White Fragility
People are susceptible to hucksters. And so we have a newly-popularized cult of racism masquerading as anti-racism, and one of its most bizarre examples is a book called White Fragility. Not only does it lump white people together in a unitary group, but it labels them as inherently weak. Maybe author DiAngelo has a point, though – anyone who would buy the thesis of her book is, at the very least, weak in the head.
I could not care less what this woman calls me – which would be “racist,” since that’s what she calls white people who reject her theory (although if you actually looked at me, I might be physically indistinguishable from many people nowadays labeled as “brown”). But I do care that her book has become extremely popular – number one on Amazon at the moment.
How can so many people buy (literally and figuratively) such destructive and reprehensible stupidity? And yet DiAngelo has been getting good money for years already, offering companies and schools the benefit of her “wisdom” in workshops in the field. Apparently, the need to self-flagellate is strong. And the effects of workshops like that and books like this are obvious.
Matt Taibbi has quite a bit to say about 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 (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), 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.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.
This is the swill that a great many Americans seem to want to swallow. And to be brainwashed by – although at the moment 15% of the Amazon reviews of the book are one-star, it’s not enough.
Perhaps a lot of people are buying it without reading it, as a badge of wokeness and humility (buying a book is easier than getting down on one knee).
This is part of the group identity politics that has poisoned our culture in the last couple of decades and is the main card in the deck of the Democrats, and apparently a very effective one. And for DiAngelo, it’s been a very lucrative one, proving once again that no one ever went broke underestimating the American public.
I think that a lot of people buy this book because it’s popular. If everybody thinks it’s great, then it must be, right? It’s that desire to dance in a circle, which has never been one of my desires. So perhaps it’s time for one of my favorite passages from Czech author Milan Kundera’s work The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which he wrote in the late 1970s:
Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.
[NOTE: If you want to familiarize yourself with DiAngelo’s credentials, go here. It reads like a primer of what leftist education hath wrought in recent decades, with leftist jargon galore. She bills herself as offering a “critical racial & social justice education.” A little sampler of her academic background:
I received my PhD in Multicultural Education from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2004. I earned tenure at Westfield State University in Massachusetts. Currently I am Affiliate Associate Professor of Education at the University of Washington, Seattle. In addition, I hold two Honorary Doctoral Degrees. My area of research is in Whiteness Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis, tracing how whiteness is reproduced in everyday narratives.]
Perhaps the best analysis of this absolutely pernicious nonsense is by James Lindsay (whose background lies in math and physics) on “The Cult Dynamics of Wokeness” at the website New Discourses. There is also an excellent short video from Australian television of Douglas Murray, author of the superb The Madness of Crowds, on the phenomenon of the miseducation of the young by privileged elites into stupidity and irrationality.
Perhaps the most vapid piece of dreck published this year.
Racism should be defined by law, to mean
supporting or advocating laws or policies that treat similar people of different races differently.
Such laws are now illegal, because discrimination is, in theory, illegal.
But “affirmative action” laws are racist.
Being a racist is not illegal, and should not be.
Calling somebody a racist who does not support different policies should be subject to defamation lawsuit.
“To prove prima facie defamation, a plaintiff must show four things: 1) a false statement purporting to be fact; 2) publication or communication of that statement to a third person; 3) fault amounting to at least negligence; and 4) damages, or some harm caused to the person or entity who is the subject of the statement.”
When those folk who are defaming others with false claims of being “racist”, when such folk get sued and lose, that behavior will hugely diminish.
King’s Dream is the right dream. Judge people based on their character, not on their skin color.
And character is best shown in actions.
Teaches at an Ed School with a doctorate in Education. Why, as a former teacher who had to suffer through the gobbletygook of Ed School classes, am I not surprised that this purveyor of nonsense is from the Ed School environment?
According to Wiki, she was born in 1956. Her vitae states she got her BA in 1991 – which would be at age 35, and a Master’s in Education in 1995. It doesn’t list any teaching experience at the high school or elementary level, and no college teaching experience until 1998, at age 42, Robin- the missing years.
https://education.uw.edu/sites/default/files//profiles/cv/CV_DiAngelo.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_DiAngelo
Gringo,
I wonder whether she knows Dr. Jill.
