Imagine a guy arguing with his girlfriend by simply repeating "you're too emotional" at her for a few hours, and that's DiAngelo's book in a nutshell. One of the most depressing things about racism, apart from its immorality, injustice, etc., is how stupid it makes us all. I don't know how else to explain the popularity of this cynical, predatory cash-in, other than that emotionally-charged subjects like race remove our ability to think critically. Scam artists like DiAngelo claiming to palliate racism through word games, sophistry, bad history, and gimmick corporate seminars should remind us of medieval physicians waving leeches at us to treat an imbalance of the humours, but here we are sending her book up the charts in a desperate effort to avoid real work about racism and systemic inequalities
A rational society would think twice about the incentive structure behind DiAngelo's business model - a white person paid thousands of dollars an hour to tell other white people what the correct opinions about minorities to have are - but an increasingly bureaucratized America addicted to rebranding its social problems as HR issues will naturally turn to familiar corporate solutions like this. Anyone who's had to sit through mandatory training knows that it's easier to just turn off your brain, let this stuff wash over you, and check the box marked Training Complete at the end: who wouldn't rather do that than real work? This book is short, repetitive, and written at bozo level, so if you are a white American who's feeling lazy, then buying and reading it might be a fairly cost- and time-effective alternative to activism, independent thought, self-education, or, god forbid, actually talking to a person of color.
Like many people, I came across this book just after the George Floyd protests. I think active anti-racism is incredibly important, and anyone with a conscience should be disgusted and outraged not only by specific instances of police brutality, but about the entire social system behind events like that. We have an obligation to each other and ourselves to speak up when something is wrong, and there's absolutely no shortage of work to be done. Part of that work is self-education, which is why I have such a viscerally negative reaction to this vile little tract, which DiAngelo frankly admits is not designed to convince open or even closet racists to be less racist. Quite the opposite - its goal is to convince well-meaning white people trying to be not-racist that in fact they were actually racist all along without them having known it. This is a strange tactic if your goal is to reduce the overall goal of racism in a society, but DiAngelo's real goal is to maintain her lifetime sinecure of bullying hapless victims in corporate workshops with carefully constructed trap-door arguments about privilege that are impossible to engage in good-faith dialogue with.
A great example of how poisonous DiAngelo's approach is comes in chapter 5, which begins with the banal observation that the world is not neatly divided between bad racism and good anti-racism, and ends concluding that thinking some more about anti-racism is the best thing to do (or something; it's often hard to tell what her point is, especially when she starts "conceptualizing myself on an active continuum"). DiAngelo shares a story from one of her workshops where a participant related an interaction she had with some parents protesting against the black-white achievement gap in schoolchildren. In retelling the incident, which concludes with the teacher admitting that one particular protestor was correct to point out that she didn't understand the schoolchildren and so she needed to do some further thinking, the participant imitated the protestor in a way that was "bordering on racial mockery".
DiAngelo heroically points out the participant's problematic racism-adjacency, the particpant gets a bad case of white fragility and quits the workshop, and DiAngelo is acclaimed by the rest of the participants, white and black alike, for her virtue (no, DiAngelo is not being a white savior, how dare you even think that). To DiAngelo, all that matters is that one white person might have told a difficult personal story of vulnerability and growth, in a workshop theoretically designed for that very purpose, in a problematic way; to anyone else, this is a near-criminal exercise in missing the point. What about the black-white achievement gap in schoolchildren? How is DiAngelo helping those children via her terrible facilitation skills? Is DiAngelo actually accomplishing anything at all here?
