#White Fragility

[morlock-holmes]

So, I decided to keep looking and got Ibram X. Kendi's *How to Be An Antiracist* from the library.

This is going to be the hardest one for me to finish, not because of anything political at all but just because I find the way Kendi writes memoir stylistically unexciting.

It reminds me of those long-form magazine pieces that go on and on about the subject's disarming smile and the color of his Italian loafers and how the sunset looks from the coffee shop he selected for the interview and the whole time you're going, "Jesus Christ get to the good parts about securities fraud already"

I'm not coming into the book with a positive attitude which certainly can't help.

So far the political arguments are... well they're arguments, so it's immediately a huge step up from *White Fragility*. That there is even a cogent argument being made feels bizarre after slogging through the utter mess that is *White Fragility*.

They also, unless I'm totally misunderstanding what Kendi is saying, seem *entirely* incompatible with Robin DiAngelo's approach to antiracism on some extremely fundamental levels, which is making me reconsider what *White Fragility* actually is and what was going on in 2020 in general.

I am kind of getting to the point where I almost want to recommend that people read *White Fragility* just so you can understand how truly shockingly bad it is. Like I really cannot overstate it, it's not just that I disagree with the politics, it's really genuinely awful even as an example of those politics.

[hussyknee]

Whites and their liberal bootlickers are an infection. The settler is the colonizer is the genocider. Rejecting the most brutal form of direct violence means nothing when you refuse to divest from the structures created to accommodate it.

A settler's very existence is violent because they cannot exist without the colonial power that protects them. The only way to make it NOT violent is by dismantling the colonial power. Until then, your job is to work on educating yourself, amplifying the voices of the colonized, and accepting that armed resistance is a consequence of your existence. Holding placards over your head and yelling a lot at the people propagating and safeguarding the status quo that you benefit from doesn't merit you extra cookies anymore than accepting the softest punishment from a carceral system designed to torture the colonized to the point of death.

And if that makes you ask yourself "But...but I'm a settler! I have settler privilege! Does that mean MY existence is inherently violent to—" yes. It is. Take your unthreatened, unterrorized self to your whole and unbombed house with power and water and heat and food and your intact family, sit your ass down with the tub of ice cream you can afford and cry into it.

“There is no middle ground anymore. There is no way of supporting the liberal occupier, the progressive ethnic cleanser and the leftist genocider.”

—Ilan Pappé

[liberalsarecool]

The South lost the Civil War. They lost their ability to feel shame. They combine that shamlessness with insecure feelings of seeing others thriving despite wilfully injesting decades of prejudices/bigotry and arrive at MAGA cellar.

[beardedmrbean]

Given the number of various Deans and other academics™ that have been getting busted for this in the last year the only real question is who's next.

Tweet tweet

[describe-things]

new meme format.

[ID: A chart labeled, "Fragility scale", with three colums down the side. The first is labeled "Fragile" in yellow, and reads, "Glass". Next is "Very Fragile" in orange, for "The tail of a Batavian tear". Last is "The most fragile thing in the world" in red, for "Fandom when you criticize racism, misogyny, ableism, and other bigotry in media.". End ID.]

Download the HD template from the internet archive here. The image description should be copied and pasted whenever you use the meme, just edit whichever parts you're changing. No credit is necessary as long as you make your post accessible.

[odinsblog]

When the Republican backed Moms for Liberty school board candidate (who also happens to be a teacher!) tries to explain to the NAACP why she disagrees with diversity, equity and inclusion.

The person speaking off-camera is Christa Caceres, President of the NAACP Monroe County, PA Chapter.

[icedsodapop]

I'm so sick and tired of seeing Oppenheimer stans going "bUt JaPaNeSe ImPeRiALiSm" amd bringing up the rape of Nanking in response to valid criticism of the film and its politics. And as someone whose country was actually occupied by the Japanese in WW2 and is Chinese, I wish these people a very "SHUT THE FUCK UP!"

