The incomplete lessons of White Fragility
The problem with anti-racism as self-help
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What I’m Writing
CNN - What’s Behind Tucker Carlson’s Mask
What I’m Reading
White Supremacy Was Her World. And Then She Left.
Jia Tolentino on the discipline of hope
The Anti-Semitism We Didn’t See
Do Progressives Have a Free Speech Problem?
The View From Here
Since the murder of George Floyd and the surge of Black Lives Matter protest across the country, Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” has been on the best seller list. Even if you haven’t read it, there’s certainly much to read about it. Kelefa Sanneh’s piece in the New Yorker last year is a good starting point. And this week, it’s the subject of a New York Times Magazine feature about both the book and DiAngelo’s corporate workshops. John McWhorter wrote about it, too, for the Atlantic.
Some of the pushback to “White Fragility” is little more than proof of the author’s point: When confronted with the fact that whiteness is not neutral but rather its own racial identity, some white people bristle; many more take issue with the contention that avoiding race or insisting on colorblindness is itself an indicator of racial privilege, not a sign of being not-racist (though for the record, two of the three authors linked above are black). The white American understanding of race is, as a general rule, shallow and externalized — race is something other people have that holds them back (or, perhaps, that used to matter and now does not), not something white people create, enforce, and benefit from. This is why DiAngelo’s question “how did your race shape your life?” can result in silence, confusion, or frustration from white audiences. A lot of white people seek neutrality on race, and indeed have the ability to largely ignore anything having to do with race and still place themselves firmly in the category of someone who is not racist. Racists, in much of the white American imagination, are the people who wear white hoods and burn crosses, not the folks who, surely through no fault of their own but purely as a result of circumstance, have largely white social circles, are members of mostly-white families, and live in predominantly white neighborhoods. For many white people in America, that’s not a reflection of racism, it’s just normal. When DiAngelo challenges our normal, a lot of white people get uncomfortable, defensive, or angry — and then she challenges that, too.
This is all important, necessary work, and some of the backlash to DiAngelo glosses over it and seems to underestimate the ignorance and even animosity that underlies white existence in the United States. It’s exciting and heartening seeing huge numbers of white people showing up at Black Lives Matter protests, and realizing that we haven’t been doing enough, and that silence is complicity, and that there’s much to learn.
But there are aspects to this new white consciousness-raising that strike me as less about the complicated, tough work of sorting through centuries of racism and all the messaging and programming that has oriented us away from justice and toward bigotry even in our own minds, and more akin to evangelical religion. I am hardly the first person to make this observation, but in reading the profiles of DiAngelo, I was particularly struck by the incuriosity of her message. Like evangelical religion, she is promoting one answer, one Truth, and if you don’t see the Truth the way she does, that’s not the result of different experiences leading to a legitimate difference of opinion, or how one’s position in the world may mean you see the same landscape from a different angle. It’s that those different experiences, or that different position, have blinded you. If you just learn more, if you just reorient, then you, too, will see the light. And if, even when presented with the full facts and information, you are still in disagreement? It’s because of your own resistance, defensiveness, rejection, and unwillingness to be saved. (If you are a person of color, on the other hand, you are something of an oracle, bestowed with great and infinite wisdom, and likely holding opinions that are more or less the same as every other person of color).
I can understand, up to a point, what it feels like to be this sure of yourself. There are a whole series of beliefs I hold to be the Gospel truth and when someone disagrees with me, I believe that they are absolutely wrong. Often I believe they are ignorant. I certainly wish that they would see it my way. I believe I’m right and that my belief is better than theirs because, well, what else do our most strongly-held beliefs reflect? But I also know that there are a whole lot of people who look at the same set of facts as I do and draw different conclusions for legitimate reasons. Sometimes they draw the conclusions they do because of existing animus — plenty of people, to use one example of something I am sure I am right about, oppose abortion rights because they are clearly very uncomfortable with changing gender roles and with women having the ability to have sex for pleasure. Others, though, draw from a different well of experiences and beliefs. I do not believe I hold some unique and universal Truth that they are rejecting out of pure malice, and that if they would just fully and honestly open their hearts and minds, they would make their way to the conclusion I’ve already come to. I do not believe that if you’re not with me 100%, you must be against me, or that you’re deviant, or that you just don’t get it. I think the world is a big and complicated place, and as one individual, I only have access to a small sliver of understanding it.
The insistence on binary, black-and-white thinking is made more troubling by the fact that some of what DiAngelo and other educators like her are sharing is absurd on its face, and also profoundly condescending. “White culture” is credited with uniquely valuing (and over-valuing) written communication, linear thinking, the scientific method, history, rationalism, adherence to time, hard work, planning for the future, and a relationship between cause and effect. This is all very bizarre, given that white people did not in fact invent or discover mathematics, measurements, hard work, time, cause and effect, or the written word, and nor are any of these things particularly unique to white people, white families, or majority-white societies. But it’s the kind of don’t-believe-what-you-see directive that’s also fundamental to fundamentalist religions: Have faith in what the leader tells you; to question could be heretical; rationality is endangers your ability to receive and see the Truth, which is, after all, a matter of faith available to any who are able to feel it.
