WHITE FRAGILITY - ROBIN DIANGELO

188 Goddamn, this book is bad. I should come clean, I hate-read this book. Typically, I don’t finish books that I don’t like and I don’t start books that I know I won’t like ahead of time. It seems emotionally unwise to read something for the sake for getting upset. There are a few exceptions. I read HILLBILLY ELEGY knowing that I wouldn’t like it. Same with BETTER ANGLES OF OUR NATURE. In both those cases, I had already read part of the book in some magazine since those books were big events when they came out and the ideas they pushed were discussed seriously by the media. All of this is doubly true for WHITE FRAGILITY, which, as I’m sure you know, was a huge deal when it came out, clearly riding a wave of anti-racist instructional manuals (more on this later), and really picking up steam around last summer when the George Floyd and related protests really got cooking. Hell, this book is only in my house because my gf is a Seattle Public School teacher and the school district literally gave every teacher in the system (I think non-YT teachers could ask for a different title) a copy. Clearly, this thing struck a nerve. I knew it wasn’t for me, based on experts and discussions about the book, but, the book was already in my house, and it seemed to be a good pairing with BLACK MARXISM a book that takes on similar issues and manages to be better in every way and one that I thought about constantly while reading this (plus, this book is really short and reads super fast). 

I’ll start with the literal content of the book. If you’re looking for an explanation of YTness (quick aside, she doesn’t capitalize “white” or “black” in this book, which bothered me. Another reason to use YT when you mean “White” as in race) or how YTness functions, or it’s historical construction, or the ways it influences our thinking and world, this ain’t it. We get totally ahistorical, and I would say, actively damaging statements like, “Freedom and equality- regardless of religion or class status - were radical new ideas when the United States was formed.” and, “When white Northerners saw the violence that black people - including black women and children - endured during the civil rights protests, they were appalled.” as well as some truly bizarre stuff about Jackie Robinson. She doesn’t do a good job taking apart the “I’m Italian so my ancestors weren’t YT,” or, “I’m Irish and some of my ancestors were slaves,” and the rest because she doesn’t give us a good explanation and definition of YTness. Such explanations exist, Painter’s THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE, or HOW THE IRISH BECAME WHITE, or THE MAKING OF NEW WORLD SLAVERY all give much better accounts of this process and it’s implications. What we get instead is mystification, where it seems like YTness emerged from nowhere, or from the inherent evilness of people who are now (21st century) considered YT, and all that can be done to combat it is for YT people, individually, to take DiAngelo’s class. She says as much herself, “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.” This, to me, is dangerously naïve and exactly what you’d expect from someone in DiAngelo’s position. Because of the jobs I’ve had in my life, as well as activist groups I’ve been involved with, I’ve been in a lot of the types of classes DiAngelo teaches. Hell, at my last job, I was part of the committee that hired (over my objections) a person to give this sort of workshop (WHITE FRAGILITY is basically a workshop is book form). To me these, sorts of workshops are a dodge, an HR trick. Are there microaggressions and racism at any level at any institution? Of course, I agree with almost all of the substance of DiAngelo’s argument, my issue is with her implementation. When the focus is on individual workers, and almost always the lowest-power workers, while, for example, the Board of Directors not only doesn’t need to be in the workshop but is 100% YT, these workshops are offering cover for deep, institutional racism. They let organizations off the hook for actually building a non-racist world, by pretending that an afternoon workshop and a change in interpersonal language will do the trick. To me, this is actually worse than nothing, it is offering cover to the exact forces we’ve been battling the last 500 years. The final kicker, the one action that shows me that DiAngelo isn’t serious, is somewhat personal and came this summer. DiAngelo is a Seattleite, she teaches at UW, where she is beloved. Like I said, her book sold like crazy and she has a lot of cultural capital, especially amongst the sorts of “well-meaning,” woke YT-liberal that account for a large part of Seattle. This summer, we really could have used her voice supporting the BLM protests. Hell, we could use her support now. But, not a word. Not her telling her followers to join us outside, not a suggestion that this was the right thing to do, certainly not her coming out here to join us and get gassed and beaten alongside the people she, nominally, is trying to help. “Had I been old enough, I probably would have marched in the 1960s,” she writes, despite the fact that I’ve been to marches and direct political actions here in Seattle for 4 years, never seen her. Because to her and her followers, becoming anti-racist is purely individual. It’s “doing the work” but only within, there’s no step two. Real anti-racist action, that is action that is actually trying to destroy this racist world and build a non-racist one, by definition, is not going to be sanctioned, né mandatory, by HR. It’s going to require real risk and action. I might go into this in a longer essay but this is classic neo-liberal atomization, new-left virtue signaling, and a real insight into Professional Managerial Class morals. I will say, the story about the YT woman almost dying after receiving mild-feedback in a workshop is very funny and I’m sure it’s true. Other than that though, I beg people to read different books (even the ones in the bibliography are all better, please read any of them) if they’re interested in racism and/or power as a topic and I likewise beg you to not for a second think that we’re going to be able to read or workshop our way out of the mess we’re in. 125 microaggressions.