I don’t think some peoples brains are able to differentiate people on the individual level. I literally mean that. Whether is “woke” extremists or genuine white supremacists, they are unable to see people as individuals. They all seem to gravitate to the Democratic Party which originally was the party of Slavery, Jim Crow, The Ku Klux Klan, and so on.
Oh, Good Lord. My older granddaughter is at this very moment a graduate student in Social Work at the the U. of Washington, Seattle. Have we lost her?
Actually, she has been interning with the Seattle fire department, where she deals with real people who have experienced real loss. She finds it interesting. So, maybe all is not lost. (But, who knew that fire departments had social work departments?)
Universities are just not honest enough to advertise that they specialize in PHDs in Flim Flam; and that proficiency in gibberish is a requirement for completion.
This book is not on my reading list.
It is brought home daily, in so many ways, that retirement is a blessing.
The Oxford English Dictionary dates “racism” to 1935, and defines it as: “The theory that distinctive human characteristics and abilities are determined by race.” If you accept this definition, it is difficult to see why racism should be regarded with such horror, an evil scourge. Today the word has become meaningless.
DiAngelo is a misnomer. DiSatano would be more accurate.
She sure looks mighty white to me.
DiAngelo is a grifter of the highest order. I work in higher ed and have seen more than a few over the years, but this woman takes the cake. She charged the University of Kentucky $12,000 for a two hour lecture, not counting travel, accommodations and other expenses. Apparently she insists on communicating only via email or through her assistant. If she is forced to speak on the phone she charges over $300 an hour for her time:
https://tennesseestar.com/2019/07/31/lecturers-earn-6000-per-hour-pushing-white-privilege-to-students/
For 12K, a poor student could pay a good chunk of tuition.
Nominalism is the favorite solvent of the class of hedonic nihilists, or those tending in that direction. It’s a theoretic acid they love tossing in the faces of the Neanderthals who insist on believing in natural kinds and objective referents.
Very liberating, reducing all reality to categories of convention and acts of will.
Until some Neanderthal has his knee on your neck and starts laughing when you begin pleading for mercy in the name of humanity, or the respect due to women, or children, or the elderly, or a mutual or shared identity, or some other shit like that, which you have previously ruled out of court for valuation as real categories with normative entailments.
Again, this woman’s career is testament to the degree to which higher education is a patronage mill for people who are simply damaged goods. She has a faculty position at one of the state colleges in Massachusetts and an adjunct position at the University of Washington. There is no evidence from her publications that she has undertaken any serious study in any department of social or behavioral research. She is the issue of a teacher training faculty and has an appointment on one, but there is no evidence she knows anything about training teachers. Not one article on lesson plans, lecturing educational testing, evaluating student submissions, disciplinary problems, methods of reading instruction, methods of arithmetic instruction, zip, zero. She’s Tim Wise with some bogus degrees. What’s stupefying is that she also has an adjunct position on a social work faculty.
I have no clue why anyone would hire her to talk about anything.
This woman entered academe quite late in life (at age 50), so I’m fascinated as to how she earned a living for much of her life, but she’s not volunteering much on her personal site.
She claims an undergraduate degree in history and sociology from Seattle University, awarded in 1991 when she was 34 years old. She claims to be a summa cum laude graduate and to have been the valedictorian. Then she cadged a post-baccalaureate teaching certificate in 1995, so perhaps she put in some time as a schoolteacher. She had a patronage job in the Seattle City government’s diversity apparat for three years (2004-07)
It appears she was born Robin Taylor in Santa Clara County, California in 1956; she had a sister named Donna, born the previous year. She decamped to Seattle some time prior to 1980 and lived there until 2007. She married Richard Woolery on 17 January 1981 in Seattle, bore one child, then sued him for divorce, judgement granted on 2 March 1987. It appears she began using her mother’s maiden name (diAngelo) at that point. She remarried in 2004 to one Jason Toews, a divorce with a child and 11 years her junior. His primary residence appears to be in Seattle. She claims to have grown up poor and suffered ‘class oppression’.
Here’s a serious, academic take-down of DiAngelo. Even the social sciences have higher standards than the anecdotal, I-know-it-when-I-see-it basis DiAngelo provides.
