Robin DiAngelo Kicks Karen’s Butt (Book Excerpt 1/4)

One of the most influential tracts to emerge from the identity politics movement is RobinDiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. It rapidly climbed onto the New York Times bestseller list after its publication in 2018, remaining there for over a year, and its popularity then resurged after the killing of George Floyd.

While DiAngelo locates the source of racism in social structures, White Fragility fits snugly in the self-help section of a bookstore. Except for a couple of stray sentence fragments, DiAngelo has nothing whatsoever to say about transforming institutions. Instead, racism is depicted as a mental disorder, and its cure as a sustained mental regimen supervised by an expert therapist, preferably DiAngelo (for a fee, of course). The interest of her mishmash of words—the whole of my being revolts at denoting it a book—lies less in her pretense of an argument than in this thing as a cultural datum: Why did White Fragility become a national phenomenon, the go-to text of identity politics? I will return to this question presently. First, however, I must drag the reader through the slog of parsing White Fragility. I confess to a certain reluctance. It feels akin to child abuse. It brings to mind a public service announcement from the 1960s: “Mental Illness: Sympathize, Don’t Criticize.” But were I to stop here, it might be said that my curt dismissal of DiAngelo springs from my own … white fragility. So, begging the reader’s forgiveness, here it goes. DiAngelo repeatedly describes racism as “complex” and “nuanced.” The problem is that her analysis of racism is neither. It is all of a piece. She doesn’t paint in broad strokes; she paints in one stroke. Racism, DiAngelo posits, quoting a fellow diversity consultant, permeates every nook and cranny of society: “Racism is a systemic, societal, institutional, omnipresent, and epistemologically embedded phenomenon that pervades every vestige of our reality.” You might be aware, you might be unaware, but it’s there: “We might think of conscious racial awareness as the tip of an iceberg….Racial bias is largely unconscious.” It contaminates every thought and interracial relationship: “no cross-racial relationship is free from the dynamics of racism.” If you don’t or if you do have Black friends, you’re a racist. “The sad fact is many whites have no cross-racial friendships at all.… But even those that have cross-racial friendships” aren’t immune to “the dynamics of racism in the society at large.”Even if you and your Black friend “don’t talk about racism, [it] does not mean it isn’t at play. Indeed, this silence is one of the ways that racism is manifest, for it is an imposed silence.” If you profess to be “color-blind” or if you profess to “color-celebrate,” you’re either way a racist, as both are “typical white racial claims.” If you don’t shed tears at the murder of a Black person, you’re a racist, but if you do shed tears in the company of Black people, that would be “effectively reinscribing rather than ameliorating [sic] racism.” If you shout or abjure the n-word, you’re a racist. If you protest that you aren’t a racist, that itself is proof positive that you are one. Even if, hypothetically, your mind were rinsed clean of racism, you’re still a racist, as you objectively benefit from a system that privileges white people. Racism is ubiquitous and inescapable: “Everyone has prejudice, and everyone discriminates.” 134 It is zeitgeist and cross. You can run, as Joe Louis famously said (wasn’t it racist to invoke his name?), but you can’t hide. It’s not so much that DiAngelo’s panorama of race relations in the U.S. is wholly wrong—however much it might be wished otherwise, racism does interpolate so many facets of our existence—as that it is so Manichaean and ultimately paranoid. “As a sociologist,” DiAngelo boldly states, “I am quite comfortable generalizing.” Is she ever. If you’re white, you’ve been branded—and, like the mark of Cain, it’s only the brand that counts; everything else is beside the point. If you’re Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis; if you’re John Brown or Simon Legree; if you’re seeking to overthrow or to buttress a system of racial privilege; if you’re wrestling with or acquiescing in your demons; if you’re a fascist or an anti-fascist; if you’re on one side or the other in Charlottesville—it makes no difference; if you’re white, you’re a racist. If a white person utters something that offends a Black person, the white person is never misunderstood or the Black person mistaken. The white interlocutor is literally always a guilty-as-Lucifer racist, the Black person a pure-as-Jesus victim. In the books DiAngelo keeps, every white person is listed in the debit column. Racism isn’t a factor in the equation, it is, always and everywhere, the only factor. If you love listening to Mahalia Jackson sing “Elijah Rock,” The Four Tops sing “I’ll Be There,” and the Shirelles sing “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?,” if they strike a chord in your heart and touch a place in your soul, but if also and at the same time, however reluctantly, you harbor racial stereotypes: you’re just a racist; it’s that short and simple. In DiAngelo’s dystopian conjuring, you must ever be on guard, not against Big Brother, but against your inner racist demon that, unbeknownst to you and beyond your control, lurks in the ebony-most recesses of your mind, lying at the ready to leap forth and, like a bigoted neutron bomb, stamp out of existence every Black person in its proximity. And yet, it’s DiAngelo’s morbidly obsessive diagnosis of racism, it’s the psychopathic phantasmagoria in which she’s ensconced herself and wants to corral the rest of us, that renders its eradication impossible. If racism is so immovably entrenched in our psyches and structures; if it grips us like a peregrine falcon’s talons; if it is, like the air we breathe and the water we drink, so all-encompassing; if it is even, in the absence of human intention and intervention, “reproduced automatically” —then, truly, it can’t ever be eradicated. And if, DiAngelo-like, you cling to and clutch it as if a (social?) security blanket even as you feign “interrupting” it, if you discount a priori even the possibility, however evanescent, of a racism-free breathing space, of a human exchange inserted between parentheses, it won’t disappear. In DiAngelo’s constricted, claustrophobic moral universe, nothing much happens except racism: “We must continue to ask how our racism manifests, not if” (emphases in original). She is the monomaniacal Captain Ahab in pursuit of the White Whale. She is little Jackie Paper out to slay Puff the Racist Dragon. Her palette comprises two colors—white and black—and her canvas one color scheme—white over black. She is the bulimic sourpuss in Mike Leigh’s “Life is Sweet” who snaps “racist” when her sister harmlessly puns on a word. 139 What an unremitting, remorseless, insufferable bore! Who, by the way, would choose to be in the company of a one-trick antiracist pony nonstop expostulating on her or everyone else’s racism?