Do you know how fucking disgusting and manipulative that is? I can bet my fucking dollar that the people circlejerking over Oppenheimer arent the type of people who cared about the victims of Japanese Occupation but now they magically give a fuck about people like my ancestors becos Japanese and Indigenous people are calling the film problematic

[alinahdee]

So this comment was deleted (the entire post was actually) but here's what irks me quite a bit about this specific line of thinking:

This was in response to watching my video ONE SCENE FOR FORGIVENESS / THE TWILIGHT SAGA IS RACIST.

Literally within the first 20 seconds of the video, you get these:

Even if you have a very simplistic understanding of these topics, they certainly sound serious. Enough to be included in a content warning at the very least. It's giving people a huge head's up about what this video is going to dive into and discuss and that this discussion can be triggering and distressing.

And then the next minute and a half is spent with me detailing how FORGIVENESS is weaponized against Indigenous women by non-native writers. All the time. Constantly. Obviously I'm setting things up for what is going to be addressed and interpreted later.

So you're telling me you sat through ALL OF THAT right at the very start of the video and instead of --THAT-- making you angry, you're mad because I said "mindlessly consuming material" and "this franchise is garbage."

Peak white fragility.

[tododeku-or-bust]

It will never stop disturbing me that Black and Brown ppl are considered hysterical and overdramatic about bringing up our experiences with racism, when it's usually White ppl who implode and spiral at the idea of having the conversations. Like how am eye the problem when you act like treating brown ppl with equity will lead to social collapse and anarchy.

[hippityhoppityyourenowmyproperty]

So another shitty white girl is talking trash about Imane and claims she wants to 'avenge' the women and girls Imane 'got in the way of', boosting that she knocked Imane out in a prevois match and would gladly do it again.

Here's the funny part that blondie left out, though: Imane beat her in that match. Russia disqualified her on false rumours after she beat their white little champion.

Female, white boxers are showing the world what sore losers with shrivelled little egos they are.

[morlock-holmes]

A pointless, overly long, barely edited review of White Fragility

Well that book sucked.

The end I guess.

OK honestly the process of reading White Fragility was incredibly draining, I started out annoyed, then became amused and fascinated by Robin DiAngelo’s peculiar definition of “Individualism”, then got annoyed and angry again, then just… drained. It’s an exhausting book.

As I try to put my feelings out there I’m having trouble linking them together coherently but this book is just so exhausting that the idea of editing this and doing several passes is just draining to think about. So here are some scattered thoughts:

Before anything else, it’s just not well written or edited

White Fragility is very repetitive, ambling, and just kind of… not very well arranged in general. It’s clear that the book desperately needed a proper editor, or maybe it didn’t, since it became incredibly successful despite everything wrong with it. Here’s an example I’ve already mentioned. 

Towards the end of the first part of the book, DiAngelo puts together a list of a “common set of racial patterns” that are “the foundation of white fragility” and one of the bullets on that list reads,

“Wanting to jump over the hard, personal work and get to ‘solutions’”

Not once, anywhere in the preceding 111 pages or the succeeding 128 is the idea expanded on in any way whatsoever.

And it’s a truly baffling statement if you don’t expand on it. Why are solutions somehow opposed to “hard, personal work”? Is hard, personal work not part of a solution to some problem? If not why are we doing it?

The whole book has a similarly sloppy vibe; there’s very little factual information inside and what ideas there are are explained very badly.

A Christian apology for non-Christians

The more I read of White Fragility the more it seemed to me to have in common with badly written Christian apologia.

First off, modern, right-wing American Christian religious material often contains a sort of confusion that anybody could respond badly to the Gospels. After all, the good news of Jesus’ sacrifice and resurrection is both obviously factually true AND self-evidently good news, but somehow when you go out and preach the gospels, non-believers will often act with derision or anger.

And there is a certain kind of Christian who will respond to that anger, not by considering that there might be factual or moral objections to the gospel, but by essentially asking, “What kind of bizarre psychological condition would cause somebody to get angry about something that is obviously true and obviously good?”

This is an ongoing thread in DiAngelo’s writing, starting with the introduction,

“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…

“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(sic) 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 some perspectives were missing?”

Well gosh, why wouldn’t these people be excited to hear about all the things they’ve been doing wrong? Truly a mystery.