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But if we are to take [DiAngelo’s] claims seriously, then natural questions to ask include: what is her methodology? Which construct validity models guide her investigation? How does she state and present her hypotheses? What tests does she run? What data does she collect? What criteria does she use to evaluate and interpret her results?
In the social sciences, the answer to these questions often involves the use of data and statistical analysis. Statistics is crucial because it provides techniques suited to the rigorous examination of data on a scale applicable to questions about systematic trends and patterns in society. Quantitative data analysis is fraught with perils, but disciplined quantitative data analysis is usually unavoidable when trying to measure the accuracy and precision of general claims about systematic patterns in the social, economic, political and cultural dimensions of society. Data do not give us answers. Data give us something to investigate, and there are few more organized ways of parsing reams of data in a way that facilitates measurable inferences, which are sufficiently transparent for critical evaluation—although we must still be cautious about making generalizations. Statistics provides tools to develop quantitative measures of trends and patterns in social life.
…
Statistics is the science of data collection and analysis. Given the scale and scope of DiAngelo’s claims about how white fragility sustains racism as a social construct, her methodological approach should include statistical techniques. She should collect and analyze data on a scale and scope equal, or at least proportional, to the scale and scope of her claims. But she does not.
–https://areomagazine.com/2018/12/21/the-epistemological-problem-of-white-fragility-theory/
While fully knowing I am running afoul of Godwin’s Law. Broken down to its basics.There is zero theological difference between this book and Mein Kampf. You are a member of a racial group. That group all shares common characteristics that are immutable. The single difference is which group this is aimed at. Oh it will be dressed up in high minded drivel and believed by those who purport to be intelligent. But in the end the underpinnings are exactly the same. Only refined through 70 extra years practice with kafkatrapping.
I believe neo has previously covered Eric S. Raymond’s wonderful neologism, kafkatrapping:
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One very notable pathology is a form of argument that, reduced to essence, runs like this: “Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}.” I’ve been presented with enough instances of this recently that I’ve decided that it needs a name. I call this general style of argument “kafkatrapping”, and the above the Model A kafkatrap.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122
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I’m not sure what prize it would be, but Raymond deserved a prize for distilling that trap into such a memorable term.
… Mythx beat me to first mention of kafkatrapping!
Mythx,
Well summarized!
I think this young woman has nailed a critical aspect of much of what we see with young women today. They’ve flipped the insecurities the beauty and fashion industries exploited to gain money and power in new ways.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/social-justice-solipsism
The Taibbi article on “White Fragility” reminded me of my experiences checking out various New Age/therapeutic/political cults.
Make no mistake. DiAngelo is a cult leader.
I actually laughed out loud at “PhD in Multicultural Education.”
I call this general style of argument “kafkatrapping”, and the above the Model A kafkatrap.
Popular among mental health tradesmen a generation ago, especially those with a clientele consisting of the families of drunks.
Neo and probably every commentor here would find the articles and videos put out by James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian every instructive. They are academics of the Left but have dedicated themselves to fighting the PoMo, Critical Theory, Social Justice, anti-scientific garbage that has taken over academia and is now in power in most of our other cultural and governmental institutions. They are in league with others such as Bret Weinstein and Heather Heyer. I had a pretty good idea of the basics of the current movements but found that these people give excellent deep but understandable talks on what’s going on and where it comes from. Read the blog New Discourses and I particularly recommend their 3 part series on YouTube called The Trojan Horse.
PS Neo, you mentioned that DiAngelo would call you a racist, but to be fair that’s what she calls all white people. According to her, race is the essence of our existence and since “Whites” are “on top,” they are participants and beneficiaries of racial privilege and thus “racists” every second of every day.
What I find utterly fascinating about this book and its mind set. Is how it takes a view of society, adds in “higher education” and out pops White Fragility. Her real argument is against the underpinnings of western culture.
Western culture has been ascendant for the last 600 odd years for a couple of general reasons. First it is generally more meritorious than other cultures. And second it is willing to take in nearly anyone who abides the general rules of the society.
The other large cultures suffer from serious flaws that limit their growth. Roughly stated middle eastern culture has over the centuries become too dogmatic. Asian culture relies too much on “the collective”. With notable exceptions being Japan and South Korea. And African culture has been decimated by internecine conflict.
