Black Fragility? - "DiAngelo’s book does more than rehearse the familiar tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT)––racism is systemic and pervasive; race-blind standards are really white supremacist standards in disguise; lived experience confers special knowledge on victims of racism; and so on—it also uses simple and direct language to teach white people how to talk about race from a CRT perspective... At first glance, it may be hard to understand why such a punishing message would appeal to a white audience. But on closer inspection, the appeal of DiAngelo’s message derives from her masterful exploitation of white guilt. As Shelby Steele has observed, white guilt is less a guilt than a terror—terror at the thought that one might be racist. If one has never felt this terror, then it may be hard to understand how intolerable it can be, and how welcome any alleviation is... The late writer and atheist Christopher Hitchens had a riff about what he called the “cruel experiment” of Christian Original Sin: “We are created sick,” he would often say, “and commanded to be well.” In other words, the doctrine lures you in by preemptively forgiving your shortcomings—yes, you’re a miserable sinner, but it’s not your fault—then goes on to demand your compliance with a never-ending program of recovery on pain of eternal hellfire. If you understand how the doctrine of Original Sin could be seductive, then you should have no trouble understanding the appeal of White Fragility; it operates the same way. DiAngelo expiates guilt by telling white people that they’re not to blame for their racism, then commands them to adopt her version of “antiracism”—on pain of social ostracism and cancellation... A key element of her program is for whites to eliminate a set of normal behaviors when talking to black people about race: the aforementioned “silence, defensiveness, argumentation, withdrawal, certitude, and other forms of pushback.” Of course, a skilled communicator may want to avoid silence, defensiveness, withdrawal, and certitude. But how exactly does one avoid “argumentation” and “other forms of pushback” as well? If you eliminate all these behaviors, only one option remains: enthusiastic agreement. Try to obey these instructions in a real conversation, and you’ll find at least two things: first, you must utterly shut down your mind and personality in order to accomplish it; and second, developing any kind of emotional intimacy with your conversation partner is simply not possible. That is hardly a recipe for fostering healthy interracial relationships. White Fragility has two unstated assumptions about nonwhite people in general, and black people in particular. The first is that we are a homogenous mass of settled opinion with little, if any, diversity of thought—a kind of CRT-aligned hive mind... The second unstated assumption in White Fragility—and this is where the book borders on actual racism—is that black people are emotionally immature and essentially child-like. Blacks, as portrayed in DiAngelo’s writing, can neither be expected to show maturity during disagreement nor to exercise emotional self-control of any kind. The hidden premise of the book is that blacks, not whites, are too fragile... Holding back tears to spare others’ emotions is not something that adults do around their equals; it’s what parents do around children. Indeed, DiAngelo’s picture of the ideal relationship between whites and blacks bears a disturbing resemblance to the relationship between an exasperated parent and a spoiled child: the one constantly practicing emotional self-control, the other triggered by the smallest things and helplessly expressing every emotion as soon as it comes. These are the roles she expects—even encourages—whites and blacks to play. That people can call this anti-racist with a straight face shows how far language has strayed from reality. If White Fragility is the only book you read about race this year, then you will come away with a horribly one-sided education. You will learn, to take a representative example, that “it has not been African-Americans who resist integration efforts; it has always been whites”—as if Zora Neale Hurston did not exist; as if the Hyde County boycott and similar black anti-integration efforts did not happen all over the South. The book’s fundamental one-sidedness, however, should not be surprising, because White Fragility is zealotry disguised as scholarship... our national conversation about race has become unmoored from the goal of real progress and attached instead to an unending quest for spiritual absolution."
