The
Atlantic
I must admit that I had not gotten around to actually reading Robin
DiAngelo’s White Fragility until recently. But it was time to jump in.
DiAngelo is an education professor and—most prominently today—a diversity
consultant who argues that whites in America must face the racist bias
implanted in them by a racist society. Their resistance to acknowledging this,
she maintains, constitutes a “white fragility” that they must overcome in order
for meaningful progress on both interpersonal and societal racism to happen.
White
Fragility
was published in 2018 but jumped to the top of the New York Times best-seller
list amid the protests following the death of George Floyd and the ensuing
national reckoning about racism. DiAngelo has convinced university
administrators, corporate human-resources offices, and no small part of the
reading public that white Americans must embark on a self-critical project of
looking inward to examine and work against racist biases that many have barely
known they had.
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I
am not convinced. Rather, I have learned that one of America’s favorite advice
books of the moment is actually a racist tract. Despite the sincere intentions
of its author, the book diminishes Black people in the name of dignifying us.
This is unintentional, of course, like the racism DiAngelo sees in all whites.
Still, the book is pernicious because of the authority that its author has been
granted over the way innocent readers think.
Reading White Fragility is rather like attending a diversity seminar.
DiAngelo patiently lays out a rationale for white readers to engage in a
self-examination that, she notes, will be awkward and painful. Her chapters are
shortish, as if each were a 45-minute session. DiAngelo seeks to instruct.
She
operates from the now-familiar concern with white privilege, aware of the
unintentional racism ever lurking inside of her that was inculcated from birth
by the white supremacy on which America was founded. To atone for this original
sin, she is devoted to endlessly exploring, acknowledging, and seeking to undo
whites’ “complicity with and investment in” racism. To DiAngelo, any failure to
do this “work,” as adherents of this paradigm often put it, renders one racist.
As
such, a major bugbear for DiAngelo is the white American, often of modest
education, who makes statements like I don’t see color or asks questions
like How dare you call me “racist”? Her assumption that all people have
a racist bias is reasonable—science has demonstrated it. The problem is what
DiAngelo thinks must follow as the result of it.
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.
When
writers who are this sure of their convictions turn out to make a compelling
case, it is genuinely exciting. This is sadly not one of those times, even
though white guilt and politesse have apparently distracted many readers from
the book’s numerous obvious flaws.
For
one, DiAngelo’s book is replete with claims that are either plain wrong or
bizarrely disconnected from reality. Exactly who comes away from the saga of
Jackie Robinson thinking he was the first Black baseball player good enough to
compete with whites? “Imagine if instead the story,” DiAngelo writes, “went
something like this: ‘Jackie Robinson, the first black man whites allowed to
play major-league baseball.’” But no one need imagine this scenario, as others
have pointed out, because it is something every baseball fan already knows.
Later in the book, 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. “I
can get through graduate school without ever discussing racism,” she writes. “I
can graduate from law school without ever discussing racism. I can get through
a teacher-education program without ever discussing racism.” I am mystified
that DiAngelo thinks this laughably antique depiction reflects any period after
roughly 1985. For example, an education-school
curriculum neglecting racism in our times would be about as common
as a home unwired for electricity.
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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. Namely,
thou shalt not utter:
I
know people of color.
I
marched in the sixties.
You
are judging me.
You
don’t know me.
You
are generalizing.
I
disagree.
The
real oppression is class.
I
just said one little innocent thing.
Some
people find offense where there is none.
You
hurt my feelings.
I
can’t say anything right.
This
is an abridgment of a list DiAngelo offers in Chapter 9; its result is to
silence people. Whites aren’t even allowed to say, “I don’t feel safe.” Only
Black people can say that. If you are white, you are solely to listen as
DiAngelo tars you as morally stained. “Now breathe,” she counsels to keep you
relaxed as you undergo this. She does stress that she is not dealing with a
good/bad dichotomy and that your inner racist does not make you a bad person.
But with racism limned as such a gruesome spiritual pollution, harbored by
individuals moreover entrapped in a society within which they exert racism
merely by getting out of bed, the issue of gray zones seems beside the point.
By the end, DiAngelo has white Americans muzzled, straitjacketed, tied down,
and chloroformed for good measure—but for what?
And herein is the real problem with White Fragility. 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.
A
corollary question is why Black people need to be treated the way DiAngelo
assumes we do. The very assumption is deeply condescending to all proud Black
people. In my life, racism has affected me now and then at the margins, in very
occasional social ways, but has had no effect on my access to societal
resources; if anything, it has made them more available to me than they would
have been otherwise. Nor should anyone dismiss me as a rara avis. Being middle
class, upwardly mobile, and Black has been quite common during my existence
since the mid-1960s, and to deny this is to assert that affirmative action for
Black people did not work.
In
2020—as opposed to 1920—I neither need nor want anyone to muse on how whiteness
privileges them over me. Nor do I need wider society to undergo teachings in
how to be exquisitely sensitive about my feelings. I see no connection between
DiAngelo’s brand of reeducation and vigorous, constructive activism in the real
world on issues of import to the Black community. And I cannot imagine that any
Black readers could willingly submit themselves to DiAngelo’s ideas while
considering themselves adults of ordinary self-regard and strength. Few books
about race have more openly infantilized Black people than this supposedly
authoritative tome.
Or
simply dehumanized us. DiAngelo preaches that Black History Month errs in that
it “takes whites out of the equation”—which means that it doesn’t focus enough
on racism. Claims like this get a rise out of a certain kind of room, but
apparently DiAngelo wants Black History Month to consist of glum recitations of
white perfidy. This would surely help assuage DiAngelo’s sense of complicity in
our problems, but does she consider what a slog this gloomy, knit-browed
Festivus of a holiday would be for actual Black people? Too much of White
Fragility has the problem of elevating rhetorical texture over common
sense.
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.
1 comment:
I agree that while the premise of white folks have all absorbed racist ideation, self exploration and flagellation will not solve the problem. Self awareness and examining our emotions and ideas is a good thing, but only if it takes us from our comfort zone into the real world of action and interaction with others. The examination of class, who we align with and why is imperative. Our consumerism, materialistic and individualistic approach to live is also needed to understand and to become anti racist. Without action to change the world to be more equal and just, it’s all B.S.
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