Book Review: Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility

[Contains spoilers for White Fragility and Atlas Shrugged.]

I.

It is a timeless story: one woman, alone in her awakening in the midst of sleeping lemmings, opens her eyes to gaze upon the true nature of the society she finds herself in – and sees something she wasn’t expecting, something she wasn’t supposed to see. After a long struggle, she finally manages to discern the ugly truth beneath all the lies and assumptions that conceal her world’s true nature, like a scab over gaping wound. And what she discovers is this: that the people around her are split into two groups, as distinct as blue and red, one of which is good, and the other of which is evil. And these two forces are constantly in opposition, as evil attempts again and again to oppress and destroy the struggling and battered forces of good. The forces of evil, remarkably enough, possess no central coordination, yet nevertheless manage to act in concert to spread their malicious lies and twisted ideology, taking control of the country and its institutions, and shutting out any who would oppose them. A harsh reality to face, indeed – but our plucky protagonist is not discouraged. Undaunted, she rolls up her sleeves, and planting her feet firmly on the side of the good, she begins her journey of personal change in order to be ready to fight for the side of truth and goodness.

I speak, of course, of the novel Atlas Shrugged.

Despite the fact that DiAngelo – as I discuss later – valiantly opposes the individualism that Rand so cherishes, and despite other points of disagreement too numerous to mention, these surface differences only mask the underlying similarities in their stories – for make no mistake, DiAngelo’s libellus is a story of self-overcoming as much as Rand’s thousand-plus page tome, just as Atlas Shrugged is a text meant to persuade the reader to change their ideological viewpoint no less than White Fragility.

These books are both built on the idea of questioning assumptions, and seeing through surface appearances to discover non-obvious connections that present the world in a very different light. There is much to be gained by gazing from such a perspective – but such an enterprise is not without its risks, not the least of which is, that you might accidentally end up actually changing your mind. Just as Atlas Shrugged is a trap for the unwary right-leaning college student, White Fragility is the same to the incautious left-leaning undergraduate. Luckily, such dangers can mostly be avoided by taking a few simple steps (“Ideologists Hate Him!”).

But first, why is it that these books possess persuasive dangers other works, even scientifically grounded ones with fifty pages of sources at the end, do not? Rather than their content itself – it is their form. Gravel never stopped anyone – except as an ingredient in concrete.

What is it about these books that leaves such a sticky trail of residue through the minds of their readers? Here’s a hint. Reading White Fragility for the first time, I found it striking how DiAngelo starts: by promising the reader repeatedly that they will be “uncomfortable,” that their beliefs will be questioned, and so on in that vein. Now, this is a reasonable strategy for getting someone to listen to something they might otherwise write off – people become curious about what might be so bad they won’t even be able to sit through the whole thing (think Human Centipede). But unlike Dutch films inspired by Nazi medical experiments, revealing unpleasant truths is not all just harmless fun. In fact, it is the basis of what I will call here a “soul attack.” What, then, is a soul attack? To paraphrase R. Scott Bakker, to soul attack someone is to reveal to them the truth that they hide from themselves. Clearly, then, DiAngelo’s book itself is in the form of a soul attack, as it seeks to reveal to you, the reader, your unconscious racism – unconscious because you would rather not see it.

But why does DiAngelo warn you of this? Isn’t she afraid you’ll become more suspicious and wary of what she’s trying to say? Does she think the need to generate interest in the content outweighs the risk of you guarding against her message? But no, DiAngelo knows what she’s about better than that. The sort of people who would take her warning seriously are either not reading her book in the first place, or will take the opportunity to put it down – these people are not her true audience. No – her true audience will take it the way she wants them to, as an intriguing challenge. As they continue to read, the more they find themselves instinctually drawing away from her ideas, the more they will think back on DiAngelo’s initial warning and desire to rise to her challenge without giving up. They are thus motivated to overcome their own natural resistances to her arguments.

Should you, then, take her warning to heart while you still can? Or should you simply step forward into the dark unknown to find what you will find? Only you can choose. But consider – while inviting soul attacks against yourself can be very enlightening, it can also be transformative. And transformation is only good if you are changing in a direction you desire and have chosen. Facing soul attacks unprepared is a good way to find yourself altered in ways you were not intending. So, read (both the book, and this review) at your own risk. You are warned. (Have I managed to generate interest yet?)

II.

Still reading? Glad to have you along.

How, then, do you defend yourself against this soul attack, now that DiAngelo has so helpfully warned you of it? The simplest way is to approach it with a purpose and perspective of your own, so you are not lead astray on the paths of DiAngelo’s thought. But for what purpose, then, ought you to read this book?

The first and easiest reason is to read it purely for enjoyment – that is to say, as a critic. Luckily, this is not too hard with DiAngelo’s libellus – her logic is not exactly Ajencis, and her consistency – well, enough said. Don’t be too dismissive of her only for this, though – no matter how coherent most arguments may seem from a sympathetic viewpoint, they tend to fall apart when approached from a different angle, especially the angle of one who does not share all of the author’s basic assumptions.

Criticism is all in good fun – but the easiest path is not necessarily the most enlightening. Another way to read this (or any) book, is to use it as a tool in the unending search for truth. That is, to ask: what fundamental aspects of human nature has DiAngelo uncovered – either explicitly, or implicitly in the way she attempts to manipulate her readers into agreeing with her? What sorts of evidence does she give, and of what value? What pieces of her logic are novel, or beyond question, or can be reapplied constructively to other situations? All books are manuals, the study of which reveals some portion of the author’s insight into the nature of truth and reality. What is DiAngelo’s insight, and how can you adapt it, in part or in whole, to augment your own knowledge?

A third purpose is to treat the book as a puzzle, seeking out DiAngelo’s own true purpose and beliefs, following her arguments past the words themselves and back along the threads connecting them to the thoughts that put them there. There are two ways to do this: you can either follow the line back to the argument’s assumptions, or forward to the book’s consequences. That is, what assumptions does DiAngelo make that she never makes explicit, that are in fact hidden by her explicit message in order to allow her to cast as fact claims which are never proved, or that allow her to reframe, redefine, and change the reader’s perception of the world? And what do these suggest about what DiAngelo might really have wanted when she wrote this book – or why the powers that be might have published it (and lifted it to popularity)? Or alternatively: what outcome is this book expected to have – what is its intended effect on its intended audience (in this case, perhaps, middle-class white progressives)? And what goals does this outcome serve?

Three potential perspectives – which, then, is the best? Or is that perspective itself – too confining?

Like trees we grow – this is hard to understand, as is all of life – not in one place but everywhere, not in one direction but equally upward and outward and inward and downward; our energy is at work simultaneously in the trunk, branches, and roots; we are no longer free to do only one particular thing, to be only one particular thing.

Thus, taking Nietzsche’s advice (from the Kaufmann translation), we will take all of the perspectives. Of course, since this is a blog and not a tree, I can only take them one at a time – but don’t worry, there are no word limits here, and I promise I’ll get to everything eventually (the only patience in question here is yours, dear reader – like Ayn Rand, I’m afraid brevity is not one of my strong points).

III.

I will start, then, by evaluating the book for its insights and utility in the search for truth. (I realize this isn’t quite the order I gave above, but starting with critique would be uncouth.)      

Many ideas in this book are profound. Many of these are not original to DiAngelo – or anyone in the modern era, for that matter – but none the less profound for that. Is the content more important, or the source?

To begin, consider one of the most important insights DiAngelo obtained from the practice of her chosen occupation. Twenty years of running anti-racism trainings, saying the same things and getting the same responses, clearly affected her:

When I talk to white people about racism, their responses are so predictable I sometimes feel as though we are all reciting lines from a shared script.

People tend to think the same way across situations, and the same way as each other. It can be hard to see, since in general identical situations do not arise for us to observe whether people act identically in response. Unless of course, like DiAngelo, creating that sort of identical situation is your job.

No two people are the same – so why, then, don’t they act like it? With decades to ponder the question, DiAngelo has formulated a theory:

Because it is repetitive, our socialization produces and reproduces thoughts, perceptions, expressions, and actions. Thus, habitus can be thought of as a person’s familiar ways of perceiving, interpreting, and responding to social cues.

DiAngelo is not unique in pinpointing shared culture and media as the cause of this over-similarity. She recognizes cultural biases are necessary and inevitable, and even in some cases useful:

We make sense of perceptions and experiences through our particular cultural lens. This lens is neither universal nor objective, and without it, a person could not function in any human society.

We gain our understanding of group meaning collectively through aspects of the society around us that are shared and unavoidable: television, movies, news items, song lyrics, magazines, textbooks, schools, religion, literature, stories, jokes, traditions and practices, history, and so on.

But the ultimate result of these biases is unavoidable. Individuality and objectivity, DiAngelo concludes, are lies:

A significant aspect of the white script derives from our seeing ourselves as both objective and unique. To understand white fragility, we have to begin to understand why we cannot fully be either; we must understand the forces of socialization.

People do not believe what they believe and do what they do because they came to these conclusions on their own by starting from some self-evident set of axioms and reasoning from there through pure logic. Rather, DiAngelo argues, they receive their beliefs from their surroundings.

Let me take a moment to stop and consider DiAngelo’s reasoning here. Is it correct? And is she right about the implications?

The concept that people have been raised to believe in certain values and principles, and that it is hard to question these, or even see that they are beliefs and not simply reality itself, is not unique. From Heinlein questioning life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, to Rand questioning altruism, to Moldbug questioning democracy, and many others besides, it forms a tradition, going back through Nietzsche questioning the value of truth and morality, and ultimately back to Socrates questioning the values of his contemporary Greeks. DiAngelo is simply the next in this more-or-less distinguished line, choosing to question individualism and objectivity. (Did she have a poor experience reading Atlas Shrugged, perhaps?).

But just because certain beliefs did not stem from pure reason does not then make them false or wrong – rather, it simply makes them as-yet unevaluated (hence why you question them, instead of just rejecting them). Popular media or culture might habituate a person into believing many different things – are all of them truly lies? That seems unlikely. Upon questioning the values and beliefs you received through socialization, rather than obtaining a definitive list of falsehoods, you must instead continue to ask which are enduring truth and which mere ephemeral belief. How much of what you believe did you learn about from books, television, family, friends, etc.? And after such an insight as DiAngelo’s, shouldn’t all these now be open to question?

But DiAngelo is sparing in her attacks, wielding her insight against only one particular culturally-transmitted belief. Social influences might promote many lies – but among them all, there is only one, DiAngelo believes, that matters.