This book is a master class on how not to run a seminar, in particular chapter 10, where she systematically explains why normal rules for facilitators like Don't judge, Don't make assumptions, Assume good intentions, and Respect don't apply to her. Throughout the book, DiAngelo takes advantage of the fact that an effective debate tactic is to choose your terms so that it's definitionally impossible to respond to you. This makes you come off like an asshole, but in scenarios where you don't actually care about having a real dialogue - you're in high school debate club, or you don't care if your girlfriend breaks up with you, or you're leading a mandatory corporate seminar and your audience effectively isn't allowed to disagree with you - it works great. The classic example is accusing your opponent of being "disagreeable", which gives your victim 3 basic options to respond:
- Disagree, which means they prove your point
- Agree, which means they concede your point
- Try to deny the premise indirectly, which is usually too difficult to do on the fly and makes them look like they're dodging the question
This kind of vague character-based attack often works because it's very difficult to instantly refute, and partially because if you do it right it's undeniably true, up to a point: of course every single person disagrees with at least something at some point in their life. We all know people who genuinely are disagreeable, in the sense that they are exceptionally quarrelsome or disputatious, but there isn't a bright line between those people and you or I, because basically all interesting human behavior exists on a spectrum. This means that the term usually isn't very meaningful as an insult, and so we need to reserve it for exceptions; throwing out the accusation "disagreeable" in an argument with the goal of scoring a point will serve only to shut down discussion and annoy most people, who correctly recognize it as a cheap debate trick, while paradoxically making the actual disagreeable people delighted - after all, they love to disagree! Apparently the fancy term for this is "Kafka trap", from his novel The Trial, and it works similarly with any other charge where your only real goal is to wrong-foot your opponent (accusing someone of being "defensive" is another classic). Heads DiAngelo wins, tails you lose!
This rhetorical snare is DiAngelo's entire shtick with "white fragility", a term she invented herself and which she finds everywhere she looks. (Does the term "white fragility" logically imply related terms like "white robustness" or "black fragility"? It's better not to ask.) Maybe it's impolite to notice that DiAngelo makes a lot of money off of her white fragility concept (in 2019 she charged the University of Kentucky $12,000 for a 2 hour workshop, and she does plenty of these events), but you just can't help but be skeptical about the convenience of her circular logic as she continuously diagnoses everyone who questions her premises as exhibiting more white fragility. She writes about the idea of white fragility at great length, yet for much of the book there is no simple handy definition for the reader to be able to know it when we see it as we page through her muddled sociology and examples of her victims getting reacting poorly whenever she lobs the term at them. As far as the reader is concerned, "white fragility" seems to boil down to "doesn't like to be called a racist", but much like with calling someone "disagreeable" this isn't very helpful: yes, you would expect a racist to react poorly to being called out, but you would also expect that from a non-racist. The closest intelligible definition of white fragility we get is a bullet point list in chapter 4, which she says is the "foundation" of white fragility:
- Preference for racial segregation, and a lack of a sense of loss about segregation
- Lack of understanding about what racism is
- Seeing ourselves as individuals, exempt from the forces of racial socialization
- Failure to understand that we bring our group's history with us, that history matters
- Assuming everyone is having or can have our experience
- Lack of racial humility, and unwillingness to listen
- Dismissing what we don't understand
- Lack of authentic interest in the perspectives of people of color
- Wanting to jump over the hard, personal work and get to "solutions"
- Confusing disagreement with not understanding
- Need to maintain white solidarity, to save face, to look good
- Guilt that paralyzes or allows inaction
- Defensiveness about any suggestion that we are connected to racism
- A focus on intentions over impact
There are a handful of bullet points in this list that DiAngelo is unambiguously correct about: yes, someone who prefers racial segregation is definitely a racist. Most of this list, though, has less to do with racism and more to do with "doesn't react well to DiAngelo". This conceptual slipperiness behind the title concept should bother a fair-minded person in any setting, but DiAngelo leads workshops, which is where much of the book is focused. She spends a lot of time gleefully recounting the confusion and hostility of her workshop participants, yet it genuinely seems not to occur to her that vulnerable employees in a workplace setting might react poorly to being accused of any amount of racial insensitivity in front of people they have to see and work with the next day, or that she could simply be wrong.
DiAngelo is Seymour Skinner in that immortal Simpsons meme, wondering "Am I so out of touch? No, it's the recipients of my incredibly correct racial insights who are wrong". Only a liar or an idiot would deny that workplace racism is a serious problem in America, but only a grifter like DiAngelo would conclude that the best way to address discrimination at places of employment is to hire an academic to facilitate struggle sessions for non-unionized workers when the wrong word could be the kiss of death. She only barely alludes to and doesn't discuss in detail any of the countless actual instances of explicit racial discrimination in hiring, promotion, retention, or salary structure that have come up over the entire history of the United States and persist today, all she's interested in are vague thoughtcrime sentiments, because word games are her bread and butter.