So with all its faults western culture has become dominant. The real “White Fragility” , I suspect, is projecting her own insecurities about being part of that culture onto the rest of us. She has chosen to live and work in an area where that mindset has been widely praised.
Her and other of her ilk. Who have no truly revolutionary ideas. No real ways to better society as a whole. Yet feel entitled to praise and adulation of others. Have turned the projected self guilt into an industry. An industry that self sustains by trying desperately to prove who is the most devoted. The most pious among them take their turns being elevated and torn down in short order. No idea is outrageous enough for them as they claw their way over the ideological corpse of those that have come before them.
If the cycle of reward is not stopped. And stopped soon. This will continue to ratchet upwards. To where everyone becomes the couple from St. Louis. Standing on their lawn with guns. Holding back the mob’s that they very recently defended and believed to be of their intellectual stripe.
Just looking at her eyes and that frazzled hair, I get the impression that she looks fragile.
I’ve long respected Matt Taibbi as he has always come off as a journalist first, and a progressive second…a person who adheres to a standard of integrity above and beyond his personal politics. But, my goodness…I am ready to start a Matt Taibbi fan club at this point! He has clearly nibbled a few bits of the red pill and is truly putting his career on the line with this kind of commentary. He is up there with Dershowitz and Turley in my estimation.
As to DiAngelo…what can be said that hasn’t already? She is a walking caricature…a highly credentialed idiot (or perhaps savvy knave) who is raking in the royalties on promulgating self-hatred and indulgences for guilty white liberals/lefties (or whites of any other political stripe whose employers railroad them in to listening to her pseudo-intellectual horseshit…as Taibbi eloquently put it). It’s a great gig right now, and, inadvertently, showcases the power and dynamism of a American capitalism). There’s a massive market for her twaddle, and she is exploiting it to the fullest.
I’m so fragile I am reloading 38SPL, 357 MAG, 308, and 8MM (my favorite rifle CARTRIDGE) so come on with the terror of BLM and antifa.
Come within my 400 yard kill zone, please. Alas you’ll way stay. Bause I will will kill with a smile.
Frightening….
Clearly, the only way that whites can atone for their ancestor’s ‘sins’ is to commit cultural and racial suicide.
“According to her, race is the essence of our existence and since “Whites” are “on top,” they are participants and beneficiaries of racial privilege and thus “racists” every second of every day. RigelDog
Indeed by that logic every society in which there is a racial majority are “participants and beneficiaries of racial privilege” and thus by her definition… “racists” every second of every day. And, since every society on earth has a racial majority… and since racial identity is the only metric… 100% of the human race are by her ‘logic’… ““racists” every second of every day”.
Furthermore, since regardless of race, everyone’s ancestors supported slavery (either through commission or omission) the only possibility of atonement is for everyone to commit cultural and racial suicide.
Which BTW is exactly what the devil has always sought to achieve. Isn’t the devil the premier proponent of “just wanting to see the world burn”?
“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”, actor Kevin Spacey in the 1995 film The Usual Suspects
Hopefully cosmic justice will ensure that every huckster whose con employs evil will indeed burn in hell.
I’m so fragile I am reloading 38SPL, 357 MAG, 308, and 8MM (my favorite rifle CARTRIDGE) so come on with the terror of BLM and antifa.- Parker
8 mm Kurz? Never had a rifle in that caliber. What makes it your favorite?
Diversity (i.e. color judgments) including racism, sexism, classicism, blocs and quotas, is an insidious doctrine of the Pro-Choice, selective, opportunistic, politically congruent religion.
A white liberal female law professor at Creighton told me to read it in order to learn about race. She ran as a Dem for the House in WVA and got smashed.
I wrote that Wolfe’s “Back to Blood” was better. She said it didn’t sell well. Then she blocked me.
Cornhead:
A white liberal female law professor at Creighton told me to read it in order to learn about race. She ran as a Dem for the House in WVA and got smashed.
I wrote that Wolfe’s “Back to Blood” was better. She said it didn’t sell well. Then she blocked me.
I am reminded of what William F. Buckley, Jr. once said:
Just like “we need to have a conversation” is double-speak for a one-sided harangue, where the “deplorable” is supposed to listen and only listen.
Gringo, thumbs up!