American culture, she claims, is propagating racism and white supremacy. And you can’t escape it. Individualism and objectivity, taken down so viciously a few pages ago, cannot sweep to the rescue to save you anymore. No – you stand without support or backing as the great wave of racism sweeps up over your head. Your only comfort is that you do not stand alone – DiAngelo is right beside you, though alas, she is just as without mooring as you are:

This attitude [racism] has shaped every aspect of my self-identity.

But wait a moment – I see a small wrinkle in this argument. Consider: that an attitude like racism can shape every aspect of ourselves is in the strictest sense surely true – but only if by ‘shape’ you mean ‘affect’ and not ‘determine’. We live in what Jim Manzi describes as a high causal density world. Every experience shapes you, and every experience shapes how you experience every subsequent thing. You hear a funny Crest commercial on the radio – you feel a tiny bit more positive toward Crest, and every time you see the label or hear the name, you get that tiny heartening flash of familiarity. But does this mean you necessarily buy Crest toothpaste? That you think about it when walking down the street – ‘oh, he’s wearing the Crest colors, I think he’s a good person’? No, because toothpaste ads are only a small part of the massive conglomeration of influences that affect your every action. Like gravity, the effect becomes smaller and smaller as influences become less and less relevant – unless the influences are all concentrated in one place, pulling in one direction, like a massive bigoted star (a red dwarf?).

How, then, are we to live with knowing that much of what we do and think is determined by our environment and not by the pure, unbiased choices of our egos? The best way through this matter, that I can see, (assuming, of course, that in the end volition is not just another thing which is controlled) is to accept that your environment influences you, but to recall that you purposefully cultivate your thoughts, beliefs, and media consumption – that is, you influence your influences in turn, thus creating the personality and beliefs you want for yourself. Minor influences are then swept away by the current of your directed thoughts and actions. The only influences you really have to worry about are the pervasive ones, implicit in everything you do, not Crest commercials but commercials themselves, or not commercials but the capitalist system that underlies them, etc.

Is racism, then, a minor influence that can be abstracted away? Or is it a concentrated impulse that cannot be ignored – everywhere, pervasive, reaching its grimy fingers unnoticed into all aspects of our daily lives to warp our beliefs, like a neutron star bending the light of far-off galaxies? DiAngelo argues that it is the latter.

If she’s right, though, is that game over? Is ‘racist’ now the central aspect of any white person’s identity, or ‘oppressed’ the central aspect of any person of color’s? Maybe not. Since, aren’t there other pervasive influences that affect every aspect of your life, that nevertheless you can tolerate to the point of ignoring them? What about your height, your appearance, the fact you can only see light on the visible spectrum? Yet, these are acceptable influences on worldview – because they’re benign.

But taken together they create something else, something absolutely necessary for DiAngelo’s argument, even while simultaneously undermining it – that is, massive differences in worldview between different people.

For DiAngelo to be correct about white fragility, there must be two fundamental worldviews currently in existence: that of white people, and that of people of color. These worldviews must be vastly different from each other, but relatively similar between people within each group.

I ask you – does this seem likely? Take a different example: it’s easy enough to picture the differences between a Christian’s version of the world, with good and evil and an all-powerful god guiding human actions, and an atheist’s version, inherently amoral with events determined by random chance or brute mechanical cause-and-effect. But, do all Christians imagine heaven the same way? Or do all atheists have the same intuitions about the probabilistic nature of reality? No – worldview varies much more than that, even between people in the same cultural groupings. People’s influences, after all, are only partly shared through culture and media. Other causes come into effect: geographic, biological, or stemming from a person’s own choices and inborn nature.

DiAngelo’s argument that some of these influences differ by race seems reasonable:

We are socialized into these groups collectively. In mainstream culture, we all receive the same messages about what these groups mean, why being in one group is a different experience from being in another.

But take DiAngelo’s observations to their logical conclusions: those cultural messages that pertain to group differences are not by a long shot the only such messages we are receiving. The better question to ask then might be – are these messages the most important? Or are there other messages, just as strong, just as pervasive, but that interact with their receivers in a much more varied fashion?

Even small differences in perspective can have massive effects on worldview – as DiAngelo herself demonstrates. For example, when she discusses the struggles of those who create diversity courses in universities, and the challenges they face trying to get their courses included in the general curriculum, she describes feeling like her pro-diversity-course group is the underdog, put upon by the more powerful interests of, say, science or humanities departments that are trying to keep her courses out. But read any right-leaning education blog for a couple of weeks (or talk to the right people), and you see that those humanities and science departments feel that they are the ones put upon by the powerful diversity programs, that they are the ones being bullied into including diversity courses in their programs. Within the relatively homogeneous bubble of academia, we already find a difference in worldview so vast both sides can perceive themselves as the little guy being persecuted by the big bad other, even though they are different sides of the exact same conflict.

Why should racism be any different? And, of course, it’s not. DiAngelo indeed lists examples of white people complaining about ‘reverse racism’ and so forth. How to tell, then, which side is correct, and which delusional? Or are both their conclusions, well –

But DiAngelo is overlooking something else. After all, she wrote this book, and now that it went on to become a bestseller – has not her narrative become part of the shared culture? What sort of influence is her own book having upon her topic? Is it a drop in the bucket against the vast ocean of racist assumptions drowning the country? Or is it one more booted foot of the liberally biased media stamping on the face of the national consciousness? Does that not depend on – perspective?

DiAngelo, though, is not one to equivocate on this issue. Racist beliefs, she claims (unsurprisingly), are the most common and important among culturally-propagated biases, and thus the only ones she is interested in. Anyone to whom it appears otherwise is, in her view, simply incorrect.

Yet, while rejecting other worldviews as necessarily delusions, she does not for this reason stop seeking to understand them. Her attempts to comprehend other viewpoints may be made merely in order to find out how to persuade them to defect to her side – but this purpose makes her perception all the more formidable. Twenty years as – to use her terminology – a “facilitator of anti-racism training,” has given her insight. Twenty years of asking the same questions and getting the same responses has taught her something profound about human nature. She had own little laboratory of human interactions – and she used it. This book is a lesson in persuasive tactics – to see these most clearly, though, you must for a moment take the perspective of her intended audience: white progressives.

Close your eyes and imagine you are a white progressive.

You, like all people in Western culture, desire individuality and uniqueness. Though DiAngelo firmly rebuts these ideals as impossible to achieve and fruitless if not outright destructive to attempt to obtain, she knows very well the deep roots of faith in these principles are not to be torn out by logic alone, if indeed they can be at all.  Even if you agree with her consciously that individualism is a false value, you will still pursue the value unconsciously. She knows you still desire to be different from all the other readers, to be special. And she uses this desire to her advantage, by implicitly redefining different – as whatever she wants you to believe.

Take, for example, DiAngelo’s argument at the very beginning that no white person is exempt from being a racist. She goes through common reasons people claim to be exceptions, knocking them down one by one, insisting all the while that you are no different than all the rest of the racist world. And then, at the end, she closes her discussion of the topic with this:

I can predict that many readers will make similar claims of exception precisely because we are products of our culture, not separate from it.

And then she moves on – leaving you to come to your own conclusions.

DiAngelo has discerned that a major part of the reason white people claim to be not-racist is because they want to be different from all the other racists that society is full of – they want to be individual and unique. Insisting on the universality of racism just makes that uniqueness all the more stark, causing them to want to insist on their non-racism even more. But then along comes DiAngelo, saying that it’s common for white people to insist they’re not racists – the real exceptions are actually those who own up to it. And the way to become more than a “product of your culture” is not to continue insisting that you’re not, but to accept that you are and admit to it. The whole discussion is a cognitive trap for the unwary progressive mind.

She does something similar, implicitly shifting the assumptions about what actions make a person high-status, to actions that she favors you, the reader (still pretending to be a white progressive), taking:

…it is common to feel defensive.

But unfortunately, white fragility can only protect the problematic behavior you feel so defensive about; it does not demonstrate that you are an open person who has no problematic racial behavior.

The implication being, that most low-status, ordinary white people, do things like defending themselves from accusations of racism. But in order to be a good, anti-racist progressive, a unique and special high-status existence, you must instead accept these accusations as accurate.

And yet, as DiAngelo observes, it’s still hard for her audience to accept a negative label. Thus her next trick: rebranding the label as something less negative – temporarily. This is a clever use of an argumentative strategy often called the “motte-and-bailey fallacy” in which, according to Wikipedia:

 …an arguer conflates two positions which share similarities, one modest and easy to defend (the “motte”) and one much more controversial (the “bailey”).

Thus, DiAngelo redefines racism as something common and unintentional, something you can participate in unwittingly without being a bad person overall, and without being evil – the motte. This makes her claim that all whites are racist clearly true yet relatively inoffensive:

So let me be clear: if your definition of a racist is someone who holds conscious dislike of people because of race, then I agree that it is offensive for me to suggest that you are racist when I don’t know you. I also agree that if this is your definition of racism, then you are not a racist. Now breathe. I am not using this definition of racism, and I am not saying you are immoral.

It only takes a few chapters though before she goes back in to the bailey for the bait-and-switch. This comes when she calls upon critiques of her own redefinition, questioning whether most racism is so unintentional as all that:

Critical race scholar Zeus Leonardo critiques the concept of white privilege as something white people receive unwittingly.

Viewing privilege as something that white people are just handed obscures the systematic dimensions of racism that must be actively and passively, consciously and unconsciously, maintained.

So despite her assurances earlier, we see DiAngelo really is claiming that you and all her white audience are consciously racist – she just didn’t want to lead with that. DiAngelo’s turn-about here is neither without purpose, nor surprising. After all, racism has historically meant conscious prejudice against other races. If she wanted a term for unconscious bias that white people wouldn’t get confused about or feel accused by – then why did she not just make up something new (“We all unconsciously participate in exoginism!”)? She recognizes that her terminology is partly what is holding some back from agreeing with her:

White resistance to the term “white supremacy” prevents us from examining how these messages shape us.

For sociologists and those involved in current racial justice movements, however, white supremacy is a descriptive and useful term to capture the all-encompassing centrality and assumed superiority of people defined and perceived as white and the practices based on this assumption.