Secondly, most of the arguments DiAngelo makes are made very sloppily, and are only really convincing if you have already been well-convinced. To demonstrate this I would essentially have to just quote the whole book to you, but for an example see the bit above about wanting to jump over hard personal work. You and I have spent too much time in the fever swamp, we can guess what she means from cultural context, but she never explains it.

Third, as others have pointed out white supremacy in this book takes on the qualities of sin in Christian theology. All of us white people, simply by virtue of growing up in a white supremacist society, are racist. This isn’t really proven so much as assumed. 

You might assume that in Christian circles the fact that everybody is a sinner might level out hierarchies. After all, the Pastor is as much a sinner as you are.

But in many cases there is this kind of passive-aggressive jiujitsu. Oh, sure, the pastor sinned, but why should we criticize him when all men are sinners? Aren’t you failing to practice the virtue of forgiveness? 

Oh, what’s that, you did something bad? Well that’s a different story. It sounds like you haven’t been really giving yourself over to God. Maybe we haven’t been doing enough to help stop you from sinning. You should talk to the pastor and really think about where you’ve been going wrong, and of course we would just be enabling you if we didn’t call you out publicly, it’s an opportunity for growth on your part, and of course if you disagree with how we think you should atone, that's just further evidence of your sinfulness.

Anyway, speaking of passive-aggression:

The Passive-Aggressive style in Woke Politics

Robin DiAngelo comes off as one of the most passive-aggressive people I have ever read. And also, ironically, one of the most clueless people I have ever seen when it comes to the most basic aspects of ordinary human psychology.

Here, have some examples:

“I am typically received well when speaking in general terms–for example, ‘Your requirement that applicants have an advanced degree rather than equivalent experience is automatically disqualifying some of the applicants that could bring the perspectives and experiences you say you are looking for.’ Yet when I point out a concrete moment in the room in which someone’s racism is manifesting itself, white fragility erupts.”

Oh, what, seriously? When you say, “We all need to try harder to improve at this” people agree, but when you go, “Especially you Greg” Greg somehow becomes defensive? Crazy!

“For example, in a conversation about racism, when white people say that they work in a diverse environment or that they have people of color in their family, they are giving me their evidence that they are not racist. If this is their evidence, how are they defining racism?”

I mean… Literally the same way you do? DiAngelo talks extensively about how white people don’t understand racism because we often have very few interracial friendships or relationships. Like a lot. Like it’s one of the major themes of the book and, in her mind, one of the major sources of white fragility.

I mean, imagine you are talking to someone, and you go, “See, here’s the thing that people who have never been to Cleveland don’t understand” they might respond with “Oh, actually I was born in Cleveland and spent the first twenty years of my life there” and their reasons for doing so are so incredibly obvious and natural that it’s kind of hard to even articulate them. Like… yeah of course if you tell a room that they don’t understand racism because of their shallow relationships with people of color, fucking of course the people who have deep relationships with people of color are going to bring it up!

“White people are receptive to my presentation as long as it remains abstract. The moment I name some racially problematic dynamic or action happening in the room in the moment–for example, ‘Sharon, may I give you some feedback? While I understand it wasn’t intentional, your response to Jason’s story invalidates his experience as a black man’--white fragility erupts. Sharon defensively explains that she was misunderstood and then angrily withdraws, while others run in to defend her by re-explaining ‘what she really meant.’”

Sharon, let me stop you right there. Can I just take a moment to completely ignore the substance of what you just said, while pointing out that you are objectively annoying to the people around you?

“When another police shooting of an unarmed black man occurred, my workplace called for an informal lunch gathering of people who wanted to connect and find support. Just before the gathering, a woman of color pulled me aside and told me she wanted to attend but she was ‘in no mood for white women’s tears today’ I assured her that I would handle it. As the meeting started, I told my fellow white participants that if they felt moved to tears, they should please leave the room. I would go with them for support, but I asked that they not cry in the mixed group. After the discussion, I spent the next hour explaining to a very outraged white woman why she was asked not to cry in the presence of people of color.”