At least in Christianity there's grace. But whites are never safe but are always held in contempt
On “White Fragility” - "A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy... It’s been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks... Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it? DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category. If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy... which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.” DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.”... DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of this type is built around the same principles as Orwell’s Newspeak: it banishes ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform, center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices... DiAngelo writes like a person who was put in timeout as a child for speaking clearly. “When there is disequilibrium in the habitus — when social cues are unfamiliar and/or when they challenge our capital — we use strategies to regain our balance,” she says (“People taken out of their comfort zones find ways to deal,” according to Google Translate). Ideas that go through the English-DiAngelo translator usually end up significantly altered, as in this key part of the book when she addresses Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream,” speech... White Fragility is based upon the idea that human beings are incapable of judging each other by the content of their character, and if people of different races think they are getting along or even loving one another, they probably need immediate antiracism training. This is an important passage because rejection of King’s “dream” of racial harmony — not even as a description of the obviously flawed present, but as the aspirational goal of a better future — has become a central tenet of this brand of antiracist doctrine mainstream press outlets are rushing to embrace... The movement that calls itself “antiracism” – I think it deserves that name a lot less than “pro-lifers” deserve theirs and am amazed journalists parrot it without question – is complete in its pessimism about race relations. It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors. Where we reside on the spectrum of righteousness is, they say, almost entirely determined by birth, a view probably shared by a lot of 4chan readers.. This dingbat racialist cult, which has no art, music, literature, and certainly no comedy, is the vision of “progress” institutional America has chosen to endorse in the Trump era. Why? Maybe because it fits. It won’t hurt the business model of the news media, which for decades now has been monetizing division and has known how to profit from moral panics and witch hunts since before Fleet street discovered the Mod/Rocker wars... For corporate America the calculation is simple. What’s easier, giving up business models based on war, slave labor, and regulatory arbitrage, or benching Aunt Jemima? There’s a deal to be made here, greased by the fact that the “antiracism” prophets promoted in books like White Fragility share corporate Americas instinctive hostility to privacy, individual rights, freedom of speech, etc... organizations everywhere will embrace powerful new tools for solving professional disputes, through a never-ending purge. One of the central tenets of DiAngelo’s book (and others like it) is that racism cannot be eradicated and can only be managed through constant, “lifelong” vigilance, much like the battle with addiction. A useful theory, if your business is selling teams of high-priced toxicity-hunters to corporations as next-generation versions of efficiency experts — in the fight against this disease, companies will need the help forever and ever. Cancelations already are happening too fast to track. In a phenomenon that will be familiar to students of Russian history, accusers are beginning to appear alongside the accused. Three years ago a popular Canadian writer named Hal Niedzviecki was denounced for expressing the opinion that “anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities." He reportedly was forced out of the Writer’s Union of Canada for the crime of “cultural appropriation,” and denounced as a racist by many, including a poet named Gwen Benaway. The latter said Niedzviecki “doesn’t see the humanity of indigenous peoples.” Last week, Benaway herself was denounced on Twitter for failing to provide proof that she was Indigenous. Michael Korenberg, the chair of the board at the University of British Columbia, was forced to resign for liking tweets by Dinesh D’Souza and Donald Trump, which you might think is fine – but what about Latino electrical worker Emmanuel Cafferty, fired after a white activist took a photo of him making an OK symbol (it was described online as a “white power” sign)?... People everywhere today are being encouraged to snitch out schoolmates, parents, and colleagues for thoughtcrime. The New York Times wrote a salutary piece about high schoolers scanning social media accounts of peers for evidence of “anti-black racism” to make public, because what can go wrong with encouraging teenagers to start submarining each other’s careers before they’ve even finished growing?... A bizarre echo of North Korea’s “three generations of punishment” doctrine could be seen in the boycotts of Holy Land grocery, a well-known hummus maker in Minneapolis. In recent weeks it’s been abandoned by clients and seen its lease pulled because of racist tweets made by the CEO’s 14 year-old daughter eight years ago"
