AMAC Exclusive by Joshua Charles
One of the more famous—or infamous, depending on your perspective—authors to rise to prominence of late is a university professor named Robin DiAngelo. Her 2018 book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism has become an extremely influential text for Critical Race Theory adherents, woke corporations, and the modern-day Democrat Party. As a sign of just how influential her views are, last year, DiAngelo was asked to speak to 184 Democrat members of Congress and lectured white legislators at length on why they are all racist. DiAngelo has since been on a continuous circuit of lectures and workshops with local government officials, corporate and higher education organizations, talking about her concept of “white fragility.”
Since DiAngelo’s 169-page diatribe is fast becoming dogma for the Democrat Party, it is important to understand exactly what it is, she argues.
DiAngelo begins her book with false statements that deny the decades of progress that America has made to address racial segregation. Totally ignoring the impact of the Civil Rights movement, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, and the fact that Martin Luther King Jr.’s magnificent “I Have A Dream” speech is taught daily in American high school classrooms, DiAngelo pretends that this country is just as segregated as it was in the 1960s.
“White people in North America live in a society that is deeply separate and unequal by race, and white people are the beneficiaries of that separation and inequality. As a result, we are insulated from racial stress, at the same time that we come to feel entitled to and deserving of our advantage,” she declares.
“Socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves,” she continues, sounding as if she is speaking of some other era, “we become highly fragile in conversations about race. We consider a challenge to our racial worldviews as a challenge to our very identities as good, moral people. Thus, we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling and unfair moral offense.”
Even the Washington Post has critiqued DiAngelo’s claims, asserting that ‘“White Fragility’ presents oversimplified arguments that are self-fulfilling, even self-serving.” DiAngelo’s statements are certainly self-serving. Indeed, DiAngelo receives extraordinary financial compensation for her work, including $320 an hour just to take phone calls to talk about white fragility.
One analysis by the Daily Caller found that DiAngelo earns more in a day lecturing white people about their “white fragility” than a middle-class black household makes in three months. DiAngelo, who is white, is literally profiting off a “dehumanizing condescension” that “talks down to black people,” as liberal Columbia professor John McWhorter puts it.
McWhorter describes how DiAngelo’s book is “replete with claims that are either plain wrong or bizarrely disconnected from reality.” One example is DiAngelo’s false claim that “I can get through graduate school without ever discussing racism. I can graduate from law school without ever discussing racism. I can get through a teacher-education program without ever discussing racism.” The idea that racism is not discussed in the far-left environment of academia is absurd. The university curriculums discuss little else. Such lines showcase the fact that DiAngelo’s entire argument hinges on pretending that America is stuck in the Jim Crow era.
But instead of participating in a rational debate or defending her wild claims with evidence,
DiAngelo attempts to stifle any form of dissent with petty insults and character attacks. If a white person contradicts her reasoning and shows the slightest hint of emotion in doing so, DiAngelo has psychologized exactly what’s happening—they aren’t making arguments DiAngelo must consider or pointing out facts her theories don’t account for. They are exhibiting signs of what she calls “white fragility.” She describes the actions that flow from “white fragility” as follows:
“These include emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation. These responses work to reinstate white equilibrium as they repel the challenge, return our racial comfort, and maintain our dominance within the racial hierarchy. I conceptualize this process as white fragility. Though white fragility is triggered by discomfort and anxiety, it is born of superiority and entitlement. White fragility is not weakness per se. In fact, it is a powerful means of white racial control and the protection of white advantage.”
So, if you don’t automatically accept DiAngelo’s premises; if you find them offensive; if you find them counterfactual; and if you dare to say so—then you are a racist and suffer from white fragility.
To the extent these ideas dominate the public square, Americans will be captive and pathologized people. The debate will become impossible. Real solutions to the problems faced by minority communities will not be seriously considered. A new orthodoxy will be ruthlessly imposed because rational dissent will have been eliminated from the outset. Such a paradigm is ultimately intended to coddle the minds of the white liberal elites of the Democrat Party rather than contribute to any meaningful progress on addressing racism in America.
As even liberal professor John McWhorter has concluded, “White Fragility is, in the end, a book about how to make certain educated white readers feel better about themselves…The sad truth is that anyone falling under the sway of this blinkered, self-satisfied, 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.”
apply Rules for Radicals book onto Dems & see them react, Yes Rules for Radicals
The FAR LEFT is basically MARXIST-SOCIALIST with MEGA CORPORATIONS, MEDIA PLATFORMS
It’s a human problem.
You guys are like over a year late on this. By now, many progressives see this book as problematic and unhelpful in the cause of anti-racism.
(But “White Fragility” should really be the title of this website.)
I think that the left radically underestimates Conservatives, especially those that love the U.S. Constitution and our Bill of Rights. Ultimately, they will see exactly how “fragile” we really are.
