White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

In my experience, it is hard to talk about race.  People do become very defensive very quickly, and it is hard to shift the conversation away from thinking about it personally to look at systemic racism.  In the midst of a nationwide debate on institutional racism and police violence, Americans are bulk-buying recent texts on race to help them grapple with that complexity, and I certainly fall into that cliche.  When I saw that many of these books, this one included, had so many holds on them at my local library, I knew that if i wanted to stay in any way current on what is being consumed, I would have to buy things, and buy i did.  I now have half a shelf worth of reading on this subject.  I had already read Ta-Nehisi Coates book, "Between the World And Me", so I started with Ibram Kendi's "How To Be An Antiracist" and this.  My department at work is reading it, and so while reading them in tandem, I finished this first.
The take home message from this book is that it is really hard to discuss race.  In group settings, people express their subjective feelings of being disadvantaged by their whiteness and their dismay at being unable to say what they want.  Getting people to see another point of view, again at least in a group setting, is very hard at the best and impossible at worst.  There is very little in this book about what to do about these barriers, so it is more about recognizing it in yourself, and warnings about what will happen when you try to point it out to people.