In this 15-minute video, evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Brett Weinstein dissect Robin DiAngelo’s revealing book, “White Fragility.” Their discussion directly engages with DiAngelo’s central arguments. Heying and Weinstein conclude that DiAngelo’s book is revealing in the sense that DiAngelo (who is white) reveals herself to be an unrepentant racist who is attempting to impose her distorted view of reality on everyone else, especially her core belief that “race” is the single most defining features of our complex human histories and experiences.
Heying states the following at min 5:00: “This book is a hot mess of sloppy scholarship and cherry-picked data, but that’s not actually its biggest flaw.” Heying then reads several passages from “White Fragility.” I almost fell out of my chair as I heard DiAngelo’s words. Listen in at min 5:30 to hear DiAngelo’s words for yourself. Normal people don’t think these thoughts.
I bought a copy of “White Fragility” to make sure that Heying and Weinstein were giving DiAngelo a fair reading. I also base my opinions on my own readings of other work by DiAngelo. Since viewing the above video, I’ve read other passages from “White Fragility” that are similar to those discussed by Heying and Weinstein. Consider this one:
For example, I was invited to the retirement party of a white friend. The party was a pot-luck picnic held in a public park. As I walked down the slope toward the picnic shelters, I noticed two parties going on side by side. One gathering was primarily composed of white people, and the other appeared to be all black people. I experienced a sense of disequilibrium as I approached and had to choose which party was my friend’s. I felt a mild sense of anxiety as I considered that I might have to enter the all-black group, then mild relief as I realized that my friend was in the other group. This relief was amplified as I thought that I might have mistakenly walked over to the black party!
[DiAngelo, Robin J.. White Fragility (p. 53). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.]
Here’s another:
Indeed, throughout my life, I have been warned that I should avoid situations in which I might be a racial minority. These situations are often presented as scary, dangerous, or “sketchy.”
[DiAngelo, Robin J.. White Fragility (p. 53). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.]
It seems that DiAngelo needs to spend more time getting comfortable around Black people. That has been an early and recurring thought in my mind.
After careful review, I can’t help but think that DiAngelo was future-channeling Amy Cooper’s frenetic thought process at Central Park while writing White Fragility. Cooper was self-panicked as she embraced her racist world view in real time, her emotions at the moment perhaps obscuring that her actions might harm the gentle Black bird-watcher, Christian Cooper. DiAngelo has no such excuse.
DiAngelo is hyper-focused on race throughout. In fact, she lost me on her first words of chapter one:
I am a white American raised in the United States. I have a white frame of reference and a white worldview, and I move through the world with a white experience.
[DiAngelo, Robin J.. White Fragility (p. 7). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.]
Uh, no. I thank the stars that the people with whom I spend time don’t think like this and I consider this to be a utterly destructive word-view. Many of us prefer to live in a well-knitted multi-cultural and multi-racial society. Many of us insist that our children should attend diverse public schools. And most of us consider it a grotesque over-simplification that Bill Gates was “born into” all of his opportunities (p. 10). DiAngelo bears down on this simplistic formula that race should be our primary way to view the world, regardless of whether one is an impoverished white person from multi-generations of poverty in Appalachia or whether one is Oprah. I refuse to turn back the calendar to those dysfunctional times where one’s race thoroughly defined a person. That approach was used for harming people, for justifying slavery. That approach was embraced by racists of all stripes for way too long and it failed abysmally.
It’s easy to get carried away when a book unrelentingly and enthusiastically exploits deep emotional conflict, especially when “race” is still is too often used by too many people for defining each other. The best remedy for avoiding such a conflagratory reading is a steady and thoughtful approach: Start by blowing the smoke of urgency out of the room. Remember that you are simply sitting there reading and considering someone’s ideas and that if those ideas are valid and reliable, you can later go outside to run experiments. Next, stick mental labels on each of DiAngelo’s numerous Kafka Traps (E.g., if you a “white” person who protests that you are not a racist, this proves all the more that you are a racist). Then pull your airplane up a few hundred feet, and view DiAngelo’s worldview as a map. You will then likely see this mess of a book for what it is. DiAngelo needs serious personal help with her personal race problem, which she is attempting to project upon everyone else. “White Fragility” is an opportunistic sequel to Sartre’s No Exit.
