On the surface, a white person saying out loud that they're "not racist" might seem like a positive thing.
But Dr Robin DiAngelo, author of the best-selling book White Fragility: Why It's so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, has a different take on it.
"White people often say 'I'm not racist,'" she tells Jimmy Fallon in the clip above. "I know you have, I have, done things in my life I recognise as racist today. I would not do them again. They were neither intentional, or even conscious, and yet they wounded other people nonetheless.
"I think white people should remove that phrase from their vocabulary: 'I'm not racist.' Trust me, it's not convincing to black people."
DiAngelo says that if we define racism as individual, intentional acts of meanness, most white people aren't racist — but we have to change our understanding of what it actually means to perpetrate racism.
"When I'm talking about the racism that I have, the racism that you have, it's the result of living in a society in which racism is the foundation," she says. "We all absorb it. There's no way we could exempt ourselves from it."