Nothing but the best for stupid people with stupid ideas making money by degrading anyone and everyone who disagrees with her racism discussion and theories. There mere fact that you are a racist when you call out stupid people like DiAngelo is really beyond the pale. I would like to know who died and made her the expert on racism. I would agree that this is part of the Marxist Democrat playbook….and what have they done to make America better? Nothing! I would venture to say that MLK would discredit people that spew this garbage that just further divides our great nation.
The biggest racists are the one calling others racists.
Buy the book and fertilize your garden with it. There is a sucker born every minute!
Years ago we called books like this BS. There is no shortage of people with fantasies creating so called “books”. We should bring back the policy of “involuntary civil commitment” and put this author in treatment, where she belongs.
The recent and ongoing mania over “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and DiAngelo’s “white fragility,” I suspect has a root cause that stems from the horrified realization by those whose egos, ideologies and/or power hunger rely on racial politics that racism in the U.S. had just about died out. Something had to be done and an academic analytical technique was successfully adapted as a propaganda device to create an illusion of systemic, inbred racism. This helps explain why in major cities, political classes in power for decades have just recently discovered “systemic racism” rampant in their police.
The most racist people in the United States are the Blacks and the Democrats Blacks have Black Lives Matter and if you say all lives matter they want to kill you. Blacks call themselves Blacks or Black American because they think you’re so stupid that you can’t see that? Democrats were the KKK percentage wise more Republicans voted for the civil rights act than Democrats. Look at the Democrats controlled cities they are black sewers where blacks live in poverty and Crime. Blacks kill more Blacks by far than whites killing Blacks,and Blacks kill more white cops by far than the other way around. Blacks like to bring up slavery not a one living now has ever been a slave and not one white living now has ever owned a slave. Their own people sold them into slavery. If all people would quit feeling sorry for themselves and quit feeling hurt, get a job and work hard we would all be better off.
This book might be neatly placed on one’s bookshelf along side of “Mein Kampf”. The phrase “critical race theory” really stinks of the Critical Theory idea promulgated by the Frankfurt School which gave us “the New Left” back in the 1960’s. Remember Eric Fromm, Herbert Marcuse and Theodore Adorno who gave us the big lie that fascism was a right wing movement, tainting the real right idea, laissez faire capitalism. National Socialism (Nazism) and “critical race theory” attempt the same deadly end, the irrelevance of the individual.
My brown sister (100% Maltese, 1st generation American) is taking a White-ness Class to overcome her racism. My brown granddaughter is aware of her brown-ness (50% Chilean). My Blond-blued son-in-law who lived in the suburbs of SF, is against the White-man’s advantage over blacks. And all 3 of them think I am a racist. I grew up in SF; in a black neighborhood; had black, Chinese, Spanish friends; and went to their homes for dinner and playtime. How can this be especially from my sister? Oh, I forgot they are all Democrats.
I wonder what D’Angelo would do if someone were to hand her the Christian Holy Bible and ask her to read it, and ask her what she got out of it?
I think she would cower out of it and possibly denounce it. She’s self serving and arrogant, which the Holy Spirit would convict her on. Her hardness of heart would lead her to reject it. Jesus Christ is the answer to every question we have, nothing else!
I have absolutely NO problem at all talking about Racism. It’s frustrating, because those who “Pretend” to be so anti-Racism, are the most Racist and non-sensical people alive. They cannot engage in an intelligent conversation where facts are used, but can only relate to emotions and agendas. It’s like trying to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon.
Black Race less than 13%. White Race over 60%. Do the math. If there was a “real” problem, there would be no 13%!
“DiAngelo pretends that this country is just as segregated as it was in the 1960s.” In the mid-1960’s I attended college in Tennessee, as a white “Yankee” I saw a bit of discrimination but nothing like the “Colored restroom”, “Colored water fountain” and, especially” the “Colored Service Here” signs on the kitchen windows of the few restaurants that would serve “Colored” people by “allowing” them to order by knocking on that window and then, when served, were handed a paper sack with disposable utensils – because no white person would eat from a plate that a “colored person” might have used. While things may not be equal now, they certainly aren’t anything like the 1960’s.
Dear Racist, Communistic, Socialist Devil worshippers. White people have no problem talking about anything and you may soon start to hear much, much more. Most of us are NOT racists. It’s your racist ex-Pres Obama that needs mental help. He started all this crap!
Call me white and call me fragile, I want to know who they get to believe this malarkey. My friends of, all races, are more intelligent than these people
What a sad, pathetic little rich white girl you are. White Planned Parenthood and the Marxist democrats have killed millions of beautiful little black babies brought on by a white woman named Margaret Sanger. The goal: genocide of the African American population. It wasn’t the whole caucasian population – it was a few powerful people with little evil minds. That what you are, a white woman with a little evil mind, getting wealthy telling lies. What are you doing with all that wealth? Assisting the black population? I doubt it very much. People with minds like yours, care nothing about others – no matter their color. The rest of us, we care about all others no matter what their color.