If white people won’t listen to her message because of her terms, why not choose another term? The answer is simply because she can’t, not without losing the true substance of her argument – she wants to keep the word racism with all its accusative connotations, because it is an accusation. Her goal is to trick you into agreeing that you are a racist under the first, more benign definition – and then to prove that it is impossible to be racist only in that sense, or to be good if you are racist in that sense. But if you have already admitted that you are racist under the first definition, that means you have implicitly admitted to your guilt under the more malicious, traditional definition of racism as well.

Of course, to prevent you and all the rest of her unfortunate progressive readers from catching on, she goes back to the motte before the end of the book, before it becomes too much:

Most of us would not choose to be socialized into racism and white supremacy. Unfortunately, we didn’t have that choice.

The implications of the term, though, remain.

Motte-and-bailey is not her only such strategy. DiAngelo also engages in that persuasive tactic most cherished by those in the business of soul attacks – pointing out contradictions in what their victims believe.

For example, once she thinks she has said enough to convince you (still have your white-progressive-hat on?) of your implicit bias, she points out the contradiction between action and ideal through the idea of aversive racism:

…holding deep racial disdain that surfaces in daily discourse but not being able to admit it because the disdain conflicts with our self-image and professed beliefs.

Most people, on noticing a contradiction in their worldview, feel compelled to resolve it. DiAngelo poses this contradiction in order to make her recommendations feel necessary to resolve the contradiction – you must admit you are racist because, since you clearly are racist, to claim otherwise would be to lie, and who wants to be a liar?

Another contradiction she points out is the relative absence of diversity, in a society that values diversity:

I was raised in a society that taught me that there was no loss in the absence of people of color – that their absence was a good and desirable thing to be sought and maintained – while simultaneously denying that fact.

Most people find this sort of hypocrisy unsettling, at least once they have it pointed out to them. People want their beliefs, words, and actions to align, in order to feel like complete and good human beings. Somehow, then, you must seek to resolve this contradiction.

Yet, there are multiple ways you might resolve such a difference in values between word and action. You could of course take the view that these people’s words – your words – are the good and the true and reflect what you really believe, and that you’re simply not following through on them out of laziness or unconscious malice. In order to resolve the discrepancy, then, you must simply change your actions to align with your beliefs and words, and all will be well. Alternatively, you could take the view you believe what you are saying but are stopped from implementing it by forces beyond your control, like the long hand of racism, which then you might agree needs to be stopped by practicing anti-racism. But then again, when people say one thing but do another, sometimes it is not their words that they truly believe in their hearts, but instead –

One way or the other, though, the inconsistencies must be resolved. This, after all, is the purpose of these soul attacks – to create the cracks through which DiAngelo’s narrative might slip through, as the glue that will resolve the contradictions it has just created, repairing her readers’ shattered worldviews.

But a contradiction can generally be resolved in favor of either side. Why does DiAngelo trust that you will take hers – that her resolution is more persuasive than any other you might come up with on your own?

Thus I come to her next rhetorical strategy – her framing of her thesis as a narrative: a story about why things are the way they are, how things really ought to be, and what everyone must do in order to get there.

DiAngelo believes you will agree with her because she will persuade you to agree with her – not only through logical arguments, but through appeals to emotion as well (much as Rand did in Atlas Shrugged). Like all good narratives, the plot of her story is augmented by imagery and personal storytelling. To take just one example of an anecdote she gives about her experience practicing anti-racism in her own life:

The equity team has been invited to a meeting with the company’s new web developer. The team consists of two women, both of whom are black, and me. The new web developer, who is also black, wants to interview us so that she can build our page. She starts the meeting by giving us a survey to fill out. Many questions on the survey inquire about our intended audience, methods, goals, and objectives. I find the questions tedious and feel irritated by them. Pushing the survey aside, I try to explain verbally. I tell the web developer that we go out into the satellite offices to facilitate antiracism training. I add that the training is not always well received; in fact, one member of our team was told not to come back. I make a joke: “The white people were scared by Deborah’s hair” (Deborah is black and has long locked braids). The meeting ends and we move on.

A few days later, one of my team members lets me know that the web developer – who I will call Angela – was offended by my hair comment. While I wasn’t paying attention at the time, I quickly realize why that comment was off. I seek out a friend who is white and has a solid understanding of cross-racial dynamics. We discuss my feelings (embarrassment, shame, guilt) and then she helps me identify the various ways my racism was revealed in that interaction. After this processing, I feel ready to repair the relationship. I ask Angela to meet with me, and she accepts.

I open by asking Angela, “Would you be willing to grant me the opportunity to repair the racism I perpetrated toward you in the meeting?” When she agrees, I continue. “I realize that my comment about Deborah’s hair was inappropriate.”

Angela nods and explains that she did not know me and did not want to be joking about black women’s hair (a sensitive issue for many black women) with a white woman whom she did not have a trusting relationship with, much less in a professional work meeting.

I apologize and ask her if I have missed anything else problematic in the meeting.

“Yes,” she replies. “That survey? I wrote that survey. And I have spent my life justifying my intelligence to white people.”

My chest constricts as I immediately realize the impact of my glib dismissal of the survey. I acknowledge this impact and apologize.

She accepts my apology. I ask Angela if there is anything else that needs to be said or heard so that we may move forward…

She tells me that although these dynamics occur daily between white people and people of color, my willingness to repair doesn’t, and that she appreciates this. We move on.

She frames her thesis as the story of her own life, so that you might sympathize with her as you would a novel’s protagonist. She even, later on, reveals explicitly that she is in fact doing this consciously and strategically:

…it’s difficult to argue with someone who has framed a response as his or her own personal insight.”

Thus, she creates a sense of shared struggle, a sense that you are not alone (because while everyone wants to be unique, no one wants to be alone), by presenting her own journey to anti-racism as a model for you to follow – right down to anecdotes where she was the racist, and what she did to apologize and improve herself.

The struggle against racism for her, despite the broader form of racism as an all-encompassing social phenomenon, is very personal in nature – individual, one might almost say. Even when she’s trying to convince other people, she is doing it primarily to try to change herself:

Ultimately, I let go of changing the other person…But the objective that guides me is my own need to break with white solidarity…

Which leads us back to our own, possibly less-progressive, but certainly less-credulous perspective, and to the surprising observation that the focus of this narrative, and of the book as a whole, is less about achieving a non-racist society – which DiAngelo believes is impossible in practice anyways – but about DiAngelo’s own personal journey, in which she seeks to grow and change as a person. That is, the path she describes is not a golden path to victory, but a much more personal path to enlightenment. Contrary to what one might expect from her descriptions of the direct, society-wide suffering racism causes, for her the journey to anti-racism is fundamentally personal and internal.

In this, her journey follows the tradition of sin and self-overcoming in Christianity. Sin is at its heart personal, and any individual must overcome their own sin for the sake of their own soul.

In this metaphor, then, racism is like unto original sin. Consider white supremacy – a burden of guilt, shared by all white people (they didn’t start it themselves, it began with the mistakes of their ancestors and they simply inherited it at birth), that they can and indeed must constantly try to combat in order to be good people, but that they can never fully succeed in doing away with. The parallels are clear.

But where is the salvation? In Christianity, sin is inevitable, but through Christ we can be forgiven. Who will forgive us for racism?

Perhaps that is the wrong question – perhaps forgiveness is too much to hope for. Maybe all DiAngelo really wants is for white people for just a moment to open their eyes to the truth. Bowing your face into the flames sometimes just lets you see the fire more closely.

Struggling against racism, then, is a lifelong journey. And a society without racism is like the kingdom of heaven on earth – something to strive for even while knowing it is unachievable:

Racism is so deeply woven into the fabric of our society that I do not see myself escaping from that continuum in my lifetime. But I can continually seek to move further along it.

Still, I don’t feel guilty about racism. I didn’t choose this socialization, and it could not be avoided. But I am responsible for my role in it. To the degree that I have done my best in each moment to interrupt my participation, I can rest with a clearer conscience. But that clear conscience is not achieved by complacency or a sense that I have arrived.

Since my learning will never be finished, neither will the need to hold me accountable.

There’s something very Christian in the idea of constant and futile struggle against our own inherent sin, and the need to be aware of it in every moment.

As for DiAngelo’s claim that she doesn’t feel guilty – is this just posturing? Is she promising the reader catharsis if only they will do what she says? Or else, with her emphasis on publicly admitting to racism and public apologies and corrections, has she outsourced her guilt to the community to transmute it into shame, as Alone describes? Does anyone feel true guilt these days? Should we envy the old Christians their deep experiences of this particular passion?

We might also doubt DiAngelo’s claim to be without guilt when we consider some of her imagery on the subject:

Anti-blackness is rooted in misinformation, fables, perversions, projections, and lies. It is also rooted in a lack of historical knowledge and an inability or unwillingness to trace the effects of history into the present. But perhaps most fundamentally, anti-blackness comes from deep guilt about what we have done and continue to do; the unbearable knowledge of our complicity with the profound torture of black people from past to present. While the full trauma of this torture in its various forms – both physically and psychologically – is only borne by African Americans, there is a kind of moral trauma in it for the white collective. In his revolutionary book, My Grandmother’s Hands, social worker and therapist Resmaa Menakem refers to white supremacy as white body supremacy to argue that white supremacy is a form of trauma that is stored in our collective bodies: ‘Many African Americans know trauma intimately – from their own nervous systems, from the experiences of people they love, and, most often, from both. But African Americans are not alone in this. A different but equally real form of racialized trauma lives in the bodies of most white Americans.’ Our projections allow us to bury this trauma by dehumanizing and then blaming the victim. If blacks are not human in the same ways that we white people are human, our mistreatment of them doesn’t count. We are not guilty; they are. If they are bad, it isn’t unfair. In fact, it is righteous.

Well, clearly, it’s a complex issue:

White racial socialization engenders many conflicting feelings toward African Americans: benevolence, resentment, superiority, hatred, and guilt…

So complex, that sometimes it seems arguing about racism is like arguing about the Trinity – the way to win a debate is not by countering all your opponent’s arguments, which for a system so complex is impossible anyways, but rather by going on until your opponent becomes too confused to continue.

In as far as DiAngelo’s narrative shares similar features with the Christian narrative, though, it shares something deep and profound. Christianity wasn’t a major religion for hundreds of years for no reason. It fulfills a fundamental human desire to pursue a path of continuous improvement. To call this desire false or wrong would be a rejection of that which is highest in human nature – a rejection of the call to become something more, something better than you are now. DiAngelo’s worldview not only allows but encourages this mindset – by positing infinite racism, it permits infinite efforts toward anti-racism. Some problems exist not to be solved, but for the potential they unearth in those trying to solve them.

