White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

Multiple Choice and Long Answer questions create ideal opportunities for whole-book review, unit exam, or summative assessments.

Multiple Choice

1. What does “saliency” mean in the discussion of racial identities?

A) Black people’s greater visibility than white people’s in the educational system

B) The comparative importance and visibility of different identities in different contexts

C) Ways in which different identities, especially those involving race, shift over time

D) Ways in which Black people must “code switch” to assimilate in certain contexts

2. Fill in the blanks with the words closest to DiAngelo’s argument in Chapter 2: Race is a ______ construct that shifts ____________.

A) Biological; as evolution changes biology over time

B) Genetic; if your family is multi-racial

C) Social; meanings to perpetuate white supremacy

D) Reversible; to a new identity, if the individual so chooses

3. According to DiAngelo, which example of racism existed in the United States before the arrival of European colonizers?

A) Racism between the Navajo and Apache tribes

B) Racism between Eastern and Western Indigenous tribal nations

C) Racism between Indigenous tribes in the continental United States and Canada

D) None of the above

4. How does DiAngelo define “whiteness”?

A) It is a racial category devoid of any real genetic or biological markers

B) It is an American-centric term meant to describe non-Black individuals

C) It is the group of people who have their origins in the Caucasus mountain region