The Paradoxes of Dismantling Racism and White Privilege

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time,” James Baldwin

If you just clicked on a link and are reading this, you are experiencing one of the paradoxes of dismantling racism and white privilege because by writing this and making it available across the Internet, I have centered my whiteness and the voice of (yet another) man.

My scholarship and public work have for many years now been focused on class, gender, and race inequity, especially as they intersect with formal education.

Any credibility in addressing racism and white privilege that I have earned comes from my critical unpacking of my own whiteness and of my racist heritage in my home and community of birth, but I also have manufactured a greater level of racial awareness by reading and listening to Black voices — notably Black artists/writers and Black scholars.

However, there I stand in front of my classes, centered by my role of authority, my whiteness, and my being a man with the additional weight of almost 6 decades.

Two situations, one recent and one a year or so ago, have pushed me to continue to wrestle with the paradoxes of my activism dedicated to dismantling racism and white privilege.

More immediately, I have been disturbed to see a blog post discrediting Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility being shared across social media, often by Black academics and friends. This challenge to DiAngelo’s work, I discovered, comes from a source that is neither credible nor reliable.

The other situation came over a year ago when I was invited to speak on whiteness and racism at a university (in a…

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