Robin DiAngelo‘s best seller, “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism,” is getting scooped up by white idiots who want to know that they are racist to the core, without knowing it.
In DiAngelo’s view, the very fact that I am critical of the idea that racism is as embedded in my white DNA as my skin color is proof beyond doubt that I am a racist.
She knows this because, well, she knows it. It’s based on her years of conducting clinics shaming white people for their hidden bigotry. If you challenge her methodology and epistemology as anecdotal, fraudulent, pseudo-scientific, idiotic and blinkered beyond belief, you might as well tattoo “racist” across your forehead.
My pathetic fellow white racists, you can’t see your racism because you have been unconsciously programed by your white privilege to deny your intrinsic racism. Despite your most passionate denials, it’s there, lurking just, well, skin deep. Rest assured, DiAngelo, herself a person of white, will set you straight.
Somehow, she has pried open the heads of millions of white people to discover the rot hidden there, even though she doesn’t know me, or you, or you.
It gets even better.
As described in a review in New Yorker:
In DiAngelo’s almost epidemiological vision of white racism, our minds and bodies play host to a pathogen that seeks to replicate itself, sickening us in the process. Like a mutating virus, racism shape-shifts in order to stay alive; when its explicit expression becomes taboo, it hides in coded language. Nor does prejudice disappear when people decide that they will no longer tolerate it.
Like Covid-19 is a disease, racism is a disease for which there is no vaccine. You can’t get rid of it by wanting or trying to gt rid of it.
More from the above review:
Even the racial beliefs and responses that feel authentic or well-intentioned have likely been programmed by white supremacy, to perpetuate white supremacy.
In other words, your belief that all black lives matter is programed by white supremacy to perpetuate white supremacy.”
And in the face of this, do you dare to think that you are an individual, a product of your free will, your experiences, your reasoning and even your own emotions? No way:
Such ideologies include individualism, or the distinctly white-American dream that one writes one’s own destiny, and objectivity, the confidence that one can free oneself entirely from bias.
And for those whites who so strongly despise and speak out against racism, your feelings might only be a dodge to avoid facing your obligation to, well, genuflect and repent:
You may have subconsciously developed your strong negative feelings about racism in order to escape having to help dismantle it.
The absurdity, irrationality and high-flying speculation of all this (and more) is breath-taking. It’s bizarre. More than that, it is dangerous.
This is food for those who see life as simply explained, in terms of black and white and in ways that appeal to emotion instead of reason. It is trash posing as scholarship. It is designed to guilt well-meaning people. It is does exactly the opposite of what it claims to do: it divide us into combating groups.
This book frightens. That so many people, many of them well-intentioned, take this as The Word, is alarming. It fuels the hatred and violence that maims America today.
But I’m glad that it is published. It exposes the warped thinking to the bright light of truth.
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