Cynic Theories by Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay 2020
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Example 3: White Fragility: Why It Is So Hard to Talk to White People about Race by Robin DiAngelo (2018)
In this book, lecturer in “whiteness studies” Robin DiAngelo develops the concept of “white fragility” that she first laid out in a highly cited paper of that title from 2011.57
She begins with a strong objective truth claim:
- White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress.
This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to what I refer to as White Fragility.58
But DiAngelo goes on to insist that society is permeated by white supremacy and that any disagreement with her ideas is the result of a weakness that has been socialized into white people through their privilege:
- White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.
These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation.59
White people are complicit beneficiaries of racism and white supremacy.
This is The Truth According to Social justice— disagreement is not allowed.
DiAngelo is quite explicit about this.
If disagreeing, remaining silent, and going away are all evidence of fragility—mere “defensive moves”—the only way one can avoid being “fragile” is to remain put, show no negative emotions, and agree with The Truth—after which one must actively participate in discovering the Truth, that is, learning how to deconstruct whiteness and white privilege, which is billed as the necessary work of “antiracism.”
This is quite staggering.
DiAngelo, a white woman, contends that all white people are racist and that it is impossible not to be, because of the systems of powerful racist discourses we were born into.60
She insists that we are complicit by default and are therefore responsible for addressing these systems.
Like Applebaum, she argues that it does not matter if individual white people are good people who despise racism and are not aware of having any racist biases:
- Being good or bad is not relevant.
Racism is a multilayered system embedded in our culture.
All of us are socialized into the system of racism.
Racism cannot be avoided.
Whites have blind spots on racism, and I have blind spots on racism.
Racism is complex, and I don’t have to understand every nuance of the feedback to validate that feedback.
Whites are / I am unconsciously invested in racism.
Bias is implicit and unconscious.61
So do collectivism and rejection of individuality.
DiAngelo writes as a white person addressing other white people and insists “we” should see the world the way she does,
- This book is unapologetically rooted in identity politics.
I am white and am addressing a common white dynamic.
I am mainly writing to a white audience; when I use the terms us and we, I am referring to the white collective.62
Moreover, white people are, according to DiAngelo, “socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves.”63 All white people can do is become more aware of their relationship to power and consciously address it—over and over again.
This is the postmodern political principle at work.
DiAngelo also rejects the liberal principles of individualism and “color blindness”—that a person’s race is irrelevant to her worth, as Martin Luther King, Jr., argued.
Liberal values are, in The Truth According to Social justice, racist because they enable white people to hide from the “realities” of their own racism and white supremacy.
DiAngelo sermonizes,
- To challenge the ideologies of racism such as individualism and color blindness, we as white people must suspend our perception of ourselves as unique and/or outside race.
Exploring our collective racial identity interrupts a key privilege of dominance—the ability to see oneself only as an individual.64
Like her contemporaries, she displays an unshakable conviction in the postmodern principles and themes.
This indicates that these have been reified as the foundation of the Social justice metanarrative.65
Worryingly, her ideas, more than any other, have successfully broken the bounds of academia and entered the mainstream.
The book White Fragility was a New York Times best seller for over six months: Di-Angelo was able to promote it on an extensive world tour.
Another book by DiAngelo on confronting racism, as she sees it, is already on its way.
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