For anyone hoping to actually learn anything from this book, that's probably the single biggest obstacle. She's using terms like "racism", "white supremacy", etc differently than normal people, in classic academic jargon fashion, so that you can then hire her to explain it to you. There are thousands of books debating race as biological vs sociological vs legal construct, but most people have converged on basic common understandings of words like "racism" as "an act of discrimination based on someone's race", or "white supremacy" as "the belief that white people are inherently superior to other races", and so forth.
That's not enough for DiAngelo, who is trying to ensure a broader market for her services by connecting racism to as many other concepts as possible, even theoretically neutral ones. It's one thing to point out (correctly) that in practice, America's rhetoric of individualism, meritocracy, and so forth has not matched its practice, or that racists have often couched their appeals in the seemingly neutral language of small government, low taxes, and neighborhood character. It's quite another to identify those very concepts themselves with white people, because that leads her to say weird things like this:
Whiteness rests upon a foundational premise: the definition of whites as the norm or standard for human, and people of color as a deviation from that norm. Whiteness is not acknowledged by white people, and the white reference point is assumed to be universal and is imposed on everyone. White people find it very difficult to think about whiteness as a specific state of being that could have an impact on one's life and perceptions.
The reason that it's difficult to think that way is because the only people who take thought patterns like that seriously are white supremacists! DiAngelo is almost too interested in getting white people to explicitly think of themselves as white people, in a manner that should set off alarm bells in your head. Hitler jokes aside ("You know who else really wanted white people to think about whiteness as a specific state of being?"), reading this book is to discover that DiAngelo actually sees the world very similarly to white supremacists, just with the sign reversed. In anecdote after anecdote, DiAngelo is incapable of understanding the world through any frame but one: white people are history's protagonists and everyone else is sort of along for the ride, forever outsiders, incapable of agency or defining their terms of their existence on their own, caught in a web of white supremacy that they can never escape (unless someone pays DiAngelo a lot of money, presumably).
DiAngelo can get away with this because, as she says, her primary audience is white people, specifically white people in the Anglophere, but really just the United States. So if you are among the more than 95% of the planet who is not a white American, this book is basically just a testament to the true force of white narcissism at maximum intensity. This extends to her scholarship: a few nonwhite people get quoted from time to time, but never in a manner that indicates that DiAngelo is actually in dialogue with them, only that she's willing to appropriate their words for her own project. Let's not even discuss her historical inaccuracies, which a less polite person might term "lies".
I will try to find some good things to say about the book, because DiAngelo does at least mention many true facts: it is possible for well-meaning people to be complicit in or promoters of racism; there are massive racial disparities in power, wealth, health, and social status in America; American history is littered with criminal racial violence from the beginning up to this very day; racism hurts everyone, including white people; white people could stand to consider the impact their thoughts and actions have on others even if they didn't think they were being offensive; white people often artificially separate elements of non-white American culture like food, dress, music, and history from "mainstream" American culture into special non-white ethnic categories; patterns of racism and segregation are frequently maintained using carefully-chosen neutral phrases and legal regimes to disguise disparate impacts; merely to live your life in America as a white person can mean taking much for granted without even realizing it (white privilege is absolutely real); all of us could do more to make the America and the world a gentler and kinder place.
But you solve no problems by giving DiAngelo a single penny, whether by buying this book (I didn't) or ponying up for one of her seminars. When you get right down to it, DiAngelo's efforts to focus all attention on your individual thoughts and behaviors and none on America's broken laws are exactly identical to all the tedious debates you hear about whether it's fair to force people to not use plastic straws, when meanwhile fossil fuel plants are burning billions of tons of CO2 a year. If you actually care about climate change, then it's a complete waste of time to guilt-trip people about straws - you should be helping to get clean energy laws passed (and given that people of color are disproportionately affected by climate change, you'd be doing even more good). Go donate money to sustainable energy groups! Support the Green New Deal! But then there wouldn't be any money left to pay a straw fragility consultant thousands of dollars an hour to lecture you about how even if you don't use straws at all you're still destroying the planet, and as it turns out strawmen, are DiAngelo's entire business model.
