A CEO once told me he was reading White Fragility so he could understand his inherent privilege. I would have thought his enormous CEO salary would have taught him a few things about privilege first but he didn’t see it my way.

“Be less white” is the book’s final commandment, an incredible expectation considering that the book also 1) says a white identity is inherently racist so how do you be less of something you can’t even be in the first place? 2) is all over the place in identifying what white is exactly: European ancestry? A skin tone? A visual representation of the system?

Based on how the author says she behaves, I had to conclude it came down to being extraordinarily meek and apologetic in the presence of darker skin tones. In other words, she treats people differently because of their race, which I would call… racist.