Fighting the White Fragility cult
Some suggestions for responding to White Fragility trainers, particularly if your exposure to the program happens in the workplace.
The book White Fragility has also become very popular among book groups. In addition, it increasingly serves as fuel to cause discord in interpersonal relations among friends and family.
If you haven’t seen this explanation of some of the principles behind the anti-racism movement of which White Fragility is a part, please take a look. “Anti-racism” is a term of art, and not what it seems to be on its face.
Human fragility
This is pro racism, as per 1984.
Leftists have traditionally expended much effort on explaining society through analysis of who controls the means of production. Conservatives must do a far better job of analyzing and criticizing the meaning of the terms of discourse in analysis (“anti-fascism”, “anti-racism”, “black lives matter” etc.), for this language is entirely and deliberately constructed in such a way as to ensure that anyone not on the left has already lost the debate (facts, evidence, reason, and logic notwithstanding) before it has even begun.
Way too many syllables.
Mark Hemingway last week:
https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/15/what-to-read-instead-of-white-fragility/
That woman, Robin Diangelo, doesn’t seem to have existed before she got her doctoral degree. She’s doesn’t say when she went to undergraduate school. And what took her so long to get the degree. (She was 48 when she got her degree in someone stupid, like multicultural studies.) There are lots of people who get a doctoral degree later in life, but they usually mention what they were doing before…
The second link to The Meme Police explains things well. Confuse everyone by redefining racism using the word racism in the definition and when people’s rational defenses are down redefine the word racist to mean people who treat everyone the same regardless of their race. Once the left redefines the word then people will no longer have the linguistic ability to discuss the issue rationally.
Great thinkers increase human knowledge by adding new words to the language to express new ideas not available previously – they enlarge the number of words and meanings available for future thinkers. The left do just the opposite. They are little people who shrink the language and narrow the knowledge base available to future generations of people.
Jamie Glazov has a very interesting interview with Charles Jacobs who discusses modern slavery in Africa and how the left deliberately ignore it. They could help stop the slavery but don’t bother because it doesn’t fit their anti-white racism. Lewis Farrakhan is the most dangerous anti-Semite today because so many people take him seriously.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucKhTYrznM4
Okay, I know about the old time segregation, when I was very young we had a lovely young black woman working in our house several days each week while my mother was teaching piano lessons, my mom was very accomplished on piano and organ taking lessons herself up to six weeks before she died of cancer at 79 years old. Music was her profession and the nice young black woman who worked for and with my mom for decades became part of our family. When I was about four years old my older brother asked my mom why Vivian, that was her name, was eating in the kitchen and my mom looked around the table, went into the kitchen and brought Vivian’s plate out into the dining room and from then on for decades no matter who was eating at our home, Vivian alway had a place at the table and both my mom and dad would help pick up dishes before they served coffee and pie which was a thing at our house.
In the 1950’s my mom made a lot of women in our town unhappy when she found out she could get a Federal ID Employer number, withhold Social Security for Vivian and build her a retirement account with Social Security which was not happening with very many domestic employees. My mom also helped Vivian with her younger sister, who she was raising and between the two of them Vivian’s sister, one the years made it through nursing school and became an RN who was with my mom in her last months dying of cancer in the hospital. Vivian had passed away before my mom died but at her funeral her sister walked in along with her granddaughter and sat with our family because the ties were that great.
As for me, I was a bit of a mess as a little boy but that kind woman bathed me, rocked me and sang to me, I remember looking at the black on the skin on her hands and she looked wonderful to me. She also yelled at me and swatted me from time to time. I saw what segregation was in the 1950’s and saw millions of people as the 1960’s progressed working hard to remedy that terrible situation.
Please don’t tell me I am fragile and don’t know about Black and White because I also worked at times in cubicles where there were more black workers than white and we had a good time making jokes and enjoying each others companionship and that was over 30 years ago. On very large college football player black friend of mine came into work slinging almost at time and he was laughing, he said he forgot his ID card in his car in the parking garage and had to run back to get it. He told me that seeing a huge black man running made a lot of the nice white women jump back in their cars and he really felt bad about scaring all of them but he understood completely how they felt, he was a big old scary son of a gun.