That DiAngelo had so many insights about human nature is perhaps due at least in part to the fact that she had an exceptional purpose above herself, driving her at every moment in her desire to be less racist. This, then, is what gave her the motivation to constant reflection that her path of learning required (emphasis added):

These are the deeper feelings that I need to be willing to examine, for these feelings can and do seep out without my awareness and hurt those whom I love.

Once we understand the power of implicit bias, for example, we know that we must deepen rather than close off further reflection.

The key realization here is the need for “further reflection.” Thought leads to action, action creates reality. This is the whole concept behind mindfulness or deliberate practice. And this reflection is surely what allowed DiAngelo to model others to the extent she could see their responses like reading from a script, and to figure out how to write this book in a way that her audience would keep reading, that they would engage with her, and that some would even agree with her.

The very act of practicing “further reflection” on the subject is what will make her claims true to her readers and followers. What is real to you is only what you can perceive, and you can only perceive what you have cognitive patterns to recognize. “Further reflection” is how you create those cognitive patterns – and thus does systemic racism become real and visible in your mind, as in the minds of all who try to practice DiAngelo’s precepts.

This journey, I think though, is not over for DiAngelo entirely. If DiAngelo had truly embraced the personal, goal-centric ideology she describes, she would view all situations in which she failed to convince others of her reasoning as personal failures in her ability to model and persuade. This does not seem to be the case, as she complains considerably about people who refuse to understand or agree with her views.

Yet does she not remember her own journey to come this far in her understanding? How can she expect people who never experienced such a personal journey (at least not one in relation to racism) to act according to insights they have never yet had?

IV.

Unless you believe hypocrisy is the first and only true sin, it is easy enough to forgive a woman for not quite rising up to her high ideals during every moment of her argument. But a little bit of critique might not be uncalled for – in a helpful spirit of course. After all, DiAngelo can’t really expect her readers not to notice the contradictions, unsubstantiated claims, fallacies, outright lies, false assumptions, and non-sequiturs that populate her righteous pages, can she?

Going back to what I was discussing in part three, let me start with the false assumption I just mentioned. Here we see DiAngelo fail the infamous box-of-crayons problem – just because she herself has already discovered how to recognize her own racism and respond to criticism of such without defensiveness and white fragility, it doesn’t mean everyone else can do the same. Expecting people to instantly comprehend a system and worldview you have spent twenty years developing is unreasonable, unless you live in a world in which everyone is a Dûnyain – in which case you probably have bigger problems.

The task DiAngelo sets her pupils is difficult. People naturally become angry and defensive when accused of racism, a fact DiAngelo knows only too well; one of the later chapters is devoted to listing out all the various responses she has seen in her seminars in order to critique them, explaining how they are all caused at their root by white fragility. (Like the theories of Freud, white fragility explains a great deal of human reaction – perhaps even all of it.) But not only is the sole correct response in her eyes – admitting to the racism and apologizing – less than helpful for most of her pupils in a practical sense (can anyone say “career suicide”), it also requires a theoretical framework it seems unlikely she would have managed to impart and convince them of in a few-hours-long anti-racism seminar.

So why resent them for failing to do the impossible? Yet this is exactly DiAngelo’s reaction, and a sense of frustration underlies all she says on the subject, fresh indignation welling up at every new example of people falling short of appreciation at her insights. For example, take her comments on some white people reacting to what a person of color says:

They demonstrated no curiosity about the student’s perspective or why they might have taken offense.

Modeling someone else’s perspective to the level where you can understand why they might be offended by one thing or another, especially in subtle cases, is no easy feat. Is this an everyday thing for you? It’s not for me. Really, if her participants were regularly doing this, I might start to wonder whether we were living in the same world. Yet DiAngelo takes for granted that people ought to be able to model others this way – but only when it comes to racism. She assumes that others will share her worldview and perspective (at least other white people) – as if race were the only factor causing changes in perspective.

In a general sense, DiAngelo’s recommendation to model others is not itself flawed – it’s a useful skill to practice. But it would be a tragedy to model others only when it came to racial perspectives – to seek only a small shard of the total insight, to be satisfied by only a small sliver of the great light of understanding. For DiAngelo, who believes racism to be ubiquitous and of the highest importance, perhaps this seems like enough. But for those with other purposes and priorities, modeling others only with respect to racial perspectives and offenses is a sure way to warp your worldview. Understanding should be all-encompassing – understanding should be whole.

But this is not the only complaint DiAngelo has about her seminar participants’ lack of ability:

They were unable to separate intentions from impact.

Again, if you’ve actually managed to achieve this feat in your everyday life, I assume you are already applying it to a far wider array of uses than only anti-racism-related purposes.

She also complains about her students’…

…indulgence in emotional incapacitation such as guilt or ‘hurt feelings’…

Just imagine such a world, in which we all go around all day in complete control of our emotions. Does DiAngelo actually think she lives in a world of Dûnyain, or does she just wish it?

Asking someone to model someone else’s feelings of offense in order to respect them, while ignoring any feelings of their own they might have in response, is a high bar indeed. If most people of color are doing this all the time, having naturally reached this level of skill through environmental necessity, as DiAngelo suggests – then whites ought to be quite impressed. But most people that I have met (of any race), as best I can tell, are neither controlling their emotional responses at this level of detail, nor controlling the impact of their emotions on their thoughts and actions.

Despite her disdain for them, DiAngelo is doing her students and followers a huge favor by teaching them these skills, since they are universally useful, and applicable in situations far afield of anti-racism. But the fact that her students complain they can’t manage it when she’s acting like this high-level skill should come easily for them is hardly surprising to me. Why is it so surprising to her?

Perhaps it’s not? She admits that these are difficult skills:

To let go of the messenger and focus on the message is an advanced skill and is especially difficult to practice if someone comes at us with a self-righteous tone. If kindness gets us there faster, I am all for it. But I do not require anything from someone giving me feedback before I can engage with that feedback. Part of my processing of that feedback will be to separate it from its delivery and ascertain the central point and its contribution to my growth. Many of us are not there yet, but this is what we need to work toward.

Thus we come to the heart of the contradiction inherent in DiAngelo’s assumption – these are advanced skills people need to work towards, but at the same time her victims students are unusually crass for not having them already. DiAngelo, though – unlike me, and perhaps you – seems to find these beliefs completely compatible.

Whatever her motives, her recommendations, once you get past the tone of contempt she gives them in (processing feedback separately from its delivery is a skill she advises you to develop – is this her way of giving the reader an opportunity to practice?), are quite useful:

This includes not indulging in whatever reactions we have – anger, defensiveness, self-pity, and so forth – in a given cross-racial encounter without first reflecting on what is driving our reactions and how they will affect other people.

Quite useful, at least, when applied more generally. (What a pity it would be, to have these skills and yet only use them in “cross-racial encounters”!)

While it is easy to criticize DiAngelo’s contempt of her students’ “failures”, one cannot help but admire her attempt to hold herself to the same high standards to which she holds the world:

Feedback is key to our ability to recognize and repair our inevitable and often unaware collusion. In recognition of this, I try to follow these guidelines:

1. How, where, and when you give me feedback is irrelevant – it is the feedback I want and need. Understanding that it is hard to give, I will take it any way I can get it. From my position of social, cultural, and institutional white power and privilege, I am perfectly safe and I can handle it. If I cannot handle it, it’s on me to build my racial stamina.

2. Thank you.

The sentiment is commendable. Others seeking to improve themselves even in fields other than anti-racism would be wise to imitate her, adapting her attitude to their own areas of study. To act from a position of strength, to use whatever resources are available to become better, not caring what others think about you and your methods – this is a true path to insight. People not engaged in this sort of transformation, though, can hardly be expected to take this attitude.

Moving on – the book being called White Fragility, it should hardly surprise us that DiAngelo pinpoints the titular phenomenon as the root of most of what she observes about her white acquaintances (and even some of what she observes about her acquaintances of color). And yet, while sometimes this explanation seems plausible, often the assumption that actions and responses of such a wide variety all have a single, previously-unobserved cause, seems unlikely.

Take DiAngelo’s list in chapter nine of common responses her seminar participants have when confronted with their racism. (The full list is too long for me to type out without violating fair use, but includes, among other things: “crying”, “physically leaving,” “emotionally withdrawing,” “arguing,” “denying,” “focusing on intentions,” “seeking absolution,” and “avoiding.”) Here, most of what DiAngelo claims to observe can be explained, in the place of white fragility, by two other more mundane factors.

First, people don’t like getting criticized in general, but especially in public. That’s a human universal, and most of what she has noticed about what causes her participants to accept feedback or not likely comes down to this.

And second, people like to keep their worldviews. Her accusations of racism constitute a soul attack against them – her worldview pitted against theirs. People, unsurprisingly, leap to defend their belief systems from this sort of assault. That different people react differently can be explained by people having different worldviews and levels of understanding, and their responses reflecting these differences.

To see why this is so, allow me to separate the reactions DiAngelo sees into two broad categories. The first category includes those who leave, get upset, or seek absolution. For someone who views the world primarily through the lens of their own uncultured emotion, the natural counter to the emotionally charged accusation that they’re a racist is to find some way to bring back emotional equilibrium. These people tend to do things like leaving to wait until the emotions wear off, expressing their feelings outwardly to regain emotional balance, or seeking catharsis through forgiveness or absolution to convert uncomfortable feelings into mere relief.

In the second category fall those who like to argue back, or seek solutions. For those who live in a world governed by principles and allegiance to belief systems, either DiAngelo’s message matches with their principles, in which case they agree racism is a problem and seek solutions, or it conflicts with their principles, in which case they either care about combating the accusation or they don’t. If they do care, they argue back in order to protect their reputation, and if they don’t, the either ignore her or argue anyways out of sheer boredom.

None of these people’s responses stem from a desire to be contrary per say (except perhaps in the last case), or to frustrate DiAngelo’s immanentization of the perfect anti-racism training seminar on earth. Rather, their responses are born out of a need to protect their own worldviews. DiAngelo’s worldview is powerful – it has been created, whether through conscious intent or natural evolution, to dominate the hearts of those who run the world (much less the weaker hearts of middle-managers). DiAngelo’s students on some level sense this, and instinctually do anything they can to prevent themselves from becoming believers, thralls ridden by her ideology. They don’t want to walk out with their original beliefs having been replaced by DiAngelo’s own – which of course, this being exactly what DiAngelo is trying to do, naturally creates a conflict.