Teaching 'white fragility' is bad for kids of color - "What he had been raised to see as a trivial and unimportant trait — the color of his skin — was suddenly spotlighted and politically charged, and all his white classmates were implicitly being told to see him as different from them, and vice versa... Seattle Public Schools held training for teachers in which they were told the US is a “race-based white-supremacist society” and white teachers must “bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgment of [their] thieved inheritance”... KIPP schools — the network of free, open-enrollment college-prep schools in low-income communities in America — abandoned their classic slogan “Work Hard, Be Nice” because it “supports the illusion of meritocracy,” which “is not going to dismantle systemic racism.” Last November, Megyn Kelly revealed that she is pulling her kids from their private Upper West Side school after a letter distributed to faculty members stated, “There is a killer cop sitting in every school where White children learn.”... DiAngelo paints western society as more akin to the racial caste system in India — in which darker skinned people are rendered “untouchable” and lighter skinned people are seen as superior Brahmins — rather than one of the most inclusive and progressive cultures on earth. Her belief that “individualism,” “objectivity” and “rationalism” are pillars of “whiteness” is functionally indistinguishable from a Ku Klux Klan member’s white supremacist handbook"
I’m Black and Afraid of 'White Fragility' - "What becomes clear after getting past the introduction is that White Fragility is really an expression of DiAngelo’s own guilt and fear about her contradictory role as a Euro-American racial dialogue manager: she gets paid to be an expert on race and racism despite the fact that she believes that white folks can never be experts on race and racism... diversity training has been shown to be a largely ineffective way to address racism in American workplaces. These lectures and workshops do little—if anything—in the way of addressing the structural tensions that workers must navigate on a daily basis. As Frank Dobbin has noted in his book Inventing Equal Opportunity, such training is often merely a clever way of establishing legal protections for firms facing accusations of discrimination. Studies have also shown that such diversity training can actually activate and reinforce biases. It is no wonder DiAngelo had to explain why corporate employees under her tutelage react to her the same way high school students react to a substitute teacher. White Fragility also reinforces the belief that the responsibility for racism lies with individual workers’ attitudes and invisible phenomena including implicit bias rather than the policies and practices authorized by employers. If I were an employer, why wouldn’t I want to hire a specialist to train workers to believe that their own identities and unconscious biases are the main sources of inequality, instead of exploitative workplace practices? Simply put, DiAngelo continues to be paid by schools and firms across the country for the same reason that employers pay any professional or manager: it advances their material interests as opposed to the interests of their personnel. There’s a more essential problem at play here: White Fragility actually reinforces racist beliefs. Sociologists generally agree with the notion that ethnicity can refer to an identity that individuals or communities assert, but races are labels that are ascribed to individuals. As scholars like Barbara E. Fields, Adolph Reed Jr., and, amusingly, DiAngelo’s fellow-traveler Ibram Kendi, have repeatedly noted, racist beliefs and practices presume and reify the belief that nature produced different types of humans with unique, inborn attributes. DiAngelo doesn’t talk about supposed “racial” differences in skulls or intellectual capacity, but the book is filled with associations of race with physiological differences. Terms such as racial stress, racial [dis]comfort, racial control, racial knowledge, the unavoidable dynamics of racism, racial relaxation, and racial manipulation disturbingly resemble inverted beliefs communicated by white nationalists and commodified by the Armitage family in the film “Get Out.”... No matter how many times she confidently claims that “as a sociologist [but not really], I’m quite comfortable making generalizations [without deploying sociological methods],” racial essentialism is racial essentialism... it offers nothing to address the structures undergirding systemic racism within political and economic institutions or the dramatic decline in state funding for social programs in recent decades. Nor can it speak to the coronavirus pandemic"
