White Fragility by Robin Diangelo: On the Crest of a Wave, or Sinking Ship?

Dr. John McWhorter, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, did a piece for the The Atlantic last year, in which he stated that White Fragility is a "dehumanizing condescension toward Black people."

As far as his piece is concerned, he did echo some of the flaws that I found in the book but my personal feelings on the condescension point are mixed. I can see where’s he coming from — the book does talk in absolutist and reductionist terms for the sake of simplification (black Americans are trapped in a cage, and it’s only at the whites’ behest that they will be freed), but this is problematic in itself, as examples like this shows. With that in mind, it’s not hard to see why a black American like Mr. McWhorter, who has worked hard and even attained a PhD from a top university in 1990s USA, would feel slighted, because it kinda disregards his efforts and achievements, and that of any other black American in a similar position.

On the other, nobody—and I truly don’t think Mr. McWhorter believes otherwise—can deny that there is a great deal of racial disparity in the USA.

Here is my take on the book:

Pros

History

Perhaps the book’s greatest strength, and by extension DiAngelo’s, is when she’s translating relevant history onto its pages. She picks all the right facts and offers them in a concise and clear manner, making them engaging and accessible to all. So even assuming you were totally uninformed on the subject, the fact that she’s picked the most relevant facts and presented them well will still enable you to get a clear idea of how that history decants into subsequent eras, continuing to shape people’s beliefs on race throughout time.

Faultless on that front.

Black History Month

One of DiAngelo’s finest observations concerns how the very existence of BHM is a well-meaning but misguided attempt to further black representation in culture. It’s obviously well-meaning in that it wants to “get it out there”, but misguided in that it presents it as a separate entity from the rest of history. Ours vs. Theirs. From what I can gather online, it does seem like black history is still not taught in at least some, if not many, US schools.

This is a shame because even 15 years ago when I was at school, black history was properly integrated, sitting in the history curriculum alongside all the white history. We were taught in a very frank and detailed way about the slave trade for example, how black people were kidnapped and sold from their homelands to be auctioned off like mere objects, and then subjected to atrocious treatment. Considering that this was in the UK where the proportion of blacks to the rest of the country was less than a tenth of that in the USA, it’s nothing short of atrocious that the the US education system is not teaching this in 2020.

Then again though, the education system in the UK as with most developed countries, encourages kids to think critically. In other words, for themselves.

Affirmative Action

There’s no questioning her point that a proportion of people have this skewed perception that it’s a system of bias, giving minorities an extra leg-up over white people. The “foreigners are taking all our jobs!” is after all, *the* quote of uninformed racist folk. We’ve all heard it, but just a brief glance at some statistics will tell you it’s not true.

In fact, as DiAngelo highlighted, white women are the ones who’ve benefited most from America’s affirmative action, and that’s despite women not even being a part of the original eligible criteria.

Black Authors

I think at least to some degree, she has a point about black authors being treated as a sort of separate entity because after all, we don’t speak of authors like Dickens as being “white authors”. It runs in the same vein as the Black History Month point — it’s our authors and their authors, rather than treating authors as holistic group outside the confines of race or ethnicity.

I’m not sure how far with her overall theory I go—it does seem like she’s veering off onto one of her logical contortions—but it’s undeniably a “thing”. Whether or not similar things happen in other countries, I don’t know.

Cons

Reductionism

I can’t say this any other way — this is problematic.

For 98% of the book, she speaks both figuratively and literally in black and white terms. Even if we disregard the rest of the world and set our focus entirely on the USA (which to be fair was largely DiAngelo’s focus), the big points all focus on the black and white population.

Even just by large, sidelining the Arab, Hispanic, East and South Asian and Latino populations in a discussion of racism in the USA ain’t cool. Their populations run into the millions—not that it would be any less worse if they were smaller anyway—so they at least warranted a chapter. The book’s not that long and DiAngelo repeats herself a lot, so she could easily have given them that much.

On the odd occasion she does venture outside the black-white realm, she mostly uses the criticised “person of colour” term. Criticised of course, because it sweeps all non-whites into one tray and robs them of their individual identities. That said though, she does occasionally refer directly to Latinos and Asians, but no others.

Americentrism

Breathe Peter. BREATHE.

Hah, so anyone that’s seen either of my two cultural appropriation answers on Quora knows that I flipped a few proverbial tables when I heard sheltered, ignorant westerners abuse the term in light of the famous qipao and more recent Adele “controversies”.

I damned near gave myself a second hernia! Now calm yourself Peter, or you’ll start looking mightily whitely fragilelily…

Anyway in the latter, we were faced with some westerners shouting “black culture!”. This insular, ignorant thinking does exactly what the POC term does — stripping countless, distinct black cultures all over the world of their individual identities and rounding them up, to be thrown into some generic box with the label ‘black’ on it.

Why is this relevant?

Because Ms. DiAngelo exhibits that kind of insular thinking when making this statement:

“the United States is a global power, and through movies and mass media, corporate culture, advertising, US-owned manufacturing, military presence, historical colonial relations, missionary work, and other means, white supremacy is circulated globally. This powerful ideology