Perhaps, though, you still prefer DiAngelos’ explanations of the seminar participants’ behavior over mine? But this is not the end of it – as her descriptions of the responses she observes get more specific, her interpretations of these behaviors get more and more…unlikely:

In the early days of my work as what was then termed a diversity trainer, I was taken aback by how angry and defensive so many white people became at the suggestion that they were connected to racism in any way. The very idea that they would be required to attend a workshop on racism outraged them. They entered the room angry and made that feeling clear to us throughout the day as they slammed their notebooks down on the table, refused to participate in exercises, and argued against any and all points.

I couldn’t understand their resentment or disinterest in learning more about such a complex social dynamic as racism. These reactions were especially perplexing when there were few or no people of color in their workplace, and they had the opportunity to learn from my cofacilitators of color. I assumed that in these circumstances, an educational workshop on racism would be appreciated. After all, didn’t the lack of diversity indicate a problem or at least suggest that some perspectives were missing? Or that the participants might be undereducated about race because of scant cross-racial interactions?

DiAngelo’s explanation for this mysterious behavior, of course, is that her participants’ white fragility made them resistant to discussing racism.

Now, it could be true that in general white people don’t like to talk about racism because of their white fragility. But DiAngelo’s puzzle above has a much easier answer: these people were resentful because they had to attend what they considered a useless diversity training seminar, instead of doing whatever their actual job was. The topic of diversity, if they thought of it at all, was a social or political issue, not something they ought to be dealing with while at work. (And as for “the opportunity to learn from [DiAngelo’s] cofacilitators of color,” while they may well have all been lovely people, from the perspective of her audience, they were just more annoying “diversity trainers” wasting their time. “Cross-racial interactions,” after all, are not a hard thing to obtain in a country as ethnically diverse as the US.)

Of course, DiAngelo’s conclusions can be very hard to question, considering the long experience and study underlying her expertise. At one point she tells us:

I can name every neighborhood in my city and its racial makeup.

To which I can only say – um, is that your hobby or something? Don’t take this the wrong way – but perhaps you should consider getting a life?

Here’s another example of one of DiAngelo’s explanations failing Occam’s Razor: We see her deride people in positions of power for getting upset at

…the mere questioning of these positions…

She claims this as evidence for the existence of white fragility. But is it? Questioning people’s positions of power seems precisely the opposite what one would normally call ‘mere.’ Desiring power is a fundamental part of human nature – asking these people to give it up for justice and equality seems about as likely to work as asking people to give up eating chocolate for democracy and education. Is DiAngelo actually surprised that trying to question, i.e., take away these people’s power (that she might have it herself?), makes them angry? And does that, then, make them fragile? Really, if they were actually as ‘fragile’ as all that, wouldn’t they have just let her take it…hmmm, wait a minute. Maybe DiAngelo’s really onto something here?

Or consider this one: DiAngelo, at one point, remarks critically on her white participants’ need to “build trust” before they will discuss racism (this is also supposedly due to white fragility – yes, there is a bit of trend here). Surprising, indeed, that these people should care more about keeping their jobs, than engaging with the diversity training they have just been forced to participate in.

Her interpretation of the motive of racism itself is perhaps her greatest stretch of all, her argument a thin strand winding through the space of possibilities – and yet, the sheer elegance of its complexity makes it compelling despite everything:

To put it bluntly, I believe that the white collective fundamentally hates blackness for what it reminds us of: that we are capable and guilty of perpetrating immeasurable harm and that our gains come through the subjugation of others.

Whites discriminate against people of color because whites are racist, and whites turn to racism because they feel guilty about discriminating against people of color, which racism causes them to discriminate against them more…a vicious cycle? Or just a circular argument? (That this accusation can be leveled against DiAngelo is another easy similarity to point out between her ideology and Christianity – God exists because the bible says so, the bible is true because God said so…)

Yet unlike their faith in Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior, white people are so unwilling to discuss their beliefs about racism:

Probing forbidden racial issues results in verbal incoherence – digressions, long pauses, repetition, and self-corrections. Bonilla-Silva suggests that this incoherent talk is a function of talking about race in a world that insists that race does not matter. This incoherence suggests that many white people are unprepared to explore, even on a preliminary level, their racial perspectives and work to shift their understanding of racism.

Again, another explanation seems a bit simpler than Bonilla-Silva’s: Perhaps, these “digressions, long pauses, repetition, and self-corrections” and all the other “verbal incoherence” are a function of talking about race in a world that insists professionals confine their remarks to the politically correct or else risk having to update their resume. Meanwhile, what counts as politically correct changes unforgivingly from year to year, month to month, and week to week. These poor professionals can’t keep up, and thus find themselves attempting to mumble their way through race-related conversations without saying anything offensive – that is, without saying anything at all.

For these people to be prepared to explore, “even on a preliminary level, their racial perspectives,” might I suggest a static vocabulary to work with for a start. Just a suggestion. These people are not stupid – they know that trying to express any sort of view on race will only result in humiliation (by being corrected by people exactly like you, DiAngelo!). They may or may not want to talk about race, but they know they can’t without risking their careers, so they quite understandably take the safe route. (And to put it bluntly, DiAngelo, in your heart I think you already know this – you hate their attitude for what it reminds you of: that you are capable and guilty of humiliating them for their views on race, and that your gains come from wasting others’ time in unproductive diversity seminars;)

But what causes DiAngelo to interpret these anecdotes one way, and not another? Even Rand could tell us this one – when things appear contradictory, check your assumptions. What, then, does DiAngelo assume?

Racism, of course. She admits to this explicitly:

This book does not attempt to find the solution to racism. Nor does it attempt to prove that racism exists; I start from that premise. My goal is to make visible how one aspect of white sensibility continues to hold racism in place: white fragility.

But DiAngelo does not assume just that racism exists – but that in a way, racism is the only thing that exists, at least the only thing of consequence. For DiAngelo, racism is the first and principle aspect of being, from which all else stems, and in the light of which all else must be interpreted.

We can well understand why DiAngelo might take this very great assumption – might have to take it. Since without it – what meaning does her life have? Everyone wants to believe they are the main character in their own movie, and in order for that to be true, they have to be working on solving the central conflict – otherwise, they’re really just a side character. Thus for DiAngelo, who’s spent her life as a facilitator of anti-racism training, to deny that racism is the most important problem in the world is to deny that what she’s involved with is the central conflict – to deny her important role as the main character.

Yet, while we can see why DiAngelo might like to believe this, what are we to believe? Just because DiAngelo believes it doesn’t make it true – but just because she used motivated reasoning to come to the conclusion doesn’t make it false either. Dear reader, is racism the central problem of your life?

For anti-racism to take its rightful place as the true fundamental ideology of the US, though, it takes more than just belief that racism is an issue – it takes universal belief that racism is an apolitical issue. Right now, even the term “identity politics” suggests that the issues in question are still mired deep in political contention – and what is still politically debated cannot become axiomatic principle. Until anti-racism gets past this, it cannot be discussed everywhere with no consequences:

Why speaking up about racism would ruin the ambiance or threaten our career advancement is something we might want to talk about.

Universally accepted truths are not generally deemed inappropriate to discuss in a professional context. Political opinions, on the other hand, often are.

The transformation to apoliticism that DiAngelo hopes racism will undergo can only happen once the subject passes through the realm of politics into accepted fact. Consider: whether the US should enter World War II was once a contentious issue people probably couldn’t talk about at work (at least not too openly). Then Pearl Harbor happened, and the US did enter World War II. Now anyone can talk about World War II at their job and be perfectly safe – as long as they’re not taking the side of the Nazis. But who in heaven and earth would do that, when the Nazis were obviously wrong and evil anyways? Such is the process – the issue passes clear through politics, and into category of mere factual reality.

Unfortunately for DiAngelo, racism has a ways yet to go in that direction.

Yet some adjacent issues have already made this journey – though whether they made it on their merits is another question. DiAngelo doesn’t even see a need to cite evidence to state:

Under the skin, there is no true biological race.

Thus the conclusion the reader must come to on the topic of human equality is obvious:

Kendi goes on to argue, that if we truly believe that all humans are equal, then disparity in condition can only be the result of systematic discrimination.

Actually, she and Kendi leave out a couple of alternate possibilities on this one. For one thing, disparity in condition could be caused by historical propagation of initial inequalities, no presently active systematic discrimination required. But even if her either/or were true, we might still balk at her assumption that “all humans are equal.” This has been discussed at length in other places, but the answer, to any reasonable interpretation of the question, is an obvious ‘no.’ Humans are not the same – they do not have the same skills, the same values, the same lifespan, the same body mass, strength, intelligence, compassion, wisdom, experience, or any other thing you care to name. To claim that somehow the sum of all these things must be the same for every person would be like claiming all snowflakes have identical mass down to the femtogram despite their different structures. One might argue that all humans ought to have the same rights in the eyes of the state, or are deserving of the same hatred and contempt from their fellow humans, etc. But these things are not what most people mean by ‘equality’.

It’s interesting to see how far this assumption of equality has gone, to the extent that DiAngelo feels justified in saying:

But race, like gender, is socially constructed.

You can claim gender norms are socially constructed all you like, but denying biological differences between the sexes is like O’Brien denying two plus two is four. Not just a lie, but a really hard lie to believe, too. And yet it passed the sieve – now everyone in professional circles must agree with it, gender is socially constructed and Nazis are evil. Oh brave new world, that has such biologically identical people in it.

This, however, is not the hill I want to die on today, so I’ll leave you to your own meditations on that subject.

No, the grass on my grave grows over here: DiAngelo notes carefully the unwillingness of whites to integrate – in particular in the case of school systems, but the observation applies broadly. She also describes compellingly, with examples throughout the book, the pain and suffering people of color face trying to get along with whites, all of whom have been left to steep over-long in a culture of white supremacy. Nevertheless, according to DiAngelo, this integration, this getting-along, simply must be done – since to do otherwise would be a violation of that most fundamental of values: diversity. I must admit, I see a contradiction here. Do you?

If not, consider. There are three values at work in the chain of logic above. First, whites want to resist integration – this is the value of personal, individual expression of preference, what some might call choice. This value though, it is commonly accepted, can be overridden when needful for the pursuit of higher values and the good of the society – so far so good. Second, people of color suffer in their interactions with whites. The value at stake here is care/harm of the sort Haidt describes, or reducing suffering from a utilitarian perspective. This value is much more fundamental. Does the need to reduce suffering override the need to let people express preferences and have choices? Most would say yes.