“White BLM Activist Assaults Black Man”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlKYwJMhvHs
I love the haughty, “more in sadness than anger” pose some radical blacks adopt. They can’t even bother with whites anymore. They see it as hopeless and demeaning work beneath them. They insist it’s up to their white “allies” to wade in the sewers of white racism and bring other whites up to snuff woke-wise. Robin DiAngelo has answered that call.
Reni Eddo-Lodge is the most obvious example with her article, later book, “Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race.”
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At best, white people have been taught not to mention that people of colour are “different” in case it offends us. They truly believe that the experiences of their life as a result of their skin colour can and should be universal. I just can’t engage with the bewilderment and the defensiveness as they try to grapple with the fact that not everyone experiences the world in the way that they do.
They’ve never had to think about what it means, in power terms, to be white, so any time they’re vaguely reminded of this fact, they interpret it as an affront. Their eyes glaze over in boredom or widen in indignation. Their mouths start twitching as they get defensive. Their throats open up as they try to interrupt, itching to talk over you but not to really listen, because they need to let you know that you’ve got it wrong.
The journey towards understanding structural racism still requires people of colour to prioritise white feelings. Even if they can hear you, they’re not really listening. It’s like something happens to the words as they leave our mouths and reach their ears. The words hit a barrier of denial and they don’t get any further.
That’s the emotional disconnect. It’s not really surprising, because they’ve never known what it means to embrace a person of colour as a true equal, with thoughts and feelings that are as valid as their own.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/30/why-im-no-longer-talking-to-white-people-about-race
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To which my response is “Good for you, sweetheart. I’m not particularly interested in talking to you.”
She has made her closed-mindedness and hard-heartedness towards whites abundantly clear. What would be the point?
I got a bit of this before it became a book. My response was “boooring”. Turned out to end the discussion.
Neo wrote in the lead paragraph: “Not only does it lump white people together in a unitary group, but it labels them as inherently weak.”
With respect to this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlKYwJMhvHs
Some people, I think predominantly men, can react violently when called “weak”. The white guy in the video who assaults the black man may be a product of the kind of programming that DiAngelo’s book promotes. Perhaps this is her end goal.
Mythx on June 30, 2020 at 8:35 pm said:
…
Western culture has been ascendant for the last 600 odd years for a couple of general reasons. First it is generally more meritorious than other cultures. And second it is willing to take in nearly anyone who abides the general rules of the society.
* * *
So, basically, the West has succeeded because it is, in fact, diverse and inclusive.
It’s the meritorious part that the anarcho-socialists can’t stand – because they aren’t.
Ran into this sauntering through comments at LI or CTH (hard to remember now).
Video clip of Sowell on reparations.
Thomas Sowell – slavery a universal institution – Western Europe the only location without slavery* – enslaved whites in North Africa exceeded blacks enslaved in America
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1270698317970882568/pu/vid/1280×720/7CFsG2tIUYMK3PoN.mp4?tag=10
*at least by the 19th century; most people don’t know that the English were sending enslaved Scots and Irish to the colonies in the 17th & 18th. However, chattel slavery in the home countries no longer existed (just rural and urban serfs, slaves de facto if no longer de jure).
Of course, this guilt ploy goes back to the sixties, in particular Esalen, the nexus of the so-called Human Potential Movement.
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Price M. Cobbs, [black psychiatrist and] author of the 1968 book “Black Rage,” [was] a pioneer of sensitivity training. In 1967, Mr. Cobbs helped lead an “encounter group” at California’s Esalen Institute called “Racial Confrontation as Transcendental Experience.”
In what has become a standard practice in sensitivity training, Mr. Cobb and other seminar leaders inflamed racial anger among black participants and hectored whites to admit their own racism. Whites who denied being racists were accused of “lying.”
“‘Etiquette’ stole civil rights movement, author says”
–https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2002/apr/11/20020411-041854-3066r/
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Encounter groups usually arrive, or fake it to arrive, at some happy-ish psychological resolution. Not Cobbs’ group. It was a disaster, a true dumpster fire as we say today. Esalen’s program of transforming the world by transforming individuals failed utterly when it came to black-white race relations.
So Esalen gave up that line of encounter and chose to focus on a safer group — white American nuns and ended up destroying a convent!