Honest Diversity Is The Answer - Not White Fragility - "Take the central claim of her book: that white people’s entitlement to feeling comfortable makes them defensive, even hostile, when conversations about race need to be had. No doubt, many white people fit that bill. However, it is not because they are white. It is because they are human. I speak from personal experience. In the wake of 9/11, I toured the world to promote liberal reform in my faith of Islam. Before audiences of my fellow Muslims, I argued that the time had come to update our religious interpretations for a pluralistic 21st century. I also explained that Islam has its own tradition of independent thinking. As people of faith, we could rediscover that glorious tradition instead of turning to outside influences. The “Muslim fragility” that I witnessed pained me. Most of my co-religionists did not want to hear about the need to change ourselves. Despite backing up my case with passages from the Qur’an, I was met mostly with denial, consternation, condemnation, and, on occasion, violent threats. It took me years to appreciate that humans, universally, respond badly to being blamed. The primitive part of our brains give rise to the ego, and the ego kicks in as a shield whenever we feel threatened. For tough conversations to succeed, emotional defenses must be lowered all-around. Only then can people tap into the more evolved part of their brains, allowing reason to co-exist with emotion rather than being bulldozed by it. This is why shaming white people for being fragile is both misleading and toxic. Misleading because everybody with a brain, regardless of race, can be tricked into oversensitivity by the ego. Toxic because drenching an environment in shame rarely inspires people to listen to one another authentically. More often, research shows, shaming humiliates and plants the seeds of animosity. It demeans one group to redeem the dignity of another, sowing resentment, fueling self-censorship, and undermining collaboration. Beware any diversity and inclusion consultant who stays in business that way. There is an alternate path to tackling systemic prejudice. More ethical, engaging and, ultimately, effective than to accuse white people of fragility is to promote — among all people — “honest diversity.” Honest diversity replaces humiliation with integrity, as in wholeness. It recognizes that each of us, whatever our labels, is a multifaceted plural. By contrast, dishonest diversity slices and dices individuals into categories, as if directing people to their assigned places. Once ensconced in these cages, individuals are flattened to a single dimension, vaporizing all the rest that makes human beings capable of similarity as much as of difference... Counting categories to measure success is a recipe for perpetual grievance because it inevitably leaves ever-narrowing niches out of the picture. Much better to cultivate diversity of viewpoint, which replaces silos with dialogues and thereby invites people into relationship. Yes, that means so-called white straight guys instantly belong. Yet their belonging takes nothing away from everybody else because wholeness, by definition, is not a zero-sum game. In fact, the pursuit of different viewpoints changes the power game altogether, especially for historically marginalized people like me. Us-against-Them tribalisms demand to know whose side I am on. I am expected to swap one form of assimilation — “theirs” — for another kind of conformity — “ours.” But viewpoint diversity values me for my individuality. It liberates me from having to be an avatar of somebody else’s narrative. And that is as it should be. Because even within identity groups, members will have varied backstories. As a result, they will also have different ideas and opinions. Recognizing this is the remedy for essentialism, racial and otherwise... Yale’s Jennifer Richeson and NYU’s Maureen Craig point out that Black Americans and Asian Americans become more conservative when they are reminded that Latinx Americans are growing in number. The prospect of losing status triggers fear in everyone, everywhere."
Teaching Robin DiAngelo's 'White Fragility' Will Get You Sued - "nobody likes to be called a racist, particularly people who strive not to be one. It’s particularly galling to be assigned this malignant opinion by a stranger who knows nothing about the accused except the color of her skin... if dwelling on ethnic grievances promoted peace and understanding, then the Middle East would be the most peaceful place on earth. Should one suffer in silence as strangers affix the label of “racist” to each white forehead regardless of background or experience? Many people try to brandish their intersectionality credentials to escape the label. Were your ancestors among the 360,000 northern troops who sacrificed their lives for the freedom of African-American slaves? Did your white but Jewish ancestors barely escape the Nazis’ effort to “defend” Germany? Are you related to the white Muslim Bosnians slaughtered to address some ancient historical grievance? Or are you a patriotic American who is committed to the principles of equal justice under the law? You can try your luck in the victim competition in your small group. But good luck with your tales of anti-Irish discrimination in the 1800s. By leveraging your family history, you’re helping to validate the woke dismantling of equality. Don’t play that game... file a discrimination complaint with Human Resources. It’s not legal to discriminate against any race or skin color—yes, even Caucasians. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission proudly trumpets its courtroom victories fighting discrimination, including when it occurs against Caucasians. In Kilgore v. Trussville Development, the EEOC successfully sued an employer whose manager repeatedly referenced the victim’s race (Caucasian) stating, “you’re the wrong color,” before firing her. In 2012, Kauai in Hawaii paid $120,000 to settle a federal charge of racial harassment against a Caucasian woman. Her manager continuously made disparaging remarks about Caucasians, told her to assimilate more into local Hawaiian culture, and leave her Caucasian boyfriend for a local boy who was a “person of color.” In 2011, the EEOC successfully sued Dots, a clothing retailer, that denied employment to Caucasian applicants since early 2007."