This brings us to the third value mentioned above – diversity. As a value of social good, it is easy enough to accept that diversity might come above choice and personal preference in the value-food-chain. But what makes diversity more important than alleviating suffering?

That is to say – why is diversity good, so good in fact, that people, including people of color, should suffer for it? On this question, DiAngelo is silent.

DiAngelo may very well think that this is a question that does not need to be answered – she trusts that her audience will have absorbed her assumptions about diversity from the society and the media, saturated as they are with them.

But here, where measure is unceasing, no assumption may go unquestioned. Why is diversity so good?

First, let’s have the argument again from the top, but in DiAngelo’s terms this time.

We know that DiAngelo assumes diversity is good, because it is implicit in her message. Otherwise, she would not be able to bemoan that the message society sends about diversity is tragically mixed, or chide those misguided people who think diversity might have downsides:

No one person who loved me, guided me, or taught me ever conveyed that segregation deprived me of anything of value.

Consider the message we send to our children – as well as to children of color – when we describe white segregation as good.

…no sense that there might be value in knowing people of color…

This mixed message is exacerbated by whites’ resistance to integration:

It has not been African Americans who resist integration efforts; it has always been whites.

A majority of whites, in both the expression of their beliefs and the practice of their lives, do not want to integrate with blacks.

But these same efforts that DiAngelo applauds and whites resist, by her own account result in the suffering of people of color, who can’t feel safe in predominantly white spaces:

Whites rarely considered how sheltered and safe their spaces may be from the perspective of people of color…

I have heard countless people of color describe how painful an experience it was to be one of only a few people of color in their schools and neighborhoods. Although many parents of color want the advantages granted by attending predominately white schools, they also worry about the stress and even the danger they are putting their children in. These parents understand that the predominately white teaching force has little if any authentic knowledge about children of color and has been socialized (often unconsciously) to see children of color as inferior and even to fear them. Imagine how unsafe white schools, which are so precious to white parents, might appear to parents of color.

And not only does integration put people of color in danger, it doesn’t even necessarily help them improve their circumstances. Do children of color really get better educations at predominately white schools, if even the teachers “see children of color as inferior and even … fear them”? Where children of color are placed in situations of “stress, and even…danger”? Where even the child-development models the teachers are using are wrong for children of color?:

Is an Asian or an Indigenous child’s development the same as a white child’s within the context of white supremacy?

DiAngelo asks this rhetorically. (And this is not to mention the context of biology. But one need not go that far to take the point.)

Let’s take a step back for a moment, and consider a different, perhaps less fraught, example. Boys and girls, recall, used to be educated in different schools. Now they are educated in the same schools. This happened at first because the schools for boys were better, so everyone wanted to go there, and now everyone does. This makes sense from a historical perspective – but what about from a design perspective? Is this setup really giving children the best education they can get? Consider – do boys and girls develop at the same rate? Learn the same way? Have the same attention spans and rates of child development? Looking at the gender imbalance in colleges (more girls than boys) and within majors (which varies), the answer is clearly no. Why, then, do we insist on teaching these two very different groups together, in a one-size-fits-all manner? Do we not have the resources to develop learning programs specialized to gender? And if we could do it for gender…what about race? If students learn better with teachers of their same race, as some studies show – why not, well, adjust the system to fit the needs of those it serves? Why must children of color go on being feared and misunderstood by racist white teachers – why shouldn’t teachers of color teach children of color, and white teachers white children? Why shouldn’t women teach girls and men teach boys (if that did indeed produce superior educational outcomes, though I’ve never seen research on this particular subject)?

Are people really ‘all the same beneath the skin’? And if they’re not – is the best solution a compromise, schools that teach half towards girls and half toward boys, or half toward children of color and half toward white children? Or might separate, here, actually be…superior for all? Ultimately, AI teachers personalized to individual students will make the question moot, but in the meantime…

DiAngelo hangs herself on her own evidence, from which it follows logically that integration is not only unfair to both people of color and whites, but that separate is obviously better. Two cultures in one space, forced to merge, is a recipe for conflict.

In fact, separateness can bring peace in cases where forcing very different groups of people to compromise and merge brings only strife. DiAngelo even recognizes this within her own experience. Consider:

In fact, I have seen black reporters interviewing open and avowed white supremacists on television, with both parties proceeding calmly and respectfully.

To DiAngelo, this state of affairs comes as a surprise. But should it be? These two groups can be calm and respectful with each other, while progressives accused of racism cannot be, because they are secure in their own positions within their own groups and within society, and thus can contemplate the differences between their positions with equanimity, seeing no need to compromise their principles trying to pretend they are part of the same group. That is to say, it’s easy enough to be respectful to people you don’t like or agree with, as long as no one is forcing you to make them part of your circle and adapt your culture and beliefs to include theirs.

But don’t you know, the incensed reader cries, separate but equal is not equal? But why not? Have you ever really asked whether separate but equal could be implemented successfully? That is to say, while keeping the ‘equal’ part in both letter and spirit? Is integration necessary because it is superior in practice – or because it is superior in principle?

Which brings us back to the question – why is diversity a value? Does it have something to do with equality? Perhaps, from what DiAngelo says:

Differential treatment in itself is not the problem…The problem is the misinformation that circulates around us and causes our differential treatment to be inequitable.

But if diversity and equality are at odds with each other – then DiAngelo is steeped in this contradiction on every page that she recognizes the differential challenges people of color and whites are faced with by integration.

Equality, diversity, and the alleviation of human suffering – noble principles all, perhaps, but values have rank, and only one can be the highest. (And if we’re talking about school integration, what about education? Is that a value too?)

And we see that if she thought carefully, DiAngelo would find herself in a value conflict – does she value equality more than she values diversity? Does she value integration more than she values alleviating suffering? Seems like maybe you have some bigger fish to gut before you fry the little racist ones, DiAngelo? Some more fundamental fish? Such as, why integrate, when it will cause –

I don’t believe DiAngelo was truly trying to make a case for re-segregation – but I am nevertheless impressed by her skillful defense of what has become such a rare position nowadays.

But by this point I’m six feet under, and it’s time to move on to other topics.

DiAngelo is in general quite cautious about her words and phrasing – as one might expect. But perhaps not cautious enough. At least, when it comes to the oft-criticized practice of using “black” and “white” as nouns instead of adjectives (the example given here is only one of many, many more, in this relatively short book):

If whites are to construct this world, blacks must be separated through state violence.

And I’d be remiss not to mention the whole concept of the “language of violence,” which DiAngelo uses liberally for her own cause, waxing poetic on metaphorical harm to “bodies,” meanwhile mocking her opponents for calling their experiences a “trauma.” This idiomatic usage of violence has become part of the culture – this change brought about by DiAngelo’s own fellow travelers – and to those who’ve turned into the intersection complaining about those with their right-blinkers on using it, I have only one comment: you reap what you sow.

DiAngelo’s comments on “white identity” deserve a mention as well. First, DiAngelo encourages whites to consciously see themselves as part of a white identity – if DiAngelo is to be believed, a new experience for most. This is useful, however, only insofar as the purpose is to combat racism, because in the end:

However, a positive white identity is an impossible goal. White identity is inherently racist; white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy.

Wait, who doesn’t exist where? And if that’s true for white identity, wouldn’t black identity not exist outside the system of…well, nevermind.

DiAngelo’s justification for her desire to combat racism is similarly, hmm, elaborate:

Ultimately, I strive for a less white identity for my own liberation and sense of justice, not to save people of color.

This particular logical epicycle is necessary to avoid contradicting herself, since back in chapter six she criticizes The Blind Side for portraying whites as trying to ‘save’ a black person. And yet, the sentiment expressed here strikes a strange contrast with her earlier discussion of anti-racism as an urgent remedy to alleviate the profound and daily suffering people of color are subjected to in a world whose linens were soaked too long in the bleach.

And like any good book that sags against the edge of the Overton Window, White Fragility contains a little bit of nonsense as well – for example, where she quotes Carol Anderson on Obama’s election:

Perhaps not surprisingly, voting rights were severely curtailed, the federal government was shut down, and more than once the Office of the President was shockingly, openly, and publicly disrespected by other elected officials.

Really? People didn’t respect Obama? In comparison to who – Trump?

Or else in her remarks on ‘racial innocence:’

But why aren’t people of color who grew up in segregation also innocent of race?

They – not we – have race, and thus they are the holders of racial knowledge. In this way, we position ourselves as standing outside hierarchical social relations.

And thus we enter the territory of the non-sequiturs. I defy any reader to explain to me how “standing outside hierarchical social relations” is supposed to follow as a logical conclusion of the prior discussion.

This anecdote, at least, I’m inclined to believe:

White men, of course, are also racially fragile, but I have not seen their fragility manifest itself in cross-racial discussions as actual crying.

Really? Men don’t cry at work? Maybe we do live in the same world after all.

How does DiAngelo stay sane in the face of such tragedy and confusion? Luckily, she is not blind to the humor of her situation. When she encounters people in diversity workshops outraged when accused of racism, she responds:

Although these are unpleasant moments for me, they are also rather amusing.

Yes, DiAngelo, I too see the irony in these people hiring you as an anti-racism facilitator and then being upset when you actually do what they hired you to do. Still, I find your own amusement more amusing still. Because surely you realize you’re the one who’s breaking the unwritten contract here – they expected you to come and say a lot of nothing so they could check a diversity training box somewhere. But instead, you have to make things difficult for them, trying to convert them for real. That isn’t the way things work! they cry. I thought this was all supposed to be just an act, a simulation of believing in diversity! But, my friends – don’t you know that you can only perform for so long, before your acting becomes reality?

V.

But such criticism is shallow, and we seek not to raft in shallow waters – when we sink, let it be upon the deeps. And while seeking individual insights as in part three above can have some benefits, there are deeper fish in these oceans. Thus we come to the third perspective.

Marcus Aurelius tells us that of each thing we must ask (I quote here the Hays translation):

What is this, fundamentally? What is its nature and substance, its reason for being? What is it doing in the world? How long is it here for?

That is, of each thing, what is its form, composition, purpose, cause, and duration?

DiAngelo’s book being as amenable to this analysis as anything else, we might as well try it. Form? Book. Composition? Words. Duration? Only time and the caprices of ideological currents will tell. Purpose and cause? Now here, I think, we come to the root.