You can see an excerpt of the black-white Esalen group here:
–“The Century of the Self” (2002) @ 2:17:40
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
“The Century of the Self” is an excellent documentary, albeit leftist, on Edward Bernays (Freud’s nephew) invention of “public relations” based on Freudian drive theory.
neo and others have taken Rousseau to task for his malign influence on civilization. Freud has his place as well.
You no longer have to be actually melanin-challenged to be a fragile white person.
Or something.
https://www.redstate.com/alexparker/2020/06/30/terry-crews-child-of-god-racial-unity-tweet-equality-black-lives-matter-better-backlash/
“they’ve never known what it means to embrace a person of colour as a true equal, with thoughts and feelings that are as valid as their own. Reni Eddo-Lodge
So many people today fail to grasp two truths; our ‘feelings’ spring from our thoughts/beliefs and our “thoughts and feelings” are only as valid as they are in alignment with objective reality. By definition, to the degree that “thoughts and feelings” are incongruent with objective reality*, to that degree they are invalid.
“Their throats open up as they try to interrupt, itching to talk over you but not to really listen, because they need to let you know that you’ve got it wrong.” Reni Eddo-Lodge
Why would I ‘listen’ i.e. give full consideration… to assertions that rest upon clearly false premises? And, in seeing that a position with its underlying assertions is fundamentally flawed, it’s not “need” that gives rise to the response but the responsibility to set the record straight by insisting that facts, reason and logic must support the positions we embrace because it is that of which reality consists.
* yes objective reality fully supports the assertion that intelligent design exists. At the most basic of levels, the ‘Goldilocks’ universe in which we exist is precisely ‘aligned’ to an astonishing and literally impossible degree: http://www.ncfr.net/ncfr.net/subdomains/commentary/httpdocs/goldilocks-universe/
This woman is white!
Her whole premise is that whites cannot understand the learned experience of blacks because they are not oppressed.
Therefore, she cannot understand it either.
So why would anyone listen to her?
Are white women are so scared to talk to an actual black person that they accept her as a substitute?
But I’m that case they are surely discriminating and therefore evil!
Ouch
“And for DiAngelo, it’s been a very lucrative one, proving once again that no one ever went broke underestimating the American public.”
Indeed. “Racism” (whatever that actually means) will be a factor in America as long as someone, or some party, finds it profitable.
I just read her own definition of “white fragility” on Wiki and The Tennesean links, and it seems to have nothing immediate to do with the unreality of race or the oppositional nature or definitional structure of the concept of a “white race”. That is to say, as being unreal except in opposition to people of color, who are somehow members of real races. Which … she might have claimed in another context for all I know.
Her fragility thesis seems to be that people identifying as white have a low tolerance for racial challenge stressors, and prefer not to deal with the hassle of it, preferring to deploy various strategies of deflection, denial, or even withdrawal from contact, in order to cut short involvement in such processes and exchanges and live more satisfying lives instead.
This then is “fragility”: an unwillingness, perhaps constitutional, to be involved in and submit to a cycle – of unspecified duration – of racially framed challenges, and to retreat back to a life where these matters don’t arise.
I think I saw some old movie kinda like that; where a hen pecked husband employed somewhat the same strategy, refusing to rehash his wife’s stored up treasury of grievances and resentments, and retreating to the garage and his work bench.
I always wondered why such guys just didn’t get a divorce. I mean where’s the gain in a dysfunctional relationship like that? It didn’t seem he really had any profound moral obligation to put up with it, or that it did either of them any real good or presented any real advantage in the end.. Maybe it was that somebody was dependent on somebody, and the movie just didn’t bother to state it openly. Made-up stories often rely on such omissions or suppressions of logic, because if they did not, the entire story line would fall apart and they wouldn’t have a movie to sell in the first place.
So the action and chatter had to be kept moving right along before anyone noticed the holes in the plot and began thinking about it too much.
Nowadays of course, divorce for any reason of convenience is seen as quite normal: and even abortion for any reason as well, is seen as therapeutic and liberating.
And it kind of makes sense. If you find yourself in an unsatisfactory social relationship with someone who appears to be unbalanced, who has an insatiable appetite for grievance, and who appears incapable of respecting psychologically and emotionally healthful boundaries, you might well ask yourself, “What’s the point?” There’s got to be a good reason to stay together, one would think. Whereas, as emerging progressive values have revealed, ties and ostensible obligations which were once seen as the most sacred sort, can rightly be severed for any reason, or even for no reason, at all.