Hi, thanks for coming to our meeting where we coworkers can support each other and connect. Before we start, I just want to tell Donna, Tammy, Jim and Bob that your coworkers don’t really want to support you too much, so if you need support please go somewhere else and get it from people other than your coworkers.

Look, I get it, that black lady finds the idea of comforting some distraught white woman in the aftermath of a black man being shot absurd. Maybe don’t handle that in the most ham-handed way imaginable though?

I want you to reimagine some of these scenarios as though they were addressing a less politically fraught issue than racism. In order to do that, we need something with the following qualities:

It is often unintentional;

The people who do it are often unaware that they are doing it;

It is genuinely difficult for others to live with and should probably be corrected because of that;

There is a social stigma to it so people feel embarrassed when called out for it.

I think having really bad body odor is the perfect analogue. But can you fucking imagine some of these if that’s what we were talking about?

Imagine somebody saying, “When I say that proper hygiene is important as a way to respect your fellow employees, I get broad agreement, but when I publicly point out that a particular person has bad BO and many of their coworkers have complained, instead of being grateful for the feedback, they often get angry or defensive”

That person would be a monster!

The dirty secret of Robin DiAngelo and her ilk is that as much as they talk about “systemic racism” they really think of racism primarily as an interpersonal problem.

Here’s another quote, “The dominant paradigm of racism as discrete, individual, intentional, and malicious acts makes it unlikely that whites will acknowledge any of our actions as racism.”

I mean… All the examples I just cited above involve DiAngelo calling out discrete, individual, intentional acts. I guess sometimes the discrete, individual, intentional acts are non-malicious.

That’s the kind of central hypocrisy and profoundly passive-aggressive style of this kind of discourse. You call out a specific person for a specific act in a very public way, and then, if they get defensive, you can talk about how sad it is that when you told them that the specific thing that they personally did was bad, they didn’t realize you were just talking about systemic racism and it’s awfully silly that they are getting so defensive when all you are talking about is systemic problems, not individual faults.

DiAngelo often talks about how whites need to be less sensitive because we are not in any danger, but, like, most of the concrete problems she addresses aren’t dangerous to black people either.

Which brings me to the last section,

What is the goddamned point of all this?

DiAngelo constantly talks about the absence of cross-racial relationships between blacks and whites, but never really addresses the question of why the hell a black person would want to be friends with a white person. Honestly it sounds like it sucks; we’re all racist. Frankly I don’t see what we bring to the table other than an endless parade of microaggressions and neuroses that could just be avoided altogether by sticking to making friends with your fellow minorities.

A couple of people responding to my blog have called the book racist against whites but that’s not quite right, there’s also this bizarre sort of… Apologizing for how much better off we are then everybody else. It’s taken as basically a given that black people all wish they had the position that we do, but we just don’t let them and they’ll never get it unless we shape up and learn to give it to them.

There’s a tremendous amount of guilt but it’s combined with a massive self-absorption. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that for DiAngelo, the entire world revolves around whites and our conception of ourselves. And I mean that literally:

“...[W]hite supremacy is circulated globally. This powerful ideology promotes the idea of whiteness as the ideal of humanity well beyond the West…

“In his book The Racial Contract, Charles W. Mills argues that the racial contract is a tacit and sometimes explicit agreement among members of the peoples of Europe to assert, promote, and maintain the ideal of white supremacy in relation to all other people of the world. This agreement is an intentional and integral characteristic of the social contract, underwriting all other social contracts.”

Like… All of them? Like relations between China and the Democratic Republic of Congo are underwritten by the belief in white supremacy? White supremacy is in fact integral to the politcal relationship between those two countries?

One of the things I wondered when reading the book was why on earth DiAngelo gets paid so much money to consult. In her telling there are two forces, a white supremacist overclass dedicated to ignoring and minimizing evidence of systemic racism and a minority underclass which is nearly helpless in the face of white supremacy. Which of these groups is paying her five figure speaking fees?

Anyway to continue that quote, 

“Mills describes white supremacy as ‘the unnamed politcal system that has made the world what is is today.’”

I mean… I feel like it has a name. It’s named white supremacy. Robin DiAngelo wrote a best-selling book about it that people only bought because they already agree about it existing and being really, really important.