Is Anti-Racism Training Just Peddling White Supremacy? - "There’s an old syllogism used to describe desperate politicians: (1) We must do something; (2) This is something; (3) We must do this... Daniel Bergner has a long profile of DiAngelo and her fellow anti-racism trainers in the New York Times. The story is far more devastating than it might appear at a casual glance. It reveals a business model spreading kooky, harmful, and outright racist ideas... One of DiAngelo’s favorite examples is instructive. She uses the famous story of Jackie Robinson. Rather than say “he broke through the color line,” she instructs people instead to describe him as “Jackie Robinson, the first Black man whites allowed to play major-league baseball.”... It is not an accident that DiAngelo changes the story to eliminate Robinson’s agency and obscure his heroic qualities. It’s the point. Her program treats individual merit as a myth to be debunked. Even a figure as remarkable as Robinson is reduced to a mere pawn of systemic oppression... Bergner asked DiAngelo how she could reject “rationalism” as a criteria for hiring teachers, on the grounds that it supposedly favors white candidates. Don’t poor children need teachers to impart skills like that so they have a chance to work in a high-paying profession employing reasoning skills? DiAngelo’s answer seems to imply that she would abolish these high-paying professions altogether... (Presumably DiAngelo’s ideal socialist economy would keep in place at least some well-paid professions — say, “diversity consultant,” which earns her a comfortable seven-figure income.) Singleton, likewise, proposed evolutionary social changes to the economy that would render it unnecessary to teach writing and linear thought to minority children... Whether or not a world along these lines will ever exist, or is even possible to design, is at best uncertain. What is unquestionably true is that these revolutionary changes will not be completed within the lifetime of anybody currently alive. Which is to say, a program to deny the value of teaching so-called white values to Black children is to condemn them to poverty. Unsurprisingly, Bergner’s story shows two educators exposed to the program and rebelling against it. One of them, Leslie Chislett, had to endure some ten anti-racism training sessions before eventually snapping at the irrationality of a program that denigrates learning. “The city has tens of millions invested in A.P. for All, so my team can give kids access to A.P. classes and help them prepare for A.P. exams that will help them get college degrees,” she says, “and we’re all supposed to think that writing and data are white values?” Ibram X. Kendi, another successful entrepreneur in the anti-racism field, has a more frontal response to this problem. The achievement gap — the long-standing difference in academic performance between Black and white children — is a myth, he argues. The supposed gap merely reflects badly designed tests, he argues. It does not matter to him how many different kinds of measures of academic performance show this to be true. Nor does he seem receptive to the possibility that the achievement gap reflects environmental factors (mainly worse schools, but also access to nutrition, health care, outside learning, and so on) rather than any innate differences."
A Professor Pushed Back Against ‘White Fragility’ Training. The College Investigated Her for 9 Months. - "Elisa Parrett, a newly tenured 38-year-old professor of English at Lake Washington Institute of Technology, the only public technical institute in Washington state, realized last June that she had some qualms about the approach her university—which is located in suburban Seattle and has about 6,000 students—had taken to diversity and inclusion... the decision to have the races meet separately made Parrett uncomfortable. "Racial segregation of that kind seems like a throwback to the pre-1960s and not a good way to create any kind of cooperation or collaboration"... LWTech went to war against a tenured faculty member, launching a cartoonishly over-the-top disciplinary process that included the hiring of a private investigator, dozens of interviews, and claims of widespread trauma... What happened to Parrett, while not common, is part of a trend toward an intolerant approach to political differences—one in which disagreement on mainstream political issues is reframed as a form of harm... Parrett should have had every reason to believe she could ask questions and express points of disagreement without fear of professional retribution. For one thing, as an employee of a public college, she has robust First Amendment protections that do not generally apply in private workplaces. For another, she had recently earned tenure... The group seemed unhappy Parrett had injected such a skeptical and defiant note into the proceedings—a fair amount of cross-talk and accusation ensued—though she says a number of other colleagues thanked her (mostly privately) for speaking up... nothing in the content of what Parrett said is anywhere outside the mainstream of American political debate. It's the sort of thing one could find any day of the week in a David Brooks column, for instance. Some of the ideas she expressed, like a preference for focusing more on class and less on race, are being loudly debated even in many leftist spaces... In her email to me, Ames doubled down on her claim that Parrett's behavior in the meeting had been frothingly out of control, writing that Parrett had "started aggressively yelling at folks in the meeting." At the time, Ames didn't know I had access to the leaked audio, in which Parrett does occasionally raise her voice to be heard but never comes across as anywhere nearly as aggressive or bullying as