White defensiveness

White defensiveness is a term to describe defensive responses by white people to discussions of societal discrimination, structural racism, and white privilege. The term has been applied to characterize the responses of white people to portrayals of the Atlantic slave trade and European colonization, or scholarship on the legacy of those systems in modern society. Academics and historians have identified multiple forms of white defensiveness, including white denial, white diversion, and white fragility, the last of which was popularized by scholar Robin DiAngelo.

White people are described within the theory as displaying substantially uneasy responses when questioned about racial dynamics (i.e. instances of possible racism)—said to be as a self-protective strategy to conceal grief, trauma, and intergenerational trauma.