Hey, so, how does Tammy from HR crying about the police shooting a black teenager maintain a global white hegemony that undergirds literally all other social forces?

One thing, at least, that made me glad that I finished the book was seeing DiAngelo state overtly something that I feel has been implicit on much American thinking about race lately:

“When white people ask me what to do about racism and white fragility, the first thing I ask is, ‘What has enabled you to be a full, educated, professional adult and not know what to do about racism?’...”

Uh… You’re asking me how I graduated college without knowing how to upend a massive collusion between every nation in Europe that undergirds all of global politics and economics?

I mean I didn’t actually graduate, maybe “Overturning the entire global paradigm 101” was one of the classes I didn’t get around to.

“If we take that question seriously and map out all the ways we have come to not know what to do, we will have our guide before us. For example, if my answer is that I was not educated about racism, I know that I will have to get educated. If my answer is that I do not know people of color, I will need to build relationships. If it is because there are no people of color in my environment, I will need to get out of my comfort zone and change my environment, addressing racism is not without effort…”

Hey, yeah, but what about the part where I make minimum wage and probably can’t even overthrow Luxemburg, let alone all of Europe?

“Next, I say, ‘Do whatever it takes for you to internalize the above assumptions’ I believe that if we white people were truly coming from these assumptions, not only would our interpersonal relationships change, but so would our institutions. Our institutions would change because we would see to it that they would.”

This is exactly what I have been saying seems to be the dominant belief in America today. If we just teach Sharon from accounting to stop talking over her black co-workers, if Sharon internalizes exactly the right ideas about white supremacy from exactly the right corporate consultants, eventually, once we get our heads straight, there will be a kind of spontaneous eruption of will which will end racism forever.

From talking to more right-wing acquaintances I have come to the belief that many of them essentially agree with that premise. That racism sort of emerges as a kind of spontaneous emanation of wrong-think, and once we have used social pressure and the threat of being fired to get everybody to say the correct things about racism, racism will vanish.

And so the debate in America is no longer about policy; we don’t believe in a racial policy. The debate is about how we ought to talk about racism, with the parties disagreeing on what kind of talk will ultimately cause racism to disappear.

Do we solve police shootings by hiring a diversity consultant to tell the employees of our tech firm about white fragility, or should we hire a different consultant to teach them about color-blindness and treating people as equals?

[krystal-blossom]

Why I hate gender abolitionism

(Sincerely, a Native)

[positively--speculative]

The amount of hate towards @ca-suffit is ridiculous. People in her inbox are mad that she wrote a letter (and I'm the one who provided the prompt, so you ought to be sending that hate towards me too--the fact that the post took off the way that it did should tell you that we were far from the only ones troubled by this issue) and threatening to expose her identity? And over what? Because they cannot stand she bring up issues of racism and anti-Blackness?

Writing letters has ALWAYS been a form of peaceful demonstration. It's not even radical. Nowhere in the letter did we even ask that AMC disinvite Maven. We asked that they keep our disappointment in mind when arranging their publicity events and when thinking about whi they invite to these things. Nowhere did we encourage any sort of bullying. But as usual, nothing pleases these people. Whether we are holding signs up in front of the studio or simply writing a letter, it's all the same to these people. This shit is all connected. The way they act towards this is the same way they act when we get KILLED.

And the fact that you all are making threats towards her as if you have access or power to do what you're threatening--you very likely don't, but I know it's the power you *wish* you had. You all would not hesitate to put Black people in very real danger just because we wanted to talk about the racism of a fandom of a show that *checks notes* TALKS ABOUT RACISM!

Pathetic.

[crazycatsiren]

Witches of color: "Literally all we ask for are respect and listening to us."

White witches: *just can't handle it*

[odinsblog]

Black people: Black Lives Matter ✊🏿

Racists: That’s hurtful to white people, your calls for unqualified equality is exactly the same as a call for the genocide of all white people

Palestinians: From the river to the sea Palestine will be free 🇵🇸

Islamophobes: That’s hurtful to Israelis, your calls for unqualified freedom is exactly the same as a call for the genocide of all Jewish people