Matt Taibbi on ‘white fragility’
“DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory.”
Robin DiAngelo author of “White Fragility” says she grew up poor and white (with a capital “w” which I’m leaving out because I’m not going along with the current revival of 19th century race theory, implied by the nailing of immutable categories to “B” and “W”). Hard to believe her. If she had she would know that growing up poor and white in a western country can mean standing pale-faced at the local metro station begging for a few cents to get your next fix. You want the fix because when you wake up in the morning you can’t stand the unbearable pain of your own existence, but you can’t quite bring yourself to jump in front of a train. That’s one example of white and, for the most part, male privilege among the lower orders. No doubt at all that a young guy in that situation is completely unaware of the privilege that has accrued to him for being white. Ms DiAngelo’s class privilege permits her to blank out compassion that doesn’t fit into her race studies department intellectual categories.
DiAngelo provides a pretty exhaustive list of possible reactions to her description of white privilege, all of which she takes as evidence of a desire on the part of white people to defend their privilege. If you make an argument that precludes all possibility of contradiction then you haven’t made an argument at all, you’ve made a declaration of faith. “I believe in God”. “I don’t and I think you’re mistaken.” “Well that’s evidence of your lack of faith, maybe you’ll see the light someday.”
I’m not arguing against white privilege, which clearly exists and has a pernicious effect on the world we live in, or fragility, but against the absoluteness of DiAngelo’s position and her evident desire to stifle debate, and against her racialized and actually racist view of the world.
One of the items on her list is “class”: some people want to avoid the issue by saying it’s all about class, thus defending white privilege by refusing to engage with it. No doubt sometimes true, but the intellectual leap from “sometimes true” to “anyone saying the real issue is class is dodging the issue”, is unsustainable and simply wrong.
The trouble with class is that class got there first. Race is a sub-category of class, an invention to protect class privilege. Those who hold power can be extremely inventive when it comes to keeping it. For centuries colonists have nurtured class elites and hierarchies among the lower orders in conquered lands to keep populaces divided. German colonists in 19th century Rwanda corrupted the (at that time) fluid and harmonious coexistence of Hutus and Tutsis, inculcating the idea of race; later to be expanded by Belgian eugenicists who began measuring people’s skulls and issuing racial identity cards. Some of the colonized were considered to be more intelligent, therefore better suited for the administrative class. The aim of course was to use race as a means to keep the ruling colonists in control of the new class system.
One of Diangelo’s points is that racist attitudes are institutionalized in western societies. That’s so obvious as to be almost a platitude. Might still be worth discussing with a few Daily Telegraph readers, or with Donald Trump. But the big question we all wanted to ask but never dared to:…what about institutionalized racism in me?
That’s important, though it’s arrogant to assume that millions of people haven’t been answering that question for decades. It’s basically a matter of straightforward human empathy. It may have escaped DiAngelo’s racialized view of the world that many people feel empathy for others and it doesn’t depend on the colour of their skin. What DiAngelo seems to want to do is more superficial. She wants to make us all, especially the privileged middle and upper classes, and of course the corporate world, more polite. Godda be a good thing. The English aristocracy are and were polite, so it’s said at least, while they were plundering the world and committing serial genocide. DiAngelo in her career as a ‘diversity trainer’ seems to be doing a good job helping corporations to race-wash their image, enabling them to continue with globalized looting and enslaving the poor, politely of course.
There’s a more serious side to anti-racism that seems to escape much of the anti-racism industry. Just leaving the +most+ serious one, world poverty, driven by racism, aside…think western wars. I rarely see them mentioned in academic articles dealing with stuff like micro-aggressions. Does Robin DiAngelo know how many civilians died as a result of the western invasion of Iraq? Is she aware that criminal western wars are driven by racist disregard for lives that don’t count? Is she aware that some people who share her views, like Hillary Clinton, an underprivileged woman, glory in these wars? Would she be prepared to call Barack Obama who bombed seven Muslim countries and terrorized thousands of dark-skinned people with hovering drones a murdering scumbag?
Well, probably not. It wouldn’t be polite to call a black person a murdering scumbag even if he is one. Not even Condoleeza Rice or Colin Powell…must be some mistake there. After all they’re educated, they went to university, they belong to our class and they’ll make us feel good if we’re polite to them.
Why look at causes if you can sound impressive playing around with symptoms? It would be interesting to hear DiAngelo’s reaction to this statement from Frantz Fanon: “In our view, an individual who loves blacks is as ‘sick’ as someone who abhors them. Conversely, the black man who strives to whiten his race is as wretched as the one who preaches hatred of the white man.”
Race, the white race, was invented by supremacists, imperialists, whose skin colour was white as it happened, to divide their underlings by declaring some of them more valuable, more privileged. Empires and propaganda have been around for a long time; many imperialists believe their own propaganda. Churchill did. He hated Indians and used his conviction of their inferiority to justify their murder. But he was motivated by power and his belief in the British Empire.
According to the DiAngelo religion, all people with white skin are ingredients in the same racist soup. The person who in a silly moment assumes that someone with black skin likes reggae is lumped in with eugenicists like Boris Johnson, presumably along with Josef Goebbels too, or with perpetrators of imperial racist wars like A. Blair. It’s not a coincidence that the warmongering upper echelons of the Democratic party in the US and the Labour party in the UK are playing the the “white privilege”, “white fragility” card… seriously racist activists who love black people. If you can get citizens engaged in a throwback to Puritan self-flagellation, guilt-trip them, double-bind them, get them even more obsessed with themselves, and with their “whiteness”, there’s a good chance they won’t notice while in far away places you carry on with the Great Game, on the Grand Chessboard; power, manipulation and business as usual, Churchill’s game – just incidentally murdering millions of people of colour whose lives neither matter nor even exist.
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