Ames described. When I sent Ames the audio file and asked her to point me to where Parrett yelled at anyone, a university spokeswoman who was on the thread jumped in, writing that "The audio speaks for itself but does not reflect Elisa's visible anger." Apparently, Parrett was "aggressively yelling at folks in the meeting" but it was the kind of aggressive yelling that doesn't show up on audio. I was also curious about Ames' claim that she found Parrett's conduct "downright scary," so I asked her about that as well—whether she herself was personally scared or felt some sense of physical threat. Ames responded that she was scared on behalf of hypothetical marginalized students Parrett might teach... LWTech's pursuit of Parrett hasn't followed the disciplinary procedures laid out in the college's contract with its employees. Instead, Parrett and Snider claim, Morrison has appointed an ad hoc group of administrators to run an investigation that wasn't following any established procedure... But there's an even bigger issue with the college's investigation: Whether or not Parrett's acts were "insolent, insubordinate and disruptive," there's only the thinnest case that she has even violated any rule. "Not any that they've been able to point out to me," says Parrett. Indeed, there's a strong argument that LWTech's investigation has violated both its own internal guidelines (Snider pointed me toward multiple relevant clauses in the union-negotiated employment contract) and Parrett's rights as an employee of a public university... In progressive communities threatened by illiberalism, this hysterical style of accusation is now commonplace. Take the story of David Shor... Similarly, in 2017 the philosopher Rebecca Tuvel was accused by a fellow professional philosopher of "enact[ing] violence and perpetuat[ing] harm" via a controversial paper she wrote on "transracialism"... the fallout from a Journal of the American Medical Association podcast in which the concept of structural racism was mildly criticized, the article included a quote from a physician who described the podcast in terms one might reserve for the drive-by shooting of a toddler. "I think it caused an incalculable amount of pain and trauma to Black physicians and patients," she said. "And I think it's going to take a long time for the journal to heal that pain." Some people are likely, again, to write these examples off as meaningless anecdotes. But many intellectuals have been noting this tendency toward inflated claims of harm on the left for a while now... When an Australian psychologist, a heterodox American liberal, and a lesbian feminist activist are all criticizing the same phenomenon from different angles, perhaps it would be premature to write that phenomenon off as the fears of a bunch of old crusty white guys with outmoded views. In this worldview, everything is a harm. There is no such thing as legitimate political disagreement, because we (the progressive in-group) already know the correct answer to every question (even if the answer can sometimes change overnight), and anyone who disagrees clearly—clearly—does so not because of some well-founded political or philosophical difference but because that person wants to harm the innocent people we are righteously hellbent on protecting. There is literally no other explanation for such a difference of opinion, and it doesn't matter whether the opinion being denounced is held by the majority of Americans. It is simply toxic to treat mainstream disagreement about political issues as harmful and worthy of discipline. Yet in some circles, this style of zealotry is not just present but escalating."
How 'White Fragility' Talks Down to Black People - The Atlantic - "DiAngelo has spent a very long time conducting diversity seminars in which whites, exposed to her catechism, regularly tell her—many while crying, yelling, or storming toward the exit—that she’s insulting them and being reductionist. Yet none of this seems to have led her to look inward. Rather, she sees herself as the bearer of an exalted wisdom that these objectors fail to perceive, blinded by their inner racism. DiAngelo is less a coach than a proselytizer... DiAngelo’s book is replete with claims that are either plain wrong or bizarrely disconnected from reality... DiAngelo insinuates that, when white women cry upon being called racists, Black people are reminded of white women crying as they lied about being raped by Black men eons ago. But how would she know? Where is the evidence for this presumptuous claim? An especially weird passage is where DiAngelo breezily decries the American higher-education system, in which, she says, no one ever talks about racism... an education-school curriculum neglecting racism in our times would be about as common as a home unwired for electricity. DiAngelo’s depiction of white psychology shape-shifts according to what her dogma requires. On the one hand, she argues in Chapter 1 that white people do not see themselves in racial terms; therefore, they must be taught by experts like her of their whiteness. But for individuals who harbor so little sense of themselves as a group, the white people whom DiAngelo describes are oddly tribalist when it suits her narrative. “White solidarity,” she writes in Chapter 4, “requires both silence about anything that exposes the advantages of the white population and tacit agreement to remain racially united in the protection of white supremacy.” But if these people don’t even know whiteness is a category, just what are they now suddenly defending? DiAngelo also writes as if certain shibboleths of the Black left—for instance, that all disparities between white and Black people are due to racism of some kind—represent the incontestable truth. This ideological bias is