What was DiAngelo’s purpose in writing this book? Of course, she tells us her answer to this question from the very introduction, which we quoted earlier but let’s have it again to save you some scrolling:

This book does not attempt to find the solution to racism. Nor does it attempt to prove that racism exists; I start from that premise. My goal is to make visible how one aspect of white sensibility continues to hold racism in place: white fragility.

That is, her claimed goal is to persuade the reader of her definition of and beliefs about white fragility. And this isn’t obviously a lie. After all, the book is called White Fragility, and it’s short enough no digression can stray too far from the central topic.

But should we trust DiAngelo? Should we trust her to be telling the truth? Should we trust her to even know the truth in the first place? Could her true purpose not be – a truth hidden from even herself? Should we trust anyone’s own response to this sort of question?

But if we assume DiAngelo is dissembling or mistaken – how, then, can we discern her true purpose? One way is to look at the actual results, rather than the results DiAngelo claims she’s aiming for, and assume that those were what was intended. Another way is to go in the other direction and look at the assumptions – the actual assumptions, rather than the assumptions DiAngelo claims to take – and reconstruct her worldview as implied by these assumptions.

What result, then, can we expect DiAngelo’s book to have? Is it persuasive? For her intended audience, surely it is at least to some extent – more on the implications of that later. But from the perspective of an outsider, who doesn’t already buy in to her ideology – that is, someone who doesn’t already consider themselves anti-racist, open-minded, and progressive – it strikes less of a chord.

And this is not, contrary to what certain others might claim, due to the writing style. This is not a master’s thesis. It is written with more or less the same style, coherency, and polish as many a pop-psych book. The terminology is there, but in most cases only in ways in which it’s intended to be understood as having meaning, not as not-so-subtly showing off the author’s knowledge of inside jargon. The reason this book is unpersuasive is because it does not prove enough – it is only a small step in the logical progression that must happen for someone to come to believe in the ideology of anti-racism and white fragility, and the last step at that.

This is because DiAngelo starts with a number of premises that are by no means universal. She admits to assuming the existence of racism – but that is only the tip of the iceberg. Most of these we’ve gone over earlier. First, she assumes much more than merely that racism exists – she assumes that it is everywhere present, everywhere relevant, and everywhere the driving force ordering the structure of the world. Next, she assumes not only the fact of biological human equality, but the inherent and unquestionable value of equality and diversity. And of course, she assumes that all these values and beliefs are above the realm of politics, and ought to be above serious question or debate.

Disagree with even one of these assumptions, and the thesis of the book becomes an exercise in semantics and technicalities.

So this book cannot be expected to persuade anyone who does not already mostly agree with the thesis. Yet, that does not necessarily imply her purposes in writing it are either hidden or nefarious. Perhaps DiAngelo only cares about convincing those who already have a foot and four toes on her side of the line – perhaps her class of people are the only ones worth her time. Or perhaps these are the only ones she thinks she can convince, and hence she has reasonably given up on persuading anyone else, counting on the more direct opposition of politics and power to take care of other dissenters.

Or else, it could be she can’t see her own assumptions and does indeed perceive her arguments as universally compelling – an easy enough mistake to make. DiAngelo claims certain skills at modeling others’ perspectives and getting outside her own mind – but perhaps she has taken her own advice and uses these skills only for modeling people of color to prevent herself from perpetrating microagressions, not wasting limited brainspace on modeling political rivals. As for the obvious contradictions in her worldview – well, there are inevitably contradictions in any human soul, and if they were easy to resolve, we would all be gods tomorrow.

Whether she truly believes everything she says or not, though, we can be fairly sure hers is a goal-oriented purpose of persuasion, and no dialectic searching for truth.

She admits as much herself – that she has gone beyond truth:

In my work to unravel the dynamics of racism, I have found a question that never fails me. This question is not “Is this claim true, or is it false?”; we will never come to an agreement on a question that sets up an either/or dichotomy on something as sensitive as racism. Instead I ask, “How does this claim function in the conversation?

This book is not an argument for ends – it is an argument for means. Anti-racism is and always will be the end. Belief in white fragility is the means. As more evidence, observe that DiAngelo, somewhere to the left of Marx, is even still not a relativist (in fact, anyone who’s turned so far left they’re out in the intersection but who’s still a relativist is lacking a certain layer of insight – which is why all Rand’s villains in Atlas Shrugged seem kind of pathetic, and why they’re all relativists – a discussion for another time). DiAngelo can say with confidence:

…all perspectives are not equally valid; some are rooted in racist ideology and need to be uncovered and challenged.

DiAngelo knows what she wants and how to get it. The purpose is not to find truth – the purpose is to convince her readers to believe certain things. But why? To quote Bakker:

Why upbraid a wife for weeping? Why not strike her instead? Why not laugh, ignore, or console? Why not weep with her? What made one response more true than another? Was it one’s blood? Was it another’s words of reason? Was it one’s god? Or was it, as Moënghus had claimed, one’s goal?

Why challenge racism? Why not ignore it or eliminate it? Why not continue it? As a good progressive liberal, DiAngelo of course will not fall back on blood, god, or words of reason. And she means by a “valid perspective” absolute objective truth no more than Bakker does. Truth is whatever gets you to your goal. The goal is all.

But to answer the question of why this goal and not some other, it is fruitful to take a step back and ask – why does DiAngelo believe in racism? Why does she want anti-racism to be important and necessary? The answer is immediately apparent – this is her job. A job which she apparently enjoys and wants to keep, and also a job which casts her as the main character in her fight against the forces of racism and oppression.

And yet, her job is one of those that the more successful the occupant, the less necessary the occupation. People often accuse dieting centers of being purposefully useless, or intentionally not teaching strategies that let people lose weight in the long term, because if they actually worked, everyone would get thin and they would lose all their customers. Diversity trainers, or facilitators of anti-racism training, are only necessary to the extent that racism exists as a problem that white people need training to fix.

This is the paradox of the social justice movement as a whole – the driving force of the movement is to demand redress for injustice, but such demands only make sense where injustice continues to exist. If feminists demand the right to vote, and are given the right to vote, what purpose does feminism now have as a movement? It can only continue if it finds somewhere else to move, something new to demand, some new injustice to redress. It must adapt. DiAngelo recognizes this, and fits her own pet injustice into the same mold, while giving moral support to her fellow travelers:

All systems of oppression are adaptive; they can withstand and adjust to challenges and still maintain inequality.

No, DiAngelo exhorts us – don’t let anyone trick you into believing that injustice is so easy to get rid of! When you look but can’t find it, that just means it’s gone somewhere else – since if it hadn’t, it would have to be gone, and that would be a problem – a problem for DiAngelo, that is. Since what would she do then? Deliver pizza?

Thus, DiAngelo’s convolutions of logic to prove that everything white people do to end racism only twists the knife deeper:

For example, a common response in the name of color-blindness is to declare that an individual who says that race matters is the one who is racist. In other words, it is racist to acknowledge race.

DiAngelo brings up this perspective to mock it. Clearly, the racist is the one who doesn’t want to talk about race, since saying you’re not a racist doesn’t mean you’re really not a racist – it just means you’ve hidden your racism away in your heart, where no one will look. Certainly, this is possible. But her solution, that we should acknowledge race – that we should see race in everything we do – is not designed to end racism. The obvious effect of acknowledging race explicitly and constantly is to strengthen the role of race in society. At least by not acknowledging it, someday the intuitions might fade out through the generations of silence, until people no longer remembered and the past no longer mattered to anyone but history scholars, like the conflicts between papists and imperialists of the Holy Roman Empire. It’s not guaranteed to happen this way, but at least it’s possible. By making race a ubiquitous aspect of life of which people are constantly aware, DiAngelo’s strategy guarantees the US will have a race problem until the end of days. Which, we might guess, is the point – since a continuing race problem guarantees continuing jobs for anti-racism facilitators.

And thus we come to a second hypothesis for the purpose of this book: DiAngelo wants people to think about race all the time in order to increase the amount of perceived racism –perhaps also increasing the amount of actual racism (but only as a side effect, she’s not evil) – in order to gain increased job security.

But of course this is only a single hypothesis, and by no means proven.

Another thing that struck me as I read this little treatise was DiAngelo’s emphasis on people’s responses to her training seminars, and the similarity to the point of boringness (from DiAngelo’s perspective) of those responses. So, imagine you are DiAngelo. Twenty years into a moderately successful career as a facilitator of anti-racism training, making decent money because of your seniority – it’s a nice job. Or it would be, except that you’re bored. But you can’t quit without taking a giant hit to the paycheck, since all your experience is in diversity training – unless you went back into the same profession, which would defeat the purpose. And it’s not that you hate your job either, it’s just that people are so predictable. Why can’t they do something different for a change?

So you issue a challenge. You write a book, cataloguing all the ways participants respond to your seminars, all the things they try, all the arguments and the tears and the silences. And because you can’t just leave it at that, you model a new, uncommon response for them – to try to accept the criticism, accept the premise of the argument, incorporate it into their worldview, and become more thoughtful and reflective people capable of modeling others. Not a novel way to respond, certainly not anymore, but at least they have to think in order to do it – at least they have to struggle – at least if some of them succeed, it will make them more thoughtful, more canny, more interesting to talk to.

And for the rest – for the rest who read this book and their whole soul cries out against admitting they are a racist (or agreeing with your arguments) – when they encounter you, DiAngelo, giving your seminar, what will they do?

You don’t know. That’s the point – they will actually think about it now, knowing all the common responses and discarding them, and come up with something else. Something different. And then, maybe, just for a little while, even if just a few times, something new will happen. It will be like back in the old days, when every new argument, every fresh set of tears, every unexpected silence, was a little mystery for you to solve. But you solved them, over twenty years, solved them all, and now you need a new fix.

What then, dear reader, would you do? Assume for a moment you are not DiAngelo’s suggested form of anti-racist, and will not be copying her suggested response. But you’re not going to be so dull as to react in a boiler-plate manner DiAngelo has seen a hundred times, are you? After all, DiAngelo may no longer believe in individuality and uniqueness – but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. So, what response could you make, that would lie outside of DiAngelo’s philosophy? What could you say, or do, or imply, that would throw her for a real loop, make another mystery for her to solve? You may not be the only one to think of it, and eventually it could become just another common response for her to include in the catalogue of her next book (White Fragility II: This Time, With Twice the Fragility, At Half the Cost!). But in the meantime…

All well and good, you say, but how many people will actually take the book as a challenge? Far easier to just follow DiAngelo’s suggested response of admitting to your racism (or going along with her theories) – making it much more likely that the result of the book will be more people following this pattern of response.