What kind of mind so readily divides people based on superficial immutable characteristics—uses a superficial thing like skin color as a proxy for the underlying character of people? This is akin to other cult-like lazy attempts to declare the complexity of another person, such approaches as astrology, phrenology or judging people by how wealthy they are. What kind of mind refuses to evaluate others primarily as individuals and to label dissenting others as racist? What kind of mind proudly ignores the ubiquitous unifying commonalities of all of our fellow humans? If you need help identifying or counting the ways in which all of us are overwhelmingly similar, check out Donald Brown’s list of hundreds of characteristics, which I discuss here. Maybe, with lengthy therapy, DiAngelo can someday learn to tamp down her enthusiasm for making blunt-lined judgments about the personalities, experiences and personal histories of individual people based on their skin color.
It should give all of us pause to see modern writings that seek to divide people in cartoonish ways. How much effort would it have taken to have choosen a higher road: To double-down on seeking new strategies and remedies for stamping out real racism (and racism is not difficult to find, unfortunately) while simultaneously seeking to unify and heal our communities? Why not fight such a two-front war? And why does DiAngelo utilize so much opaque terminology that she insists that others also must accept, lest they be branded “racist”? DiAngelo’s humorless religion of identifying sinners by the way they look fails to include any meaning notion of seeking common ground or forgiveness.
In this video, Weinstein mentions a Tweet he received from a friend. What should one do if one’s employer insists on reprogramming the workforce by requiring employees to read “White Fragility.” The suggestion from the friend is that the employee should say: “I’ll read that if you read 1984.” I would add, “And if you also listen to Martin Luther King’s speech: “I have a dream.”
DiAngelo is the classic case of what Friedrich Nietzsche refers to as “ressentiment,” a desperately energetic creative personal crusade by insecure people to impose their dysfunction upon the rest of us.
For a more pugnacious account of “White Fragility,” consider Matt Taibbi’s article, “On “White Fragility”: A few thoughts on America’s smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism.”
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. . . . At a time of catastrophe and national despair, when conservative nationalism is on the rise and violent confrontation on the streets is becoming commonplace, it’s extremely suspicious that the books politicians, the press, university administrators, and corporate consultants alike are asking us to read are urging us to put race even more at the center of our identities, and fetishize the unbridgeable nature of our differences. . . . It’s almost like someone thinks there’s a benefit to keeping people divided.
He who gets to define the terms wins the battle. Which is likely DiAngelo’s objective, to spark a battle she can win to obtain power. It’s Alinsky for Rednecks.
Earlier today I was on a discussion forum when someone with foregone conclusions about the righteousness of destroying public property asked a rhetorical question prompting an answer referencing libertarians. The well-educated adult questioner knew nothing about them and asked for links. It was a Damascene moment for me: A core problem of the Left is an inability to construct effective internet search queries, thus everybody read the same Google- and Youtube-promoted articles and engaged in Group Think.I wound up needing to post links to libertarian-written documents, such as the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the writings of Hamilton.
The content in DiAngelo’s book is designed to prompt division. People calling themselves liberals, but actually Far Left Progressives, have defined the terms. The original meaning of Affirmative Action was simply good business practice and the antithesis of racial preferences. The term illegal immigrant is eschewed, the word “undocumented” substituted. As though a clerk somewhere had forgotten to punch a hole in the card in the right spot, never acknowledging violating US law. Liberals promote liberty and inclusion; Progressives promote submission to the state and exclusion.
John McWhorter at The Atlantic:
This video, attributed to Robert Weide and Larry David, intersperses excerpts from a Robin DiAngelo lecture with a discussion about DiAngelo by Glenn Loury and John McWhorter.
Here is the entire July 2 podcast featuring Glenn Loury and John McWhorter.
Here’s another well-deserved attack on Robin DiAngelo’s book, White Fragility. This discussion is by Kmele Foster, Zaid Jilani and Katie Herzog of Backchannel.
Matt Taibbi is yet another severe critic White Fragility. This interview is from The Rising on The Hill.
Coleman Hughes on White Fragility, from City Journal, “Black Fragility? A bestselling book offers a prescription for race relations that casts whites as sinners and blacks as children.”
John McWhorter, discussing Robin DiAngelo on NPR:
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/20/892943728/professor-criticizes-book-white-fragility-as-dehumanizing-to-black-people
Robin DiAngelo stirs up racism at Coca-Cola:
Woke Temple Points out DiAngello’s claim that color blindness is as bad as slavery and Jim Crow.