We need to find some way to restore the dignity of folks on all sides trying to work for the good of all of us and find some way to defuse the breaking of our cultures of respect and love we are not at war with any race nor do we wish anything but goodwill towards others. That probably sounds like old white man stuff but I assure you while I am old I am not fragile. I have been there and I have done it, the right way working to help everybody move forward.
To Bee or not to Bee…
https://babylonbee.com/news/progressive-parents-disappointed-in-how-white-their-children-are
The Star of David has been deemed “hateful imagery” by Twitter, which is locking the accounts of users who display it in their profile pictures.
The Campaign Against Antisemitism has reported that several Twitter users have contacted them in recent days to report that their accounts had been locked by the social media platform. The reason given? According to messages they received from Twitter: “We have determined that this account violated the Twitter Rules. Specifically for: Violating our rules against posting hateful imagery. You may not use hateful images or symbols in your profile image or profile header. As a result, we have locked your account.”
OldTexan: I caught the tail end of segregation in the South. I remember COLORED drinking fountains in Florida. My high school was one of the first to integrate in my area.
Admittedly it was on account of our ambitious football coach who saw the opportunity to scoop up some fabulous local black talent and drive our school to a state title. But there were white schools inland who didn’t take to playing black players and there were some tense situations. That coach made a big difference in many black lives.
The idea that America, especially the South, hasn’t made progress in civil rights and that we’re all racists again, drives me crazy.
Listening to black conservatives instead of white liberals could be a good way to fight the cult.
https://spectator.us/sanest-debate-race-bret-weinstein/
“Is this the sanest debate on race yet?
Bret Weinstein assembled a smorgasbord of mostly young African American academics in a fascinating two-hour round table discussion”
What is Real Racism? How do you know you’re such a victim?
I know I’ve met one.
My buddy from Minneapolis married an accomplished black woman, a native of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She was a prof of poli sci at Stillman College (a historically black institution). And I was fortunate enough to be invited over to her family’s house for Thanksgiving dinner in 1998.
Her family is hard working, the kind for whom nothing good is taken for granted. And when the dinner talk turned to movies, her father taught me about how racial segregation twisted the mind in the Deep South.
He explained that he could only go to a movie theater with a balcony. We all looked at each other. We knew what that meant.
It meant that the elder Mr Royster never went to a movie theater because they no longer existed (or too rarely to be considered live option anymore).
He could not go to a theater without one because if he tried, he would become physically sick.
One must imagine what kind of socio-political control it took to become so conditioned to conform to Jim Crow era segregation life. The result was, for him, emotionally warping and hence controlling — humiliation was internalised. And that remains difficult to do for me.
“My high school was one of the first to integrate in my area.
Admittedly it was on account of our ambitious football coach who saw the opportunity to scoop up some fabulous local black talent and drive our school to a state title.” – huxley
Sounds like the plot of “Remember the Titans” – based on real events, but I don’t know how it well it matches reality as a “docudrama” — however, we played it often for our young men aka Boy Scouts — back when diversity and inclusion did not mean obeisance to a Marxist front group.
Read Vox Day’s book called Corporate Cancer.
Vox Day is (shall we say) a Hard Case… but when he’s right he’s right. And he’s written *the* book on this.
Interestingly Red Bull has just fired everyone in the firm who tried to play BLM Bandwagon internal corporate power grab politics during the recent unpleasantness. Fired. Gone.
There is little point in debating people. Only way I can think personally to fight this kind of mental harassment would be to print out some handouts on FBI crime statistics by race + excerpts from the excellent now dormant blog of La Griffe du Lion. If they’re going to force me to listen to their crap, they can effing well get their faces rubbed in the good stuff.
None of this works for slaves: i.e. anyone required to work for a corporation to support themselves and their families. So try to avoid the servile state. Difficult and nobody can be blamed for being in this way since the world has changed so much and the old social contracts have all been abrogated. But certainly one should try to GTFO of this type of employment if at all possible so that can be a bit more free and not have one’s dignity trampled on regularly.
