Robin DiAngelo Quote

To be sure, like the rest of race, whiteness is a fiction, what in the jargon of the academy is termed a social construct, an agreed-on myth that has empirical grit because of its effect, not its essence. But whiteness goes even one better: it is a category of identity that is most useful when its very existence is denied. That’s its twisted genius. Whiteness embodies Charles Baudelaire’s admonition that the loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist. Or, as an alter ego of the character Keyser Söze says in the film The Usual Suspects, The greatest trick the devil ever played was to convince the world that he didn’t exist. The Devil. Racism. Another metaphor. Same difference.

Robin DiAngelo

To be sure, like the rest of race, whiteness is a fiction, what in the jargon of the academy is termed a social construct, an agreed-on myth that has empirical grit because of its effect, not its essence. But whiteness goes even one better: it is a category of identity that is most useful when its very existence is denied. That’s its twisted genius. Whiteness embodies Charles Baudelaire’s admonition that the loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist. Or, as an alter ego of the character Keyser Söze says in the film The Usual Suspects, The greatest trick the devil ever played was to convince the world that he didn’t exist. The Devil. Racism. Another metaphor. Same difference.

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About Robin DiAngelo

Robin Jeanne DiAngelo (née Taylor; born September 8, 1956) is an American author working in the fields of critical discourse analysis and whiteness studies. She formerly served as a tenured professor of multicultural education at Westfield State University and is currently an affiliate associate professor of education at the University of Washington. She is known for her work pertaining to "white fragility", an expression she coined in 2011 and explored further in a 2018 book entitled White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.