hardly unique to DiAngelo, and a reader could look past it, along with the other lapses in argumentation I have noted, if she offered some kind of higher wisdom. The problem is that White Fragility is the prayer book for what can only be described as a cult. We must consider what is required to pass muster as a non-fragile white person. Refer to a “bad neighborhood,” and you’re using code for Black; call it a “Black neighborhood,” and you’re a racist; by DiAngelo’s logic, you are not to describe such neighborhoods at all, even in your own head. You must not ask Black people about their experiences and feelings, because it isn’t their responsibility to educate you. Instead, you must consult books and websites. Never mind that upon doing this you will be accused of holding actual Black people at a remove, reading the wrong sources, or drawing the wrong lessons from them. You must never cry in Black people’s presence as you explore racism, not even in sympathy, because then all the attention goes to you instead of Black people. If you object to any of the “feedback” that DiAngelo offers you about your racism, you are engaging in a type of bullying “whose function is to obscure racism, protect white dominance, and regain white equilibrium.” That is a pretty strong charge to make against people who, according to DiAngelo, don’t even conceive of their own whiteness. But if you are white, make no mistake: You will never succeed in the “work” she demands of you. It is lifelong, and you will die a racist just as you will die a sinner. Remember also that you are not to express yourself except to say Amen... DiAngelo does not see fit to address why all of this agonizing soul-searching is necessary to forging change in society. One might ask just how a people can be poised for making change when they have been taught that pretty much anything they say or think is racist and thus antithetical to the good. What end does all this self-mortification serve? Impatient with such questions, DiAngelo insists that “wanting to jump over the hard, personal work and get to ‘solutions’” is a “foundation of white fragility.” In other words, for DiAngelo, the whole point is the suffering. And note the scare quotes around solutions, as if wanting such a thing were somehow ridiculous... White Fragility is, in the end, a book about how to make certain educated white readers feel better about themselves. DiAngelo’s outlook rests upon a depiction of Black people as endlessly delicate poster children within this self-gratifying fantasy about how white America needs to think—or, better, stop thinking. Her answer to white fragility, in other words, entails an elaborate and pitilessly dehumanizing condescension toward Black people. The sad truth is that anyone falling under the sway of this blinkered, self-satisfied, punitive stunt of a primer has been taught, by a well-intentioned but tragically misguided pastor, how to be racist in a whole new way."
This is no surprise. Liberals are convinced that American schools don't teach slavery or racism, which is why they're obsessed with teaching "critical race theory" (when they're not claiming that that is something only taught in law school)
A Closer Look at 'White Fragility' Theory - "The organizers opened by telling participants—which included white, black, and multi-racial people—that they were creating a safe space to discuss difficult topics. However, white attendees were then informed that, as beneficiaries of institutional racism, they were complicit in racial injustice and that expressions of dismay or guilt were inappropriate and unwelcome... Morgan, a progressive leader in a voter organizing coalition, also learned over time to hold her tongue. “I can’t disagree publicly with one of my peers of color,” she said, without the risk of being perceived as a racist.” A biologist working on rural land management made a similar comment, noting that several colleagues had moved on as disagreements with a black manager about species at risk got interpreted through a racial lens. Peter, a white male, sat on the board of an environmental organization known for strong analytics. An internal memo from the DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) Committee described an emergency storm response as racially biased. Peter acknowledged the plausibility of the claim, but since it was likely to find its way into a newsletter to the organization’s entire membership, he requested more information. He asked if this bias was due to the race-based economic inequities created by centuries of systemic racism, or if there was an additional and separate racist dimension, and if so, whether there was data to help support the claim. An email from the committee to the staff and board described such a request as racist. No staff or board members objected to this publicly. Several of them, including some on the committee, later told Peter in private that they disagreed with the email but needed “to keep their heads down.” Peter left the board shortly thereafter... Some writers have pointed out that the concept of white fragility is so broad and loose that it doesn’t qualify for social science research. As a psychologist, I tend to agree. Anything from academic critique to individual expressions of grief about race-based suffering can invite the label... ideas can be sticky or contagious for lots of reasons, independent of their truth. In the case of white fragility, at least part of the stickiness may result from the way the concept is defined and deployed.
Circular logic
Opacity
Rejecting research
A subtle yet satisfying insult?...
The idea of white fragility may also resonate because it is consonant with the current dominant paradigm for examining race relations, which academics call critical race theory.