When I espy a full moon,

I can’t help but see

The white orb

Silencing

Erasing

Invalidating

The Black heavens.

Racism, how do I loathe thee?

Let me count the ways.

And, by the by, if racist microbes have so diseased white people and so desolated Black people; if racism were the sum total, not just a part (albeit a critical part), of our collective racial experience—which also includes our give-and-take banter in the locker room and our common bereavement at a workmate’s passing and our common vote for a Black presidential candidate; if race relations were only lethal and not also sometimes benign, and sometimes even ridiculous: if the picture of race in America were so monochromatically lachrymose, it’s cause for wonder how Richard Pryor or Chris Rock could laugh at it and make us—all of us, white and Black—laugh too. (God help us if YouTube appoints DiAngelo its race consultant.) But DiAngelo isn’t just a dullard possessed. She’s positively a menace. As if a Lavrentiy Beria wannabe, DiAngelo is on the prowl 24/7, bracing herself to pounce on, if not bourgeois class enemies, then white racist enemies; to ferret out even those who “subjectively” don’t harbor an errant thought but still “objectively” serve the nefarious cause, if not of bourgeois supremacy, then of white supremacy. Once having exposed the race (before it was class) enemy, DiAngelo orchestrates a group “session,” a Purge Trial, to gently minister, like the most refined of torturers, her thoughtful “feedback,” so as to publicly humiliate and degrade participants as she chews them up and spits them out, for their own good, of course, until finally, kneeling in contrition, begging for forgiveness, screaming for surcease, they admit it, they blubber out:

I’m a racist!

I’m a racist!

Thank you Jesus!

Thank you Comrade Stalin!

Thank you Chairman Mao!

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you, Coach DiAngelo!

I’ve seen the light!

Hallelujah!

I’m a sinner no more!

At least, not until Coach DiAngelo turns up at your company’s doorstep to conduct another “session.” For she doesn’t believe racism can be vanquished 141 while, her protestations notwithstanding (two can play the same game…), it’s most doubtful that she wants to vanquish it. Chuck the Civil Rights Movement, her anthem is: We shan’t overcome, not on my watch, goddamn it! Get me to the bank on time! It might, incidentally, be asked, if racism is buried irretrievably and irrevocably in the labyrinthine chambers of our interior cyberspace, and if it replicates itself in structures and institutions even absent human intercession, then what’s the point of her coaching? However kickass her “sessions,” DiAngelo plainly can no more “interrupt” racism than a twig can “interrupt” an oncoming locomotive. Shouldn’t she counsel her clients that the fee she charges would be better spent feeding little brown babies in Africa? (I know, racist.)