Related (featuring Bob Woodson):
https://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2020/07/one-of-steps-of-defeating-truth-is-to.html
Antisemitism is a subset of Racial Collectivism. We (Humanity) have to condemn all forms of Racial Collectivism. We have to identify Black Lives Matter as the Racial Collectivist group that it actually is.
Racism was invented in the 1930s. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the word racism to 1935, and defines it as: “The theory that distinctive human characteristics and abilities are determined by race.”
That definition has certainly been changed.
I thought it was “Fighting the White Frigidity Cult.” For once, I was looking forward to the struggle sessions. But no, I should have known that wokies never fail to disappoint.
@ Huxley – New England fans may remember that sports was the reason for integration in the stories of both Sam Cunningham https://www.latimes.com/sports/usc/la-sp-usc-cunningham-alabama-20160831-snap-story.html
Also Jim Rice in high school in South Carolina, though because of football, not baseball.
@ neo, you are right to use the word “cult” in this context, because redefining common words is a tactic religious cults often use.
Waal, I wish anyone well. Problems: (1) the judiciary is dishonest and (2) even when they’re not, the transactions costs of resistance are tremendous. Several enraged someone’s will have to take one for the team ‘ere the compliance people will realize the cost-benefit function has moved from a ‘yes’ to a ‘no’ modality.
What’s distressing, of course, is that people with real work to do are pulled away from their jobs and put through this harassment by these itinerant grifters. Are there any non-idiots in charge of American corporations?
He could not go to a theater without one because if he tried, he would become physically sick. One must imagine what kind of socio-political control it took to become so conditioned to conform to Jim Crow era segregation life. The result was, for him, emotionally warping and hence controlling — humiliation was internalised. And that remains difficult to do for me.
You’re describing a man with a phobia. That’s too bad for him, but it doesn’t have much larger significance.
That woman, Robin Diangelo, doesn’t seem to have existed before she got her doctoral degree. She’s doesn’t say when she went to undergraduate school.
She’s the issue of the sociology department at Seattle University. She received a BA degree fairly late in life, at age 35 (and claims a double major in history) She cadged a teaching credential at age 39, supposedly specializing in ‘curriculum and instruction’ in her MEd. program. It’s a reasonable wager she was a schoolteacher for a number of years.
One curio about Seattle University is that they’ve put an archive of their course circular on their site. Years and years worth of annual circulars, so we can get an idea of the course offerings in their sociology department when diAngelo was a student there. There was in 1989 one 200 level course in quantitative methods. I’m wagering you could get through the program without undertaking any quantitative research apart from that course (which was cross-listed with the psychology department and which was required of sociology majors). The vibe of the 1989 circular is such that I would wager it was less intensely politicized than is the case today. As of now, the department wears it’s absence of scholarly disposition on its sleeve and advertises its association with diAngelo.
Her primary academic appointment is in the teacher-training faculty of one of the state colleges in Massachusetts. Since absolutely none of her published work concerns teaching methods, she’s a fine advertisement for the proposition that many and perhaps most teacher-training programs should be shut down.
Again, academe is sociologically corrupt, and can only be reformed by trusteeships imposed by people outside the academy.
I follow some blogs that have nothing to do with politics. One blogger, mid-twenties and white, who mostly dedicates her blog to fashion and lifestyle, posted about how she’s processing the whole BLM fever (my words) that has swept the world in the past three months or so. She listed two links of resources that she’s using to become a better “ally” to people of color and several books. A small portion of the White Fragility catechism:
Books –
Such a Fun Age (Kiley Reid)
Be the Bridge (Latasha Morrison)
Becoming (Michelle Obama)
The Nickel Boys (Colson Whitehead)
And, of course, White Fragility was listed too.
Docs/Articles –
(1) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BRlF2_zhNe86SGgHa6-VlBO-QgirITwCTugSfKie5Fs/edit
(2) https://sojo.net/articles/our-white-friends-desiring-be-allies?fbclid=IwAR3U8qQd_HfnJQ-12hQ6J7ZtOPkUF1J_NoWvjtbV4aNAa0zqRt1iNT_3GPE
These aren’t the only resources and books that are being circulated. The blogger did write “we all have work to do.”