Tribes, not individuals
Competition vs. inclusion
Guilty either way
Denying progress"
White Fragility: Unpacking the Kafka Traps of Robin DiAngelo's NYT Bestseller - "If DiAngelo, an affiliate professor of education at the University of Washington, were simply outing her own biased patterns, that would be one thing. Where her argument breaks the rules of good scholarship is that she makes it in a way that's unfalsifiable... For DiAngelo, you are racist even if you actively try to promote racial equality—for instance, by marching with Dr. Martin Luther King in the 1960s. If you're white, there is no way for you to not be racist. A good scholar will present a hypothesis and test it. This is the scientific method, and it applies as much to the social sciences (DiAngelo is a sociologist) as to the physical sciences. The reason scholars do this is that we're all human, and none of us has all the answers. Therefore, we must discuss and debate ideas, and marshal evidence for and against them, in order to reach the truth. At the root of good scholarship is the humility to accept that you might not have the world completely figured out. DiAngelo takes a different tack. She presents her hypothesis as axiomatic and therefore as beyond question. If you're white, you're racist; full stop. DiAngelo further breaks from the established rules of scholarship by explicitly adopting a mentality of: believe all accusers... The problem is that accusations aren't always true. Sometimes the person making the accusation has misunderstood the situation. They might mishear, lack context, or simply have an underlying assumption that's incorrect... DiAngelo's approach is a refutation of the idea of, "innocent until proven guilty." But it's bigger than that, too. It's a rejection of the scientific method, wherein claims (even claims such as, "John's a racist") are weighed according to things like evidence and can be disagreed with. If you're accused of racism, under DiAngelo's approach, even asking a third party to weigh in is considered unacceptable. DiAngelo says that sometimes, if someone calls her a racist, she's tempted to ask another person of color for their perspective. But she dismisses this urge as "inappropriate" and something that "upholds racism." Even weirder, for DiAngelo, denial of the accusation of racism is proof of your racism... if you deny that you are racist, you are part of the group that (according to DiAngelo) does more actual damage to people of color than the KKK. This is a logical fallacy known as a Kafka trap. A Kafka trap is when someone is accused of something, and if they defend themselves then it's considered proof of their guilt. Crucially and disturbingly, DiAngelo doesn't play by her own rules on this one. John McWhorter, a black liberal and Columbia University professor, wrote a review of White Fragility in The Atlantic that accuses the book of racism. The review is titled, "The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility" and includes lines like this: "Few books about race have more openly infantilized Black people than this supposedly authoritative tome." When an interviewer brought up McWhorter's criticism, DiAngelo dismissed it. Her response: "I think that that is a disingenuous reading on the part of John McWhorter."... Besides the idea that all white people are racist and that any accusation of racism must be accepted (unless it's a black liberal calling DiAngelo racist), there's a third core of the book that's in some ways equally troubling: another Kafka trap. DiAngelo argues that, if you're white, you are automatically fragile when it comes to any discussion of race... Weirdly, even wanting to promote racial equality is a sign of white fragility. For DiAngelo, the guilt is the point; if you're white, the work is to embrace this guilt. And, "wanting to jump over the hard, personal work and get to 'solutions'" is one of the patterns at the, "foundation of white fragility."... The other big issue with DiAngelo's book is that I got a consistent sense, from the stories she told, that her empathy for her fellow human was tied to skin color... "Her friends wanted to alert us to the fact that she was in poor health and 'might be having a heart attack.' Upon questioning from us, they clarified that they meant this literally. These coworkers were sincere in their fear that the young woman might actually die as a result of the feedback." How did DiAngelo respond to the fact that a white woman might have died during one of her workshops? I don't know how she responded in the moment, but in the book she described it as a, "cogent example of white fragility." She bemoaned how it took attention away from the people of color in the room"
What anti-racism really means and how to talk about it - The Spectator World - "How do you navigate conversations with people when the default assumption is that you’re a racist? What do you do when calmly and sincerely stating that you are not a racist is taken as evidence of your guilt of racism? First, understand what the terms mean, where they come from, and who are the proponents. ‘Anti-racism’ means being against racism, except for one important detail. What anti-racist advocates mean when they use the word ‘racism’ isn’t the same as what most people mean.‘Anti-racism’ comes directly from the academic scholarship of Critical Race Theory... She explains what she calls ‘racism’ this way: ‘the question is not “did racism take place?” but instead “how did racism manifest in this situation?”’ In other words, all situations contain racism, and it is up to the anti-racist activist to uncover it. To do anything else is described as — you guessed it — being a ‘racist’ by upholding ‘racism’.Second, understand how these ideas are used unfairly against you. The ‘anti-racism’ program offered by Critical Race Theory offers no neutrality. Everyone is either an ‘anti-racist’ or they are ‘racists’ by default. The lines of literature in which DiAngelo situates her claims clearly state that there is no such thing as being not-racist, and she repeatedly asserts that neutrality on this issue means favoring ‘racism’. Not even progressives are safe... This false dichotomy is central to the ‘anti-racism’ narrative currently being forwarded, especially by other New York Times bestselling authors like Ijeoma Oluo, Layla F. Saad, and Ibram X. Kendi, whose books are currently dominating the bestseller lists. Put bluntly, the only option these activist-scholars offer is to join their movement or accept being a ‘racist’."