What, then, are the consequences of this outcome? Well, for a start, more people will admit to being racist. Could this, then, be the desired result? One problem with measuring racism in the United States today is that you can’t just send out a mail survey saying: “Are you a racist? Please check: []Yes []No.” Everyone would say no. In fact, they are taught to say no:

Most of us only teach our children not to admit to prejudice.

Though DiAngelo mocks these parents, in modern society they are doing their children a service – admitting to prejudice or racism is social death.

But now along comes DiAngelo, telling people that admitting to racism is a high-status move, all the cool folks are doing it, and they should do it too. If she has convinced half of US middle-management, that actually, no, they really are all racists and they shouldn’t be afraid to say it – what will the surveys look like now?

This thesis has a small problem, though: DiAngelo demands more than just admitting to racism, in order for the reader to claim the high-status role of an anti-racist:

But acknowledging advantage is only a first step, and this acknowledgement can be used in a way that renders it meaningless and allows us white people to exempt ourselves from further responsibility. For example, I have often heard whites dismissively say, ‘Just because of the color of my skin, I have privilege.’ Statements like this describe privilege as if it’s a fluke – something that just happens to us as we move through life, with no involvement or complicity on our part.

Rather, they must do more:

It would be revolutionary if we could receive, reflect, and work to change the behavior. On the one hand, the man’s response points to how difficult and fragile we are. But on the other hand, it indicates how simple it can be to take responsibility for our racism. However, we aren’t likely to get there if we are operating from the dominant worldview that only intentionally mean people can participate in racism.

She clearly wants white people to do more than just admit to racism – she wants them to really believe it. She wants them to feel it in their very bones. She wants them to think about it. And thinking – this is what changes people’s perceptions, and through that their worldview. And what is the world made of, but people’s agglomerated views of it? So through this book, could DiAngelo be attempting – to create a world of ubiquitous racism?

And last but never least, we come to the most obvious reason DiAngelo may have written this book. Since what, at its heart, is the purpose of a book? To inform? To persuade? To entertain? All byproducts!

In a capitalist society, a book is a product, the purpose of which is to be sold to make a profit. And is DiAngelo profiting from the sales of the book? I’ll hazard an emphatic ‘yes.’ So really it is DiAngelo, as much as the descendants of slave-owners, who has grown rich off the historical struggles and suffering of people of color. (This, however, is not any kind of counterargument against her thesis, unless you particularly favor ad hominem tu quoque fallacies.)

VI.

DiAngelo may or may not believe in what she is saying – but this should have no bearing on whether or not we should believe it. We wish only to believe that which is true, or useful, or both. So what, then, is the truth about racism in the United States?

As far as DiAngelo’s term “white fragility” describes white people’s unwillingness to talk about race and their defensiveness when accused of it, it hits at a truth. Now, it could be a shallow truth, these people attempting to look good in front of others by denying their racism and avoiding talking about it to keep from stepping in the political muck and losing their jobs. But it could also be a deeper, more internal reason.

And this is what makes DiAngelo’s narrative so compelling – she points out a contradiction (lack of discussion about an important issue), and then presents an explanation to fill the gap (white fragility makes it challenging for whites to talk about racism, and this is hurting both people of color and the society as a whole), and a solution to resolve the disjoint between action and belief (everyone will talk about racism now).

But what other contradictions might exist of this form? Is race the only thing many agree on the surface is important, but which they avoid talking about for ill-defined or poorly  understood reasons? Especially if you believe that DiAngelo is really onto something when she says that racism is hidden, but once you know how to look it appears everywhere, you should ask yourself – what other things are hidden, but that if you could but once discern their outlines, you would notice them everywhere, affecting everything? What other frameworks than racism might underlie existence?

But even if you disagree with her, it does not make reading DiAngelo’s work pointless for you, nor mean that you need doubt her sincerity. It merely shows how far the world lends itself to interpretation. We look for truth by asking, what lies beneath surface appearances? But many, many things lie beneath surface appearances. Layers and layers of interpretation separate you and the logos, and every time you see beneath one layer, you need only ask – what lies beneath that? And so your insight increases. And if someday you happen to hit that bottom layer, the absolute truth – well, don’t expect it to happen anytime soon.

And DiAngelo recognizes this – that worldview is malleable, and truth is subject to interpretation. How, then, are we ever to know who is wrong or lying and who is not? For this, DiAngelo falls back on her purpose. You must first choose a purpose, and then interpret – otherwise your interpretation has no grounding. For DiAngelo, that purpose is anti-racism. All things are interpreted in light of that, all things as they relate to that. She has created herself a world, and now lives in it.

Is this wrong, though? And it is any different from what the rest of us do?

Since if we can’t reliably discern the Truth, we certainly can’t judge our opinions and goals by comparing them to the Truth. They must be compared by some other standard, some subjective standard – such as aesthetic?

Is DiAngelo’s worldview, then, beautiful?

Oh, but how.

After all, how could racism but be beautiful, when it involves so deeply such exquisite ideas as suffering and sacrifice? How sublime, the idea of a long-suffering people of color, pushed down again and again, that now rise up to their rightful places in society, even through the pain society inflicts upon them? How glorious, the idea that whites possess a great power they know not of, a power that causes suffering, that they must sacrifice out of the compassion of their hearts and on the altar of noble ideals? How magnificent, the idea that this struggle will continue forever, a light eternally shining overhead, but tragically just out of reach?

If DiAngelo did not recognize the beauty of her subject, why would she couch her arguments in such imagery?:

But perhaps most fundamentally, anti-blackness comes from deep guilt about what we have done and continue to do; the unbearable knowledge of our complicity with the profound torture of black people from past to present.

This ideology of perpetual racism appears dazzling indeed, especially when pitted against equality, which is never beautiful. Take communism, the ultimate ideology of equality – and its results: the destruction of the communists’ own countries’ environments and architecture, women wearing men’s work-suits, concrete block buildings. No, equality is not beautiful. And the ideal of color-blindness is an ideal of equality. Can we blame DiAngelo for opposing this unsightly beast, in favor of a narrative of profound and everlasting inequality? Who, then, sees the world more clearly? We cannot be sure. But one of them, for sure, sees a more beautiful world than the other. Who, after all, really wants to be color-blind?

But this idea of eternal suffering also creates – eternal conflict. And here we come to one of the many questions we asked earlier but gave no answer to: Why should we value diversity? Why should we want it, rather than something else? And choose we must – since diversity is by definition the practical opposite of equality, we cannot have both at once. Even among ideals, there is still some ‘hierarchical social relation.’

But if forced to choose between equality and diversity, diversity is better, not only because it is more beautiful, but because of what it inevitably creates.

I have seen the concept of diversity justified on the grounds that it will increase the productivity of companies that implement it. This idea is laughable. Of course, it is supposedly based on research – but I would expect this research to be about as accurate as any other field in the social sciences, i.e. the results are whatever the people running the study wanted them to be. And even if the results were real, has anyone done any analysis on whether the costs of ‘implementing’ diversity will be at all outweighed by the supposed benefits? Companies do not implement diversity policies to become more productive.

What, then, about the idea that diversity is good because it will make people happy? That is, to put it in terms of other core liberal values, will diversity have a positive utility along Haidt’s care/harm axis? DiAngelo herself disproves this potential rationale, showing unequivocally that diversity and integration fail as positive values in the sense of maximizing happiness. Since it clearly hurts people of color to be in the presence of whites with their perpetual racism and microagressions, and it hurts whites nearly as much to be in the presence of people of color, constantly reminded of their historical guilt and responsibility for slavery – why integrate? Why not just stay apart as much as possible, thus minimizing harm and suffering? Why value diversity at all?

So diversity cannot be taken as an instrumental value for the desire to alleviate suffering. (And even if the increased productivity hypothesis were true, it still doesn’t work as a value if you’re a communist, as many of those with no green arrow who’ve nevertheless turned into oncoming traffic position themselves, for whom corporate productivity is at best a secondary goal if not to be outright discouraged.) Diversity, then, must either be taken as a value in and of itself, a causeless cause and unproved proof, like the concept of a beneficent god, or else as an instrumental value for its actual (as opposed to claimed) effects.

What, then, are the real effects of diversity? What does diversity inevitably create?

It creates – conflict. But no! We don’t want conflict! all the UR readers and Democratic Senators who voted against Iraq cry. And perhaps their claim is even true – but if so, all the worse for them.

For conflict, as Nietzsche tells us, is to be cherished as a fundamental value that makes us what we are – more than what we are. Conflict underlies all existence among creatures of becoming rather than being. Conflict is how people define themselves, improve themselves, temper themselves against the world. So if diversity increases conflict and suffering – should we not value it highly for that very reason? (I again quote the Kaufmann translation):

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause. War and courage have accomplished more great things than love of the neighbor.

In fact, we should value diversity for the very suffering it creates, and the beauty of that suffering. We should value DiAngelo, too, for the conflict she creates – in our souls, in our societies, in our companies, and in our values. She challenges us – and we should accept, with gratitude.

And yet, a warning:

But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day,
If your Snark be a Boojum! For then
You will softly and suddenly vanish away,
And never be met with again!

If you are pursuing insight into some other area than anti-racism, beware of following DiAngelo’s prescriptions too closely. For her ideology is not designed to exist in a human mind side by side with another set of beliefs. No – it was designed to dominate.

And do you wish your soul, dear reader, to be dominated? I cannot answer this for you. But to come back to what I said at the start (if you still remember, and haven’t stopped reading this admittedly-less-than-concise review some thousands of words ago) – this book is a soul attack. Watch yourself as you digest it, lest it come to digest you.

And one final quote from the last chapter, I think, will suffice to show that my analysis of DiAngelo’s argument is not wholly without textual grounding:

Even if challenging all the racism and superiority we have internalized was quick and easy to do, our racism would be enforced all over again just by virtue of living in the culture. I have been engaged in this work in a range of forms for many years, and I continue to receive feedback on my stubborn patterns and unexamined assumptions. It is a messy, lifelong process, but one that is necessary to align my professed values with my real actions. It is also deeply compelling and transformative.

Ah, DiAngelo. I suppose I should have expected that she would believe in the research on priming, after all she said about implicit bias. But do her reviewers believe it? Will they be inclined to call her book, by her own implicit suggestion, “deeply compelling and transformative”? Will we?

Well, it was a good try. Valē, DiAngelo! May you fight the good fight forever!