's about investing in them and in our businesses, education, political representation, power, housing and art. It starts, also, with reflection on the harm you've probably caused in a black person's life. It may have happened when you were 10, 16, 22, 36 or 42. Comforting as it may be to read and discuss the big questions about race and justice and America, making up for past wrongs means starting with the fact that you've done wrong in the past, perhaps without realizing it at the time: in the old workplace, neighborhood, classroom, softball field. Maybe even the book club.

I am at a beer garden in Fishtown when the Trayvon Martin murder case reaches its conclusion. I am home in bed, curled like a question mark, crying over the news that Philando Castile has just been shot in front of his partner and their child. Freddie Gray is dead and I am standing in the district office of the Camden City School District, mourning with black co-workers. And I am all these things at once again when I watch my white colleagues, friends, acquaintances and long-ago classmates reopen this time loop. Still learning how to be allies yet never making amends to us.

The confusing, perhaps contradictory advice on what white people should do probably feels maddening. To be told to step up, no step back, read, no listen, protest, don't protest, check on black friends, leave us alone, ask for help or do the work - it probably feels contradictory at times. And yet, you'll figure it out. Black people have been similarly exhausted making the case for jobs, freedom, happiness, justice, equality and the like. It's made us dizzy, but we've managed to find the means to walk straight.

On my stroll to my voting place on Election Day in early June, I rounded a corner of City Hall and saw not only two dozen armed National Guard troops but a black woman slow-riding her bike in wide, dreary circles that created a miniature ouroboros, bringing her closer and closer to the fenced line of soldiers that drew me in, too. As she completed her first arc, I was able to read the sign taped to the handlebars. In red, white and blue letters it read, "No YOU do better."

Twitter: @Tre_John_son

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Perspective | When black people are in pain, white people just join book clubs

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I'm caught in a time loop where my white friends and acquaintances perform the same pieties over and over again.