The biggest red flag for me, though, is the positioning of racism primarily as a personal problem, rather than as a political one. There’s not question that racism is a personal problem, exacerbated and entrenched by biases held deeply even by people who are politically progressive. And those biases play out in politics, in who we elect, which issues we prioritize, how we structure everything around us from a starting point of white male experience (feminists have long made this same critique about gender). DiAngelo, though, has found a lucrative and I am sure personally fulfilling career talking to white, largely progressive audiences who are generally if not universally receptive to her message because what’s being asked of them is soul-searching and self-flagellation (I would guess women are particularly amenable, given our socialized penchant for both of those things). There’s something psychologically cleansing about confessing your sins and pledging to do better, while also understanding that you were born a sinner and will sin again. The process itself makes you righteous — you are at least trying, owning it, doing better, seeing the truth, while others are not. It’s a cathartic emotional experience. And for those inclined to throw stones, receiving the Truth can be a mighty powerful boost. In the name of activism and doing good, it is an incentive to name and shame those who are a step or two behind, or who proffer a narrow difference of opinion. I don’t imagine DiAngelo has much success with conservative audiences, who are more likely to outright reject the very existence of racism despite pretty ample evidence to the contrary, and certainly reject any suggestion that racism may lie in one’s heart, even as words like “this is a white country founded on Judeo-Christian values” are coming out of one’s mouth, or as one is carrying an “All Lives Matter” sign. American conservatism is already a movement characterized by magical thinking, rejection of science and reason, fear of change, and deference to white male authority. It is religiously oriented in a different direction, where there are long-existing mechanisms for claiming moral clarity, confession, salvation, evangelism, public shaming, and driving out heretics. DiAngelo can’t compete with that, because she doesn’t offer white conservatives what they fundamentally want to hear, which is that they are superior, deserving, and righteous. And what incentive does she have to try?
In reality, American racism is as much about individual animus as political choices that have become magnified over generations. A smaller proportion of the country is white than ever before, but that diminishing group has amassed much more than everyone else; its proportions will continue to shrink as its resources grow. So much of what drives racial differences in outcome isn’t a result of “white culture,” but of explicit white political dominance and resource-hoarding. I look at my own family: My maternal grandfather was able to buy a house through the G.I. bill, which ended up being my family’s first rung into the middle class. My maternal grandmother was a poor single mother of five who worked three jobs at a time to make ends meet, but she was still legally permitted to move into a mostly-white neighborhood that was deemed “better” than a majority-black one (I would also bet she made more money as a white waitress than she would have made if she was black). My paternal grandparents were both immigrants, but European ones, and not subject to the same immigration caps as would-be immigrants from much of the rest of the world. My parents were able to graduate from college debt-free because public college was simply more affordable back then and increasingly accessible. I was raised by two parents who had degrees beyond high school in a home they owned, in a majority-white liberal area where property taxes were high and as a result public schools were well-funded. A good public education meant I got into a decent college; the stability my parents inherited from their parents (who were not at all financially stable when my parents were born, but became that way in large part because of the political decisions and investments that invisibly shaped their lives) meant my college education was funded, and even at 36 years old I know I have a parental safety net if something in my life goes really, really wrong.
Yes, some of those choices are personal. But mostly they’re a result of politics, and political decisions that were made overwhelmingly by white men, in accordance with the experiences and vantage points of those white men, and with race in mind: Who was given a hand up in securing a mortgage; which neighborhoods were deemed “good” and “bad” based on their racial make-up; how we fund public schools, housing, and healthcare; which neighborhoods were zoned as single-family and were formally or informally racially exclusive (and how even formally racially exclusive neighborhoods still maintain, today, relatively higher housing values); who had access to higher education. There are trickle-down effects of those political choices that persist long after the laws in question are changed, if they’re changed: which adults can to work a single job and still make enough money to provide for their kids and have enough time to read to them every evening; which adults have the kind of housing wealth that allows them to give their children an inheritance or help their kids out in adulthood with money for college or a down payment; which neighborhoods have “blue ribbon schools” boosted by monied PTAs and which struggle to get their students basic supplies; which schools are attended by students from relatively stable families headed by professional parents and which have students whose parents are choosing between being home to tuck their kid in with a story and working enough hours to pay for this week’s groceries; which schools have the resources to help a kid with a learning disability access the accommodations to which she is entitled and which are quicker to label that child “delayed” or “a behavior issue”; and on and on. All of the consciousness-raising in the world is not going to change the history of the United States and all of the formal political decisions made along the way to give whites a leg up and to keep others down.
That does not make for a great corporate training seminar, I suppose. It demands much more than personal introspection.
I don’t want to trash consciousness-raising or individual evolution. How we understand these issues, including in our own heads and hearts, is part of changing them (as the feminists used to say, the personal is political — what we experience in our individual lives and believe to be private is in fact connected with a larger web of issues that are political in nature). Internal work is not divorced from the external; we are, after all, a society made up of individuals. It’s impossible to change the system without also changing the beliefs of the people who create, live in, uphold, and reform systems. Individual beliefs shape political realities, and ugly beliefs make for ugly politics, even in the systems that are the slowest to change — if there’s one thing Trumpism has taught us, it’s that. I also don’t want to suggest that folks like DiAngelo reject political change — of course they don’t. But emphasis matters, as do solutions. The hyper-focus on personal evolution and self-help can also obscure the slow, hard, external, and often extremely boring work of politics. And I worry that it gives too many of us an easy, feelings-centric out. Many white progressives are genuinely, deeply troubled by racism, ongoing racial inequities, and our complicity in and lack of understanding of racism; we feel sad, bad, and guilty (as we should — guilt gets a bad rap, but it can be a useful emotion and a sign of a functional conscience). DiAngelo latches onto that guilt, legitimizing it by adding another layer to it, and offering up the language we can use to make ourselves seem less racist and more committed to our own evolution without having to actually do anything other than tell other white people that they’re doing it wrong. Don’t get me wrong: Sorting through your own racial baggage and biases is important and necessary. But it’s also unlikely to change a single important thing for anyone else.
It’s easy to be a critic (hi). And to her credit, DiAngelo has built something that is not only well-intentioned, but largely good, important, and beneficial. But the work she’s encouraging is just one part of a much bigger whole, and frankly, it is far from the most urgent work. It is not work that holds all of the answers.
xx Jill