The first factor leading to White Fragility is the segregated lives
which most white people live12. Even if whites live in physical
proximity to people of color (and this would be exceptional outside of
an urban or temporarily mixed class neighborhood), segregation occurs on
multiple levels, including representational and informational. Because
whites live primarily segregated lives in a white-dominated society,
they receive little or no authentic information about racism and are
thus unprepared to think about it critically or with complexity. Growing
up in segregated environments (schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, media
images and historical perspectives), white interests and perspectives
are almost always central. An inability to see or consider significance
in the perspectives of people of color results13. Further, white people
are taught not to feel any loss over the absence of people of color in
their lives and in fact, this absence is what defines their schools and
neighborhoods as “good;” whites come to understand that a “good school”
or “good neighborhood” is coded language for “white”14. The quality of
white space being in large part measured via the absence of people of
color (and Blacks in particular) is a profound message indeed, one that
is deeply internalized and reinforced daily through normalized
discourses about good schools and neighborhoods. This dynamic of gain
rather than loss via racial segregation may be the most profound aspect
of white racial socialization of all. Yet, while discourses about what
makes a space good are tacitly understood as racially coded, this coding
is explicitly denied by whites.