A Black View of "White Fragility"

Sept 19, 2020—

Finally! Someone brilliant took apart Robin DiAngelo and her arrogant White Fragility book. John McWhorter has written an absolutely brilliant review of it for the Atlantic. You can read a summary of it here, mostly in his own words. Brackets [] indicate where I’ve filled in gaps. (But it’s best to read the whole article.) Here’s the summary.

Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility … argues that whites in America must face the racist bias implanted in them by a racist society. Their resistance to acknowledging this, she maintains, constitutes a “white fragility” that they must overcome. Americans must … work against racist biases that many have barely known they had.

I am not convinced. Rather, I have learned that one of America’s favorite advice books of the moment is actually a racist tract. [Yes, this is good news because you can skip this annoying book with no worries.]

White Fragility is the prayer book for what can only be described as a cult.

[She’s concerned] with white privilege … lurking inside of her that was inculcated from birth by the white supremacy… To atone for this original sin, she is devoted to endlessly … seeking to undo whites’ “complicity with and investment in” racism. To DiAngelo, any failure to do this “work,” renders one racist. [If you don’t do as she says, then you are a racist.]

She sees herself as the bearer of an exalted wisdom that these objectors [perhaps like you] fail to perceive, blinded by their inner racism. …

DiAngelo insinuates that, when white women cry upon being called racists, Black people are reminded of white women crying as they lied about being raped by Black men eons ago. But how would she know? Where is the evidence for this presumptuous claim? …

[Oh, I forgot to mention, DiAngelo is white and McWhorter, Black.]

White Fragility is the prayer book for what can only be described as a cult. We must consider what is required to pass muster as a non-fragile white person. Refer to a “bad neighborhood,” and you’re using code for Black; call it a “Black neighborhood,” and you’re a racist.

If you object to any of the “feedback” that DiAngelo offers you about your racism, you are engaging in a type of bullying “whose function is to obscure racism, and protect white dominance.” … If you are white, make no mistake: You will never succeed in the “work” she demands of you. It is lifelong, and you will die a racist just as you will die a sinner.

Remember also that you are not to express yourself except to say Amen. Namely, thou shalt not utter:

I know people of color.
I marched in the sixties.
You are judging me.
You don’t know me.
You are generalizing.
I disagree.
The real oppression is class.
I just said one little innocent thing.
Some people find offense where there is none.
You hurt my feelings.
I can’t say anything right.

The result is to silence people. Whites aren’t even allowed to say, “I don’t feel safe.” Only Black people can say that. … By the end, DiAngelo has white Americans muzzled, straitjacketed, tied down, and chloroformed for good measure—but for what?

DiAngelo does not see fit to address why all of this agonizing soul-searching is necessary … DiAngelo insists that “wanting to jump over the hard, personal work and get to ‘solutions’” is a “foundation of white fragility.” In other words, for DiAngelo, the whole point is the suffering.

Why do Black people need to be treated the way DiAngelo assumes we do. The very assumption is deeply condescending to all proud Black people.

In 2020 … I do not need wider society to undergo teachings in how to be exquisitely sensitive about my feelings. I see no connection between DiAngelo’s brand of reeducation and vigorous, constructive activism in the real world on issues of import to the Black community. Few books about race have more openly infantilized Black people than this supposedly authoritative tome.

White Fragility is, in the end, a book about how to make certain educated white readers feel better about themselves. DiAngelo’s outlook rests upon a depiction of Black people as endlessly delicate poster children. … Her answer to white fragility, in other words, entails an elaborate and pitilessly dehumanizing condescension toward Black people. The sad truth is that anyone falling under the sway of this blinkered, self-satised, punitive stunt of a primer has been taught, by a well-intentioned but tragically misguided pastor, how to be racist in a whole new way.