It really is amazing, how do many people get PhDs, without learning anything.
If your skin has low melanin content and you accept her thesis, then you accept being racist. If you deny her thesis tnat proves that you are racist. What a stupid game. Better not to play.
She really would have fit in with Heinrich Himmler’s racial clap trap. Reading her credentials is like a nightmare walk through wokedom academics.
Huxley has it right: there is no methodology to her madness. I read most of the book about a year ago, and gave up. It is also full of anecdotes from her corporate training, and therefore useless for teachers working with biracial children (or white parents or spouses in a bi- or multiracial family).
The nonsense of “white fragility” reminds me of an advocate and lawyer for students with special needs who headed a daylong conference about the then-new Least-Restrictive Environment application of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). She would give an example of a child’s behavior in a school situation – a van driver pulling over so a child could safely throw a fit, including stripping naked – and then almost gleefully telling teachers that questioned how that would work in a regular classroom “You’ll find a way.” She made the comment more than once that she was used to “uncomfortable silence” and “unhappy faces when I tell teachers this.”
But the real source of discomfort and unhappiness was because she knew NOTHING about teaching subject matter or the difference between elementary and high school buildings. The only time she was taken aback was when she blithely said we could send our lesson plans to our curriculum director to modify them for students; a special ed teacher informed her that a curriculum director handled eight regional districts.
Similarly, DiAngelo mentions making a joke about a coworker’s hair – yes, really. Instead of apologizing immediately and directly, she went to a “woke” white acquaintance to work out a plan before approaching the coworker days later. And this was depicted as a perfectly reasonable way of behaving in the workplace.
This is why I read Edgar Rice Burroughs. Tarzan is anything BUT a fragile white dude!
White fragility – safe spaces for soy boys and soy girls, segregated spaces for People Of Other Colors on campus and in the woke place, it all makes perfect sense. White fragility – being on the wrong side of the Marxist mob? Does a boom stick cure white fragility?
I always wondered why such guys just didn’t get a divorce.
You’re not the most perspicacious individual.
Even most philosophers know that life is complicated. 🙂
NaughtyPine:
And probably got a hefty fee from the school district for peddling her nonsense. I have read that DiAngelo has gotten $12k for a speech. My proposal would be for a school district to tell such high falutin’ high fee speakers to inform them that before they give their speech, they take charge of a district classroom for 3-5 days to show how their theories work in action.
I also recommend that policy for school superintendents who are proposing a great new “progressive” program. That could have saved the St. Paul school district a lot of money- the ~$500 k they paid off the superintendent for leaving after her policies proved to be disastrous.
Oh, why don’t you go hang yourself by your bowtie if you really can’t live without my attention. Maybe you and your hall monitor buddy could make it a twofer. We’d bury you both in the same posthole if you like. Head first.
Philosopher is sensitive today it seems. Who is this “we” you speak of white man? Maybe he needs to find a grip. 😉
Oh, why don’t you go hang yourself by your bowtie if you really can’t live without my attention. Maybe you and your hall monitor buddy could make it a twofer. We’d bury you both in the same posthole if you like. Head first.
It’s not terribly difficult to figure out the menu of reasons people put up with suboptimal situations, starting with the observation that nearly all situations are suboptimal. This seems to have escaped you all these years, which is regrettable for anyone who has to deal with you.
Her current employment should scare everyone. Look at a major university in your area and look at the requirements to get an Ed degree. You are unlikely to find much about best practices for actually teaching things like reading, math, or science. Instead, you will see lots and lots and lots of social justice warrior classes.
This is what is being taught–and almost the only thing being taught–at our schools of education.
Warning:
Stop the personal attacks on other commenters.
Applying contemporary standards to people who lived centuries ago is weak.
Maybe the democrats want their history of KKK and slavery erased?
Selling snake oil for a fad problem based on lies? Who could have guessed it? (H. L. Mencken did.)
Completely alter monopoly hiring of far Leftists will change the Ed schools, the universities, and save the culture from a polluting, self-hating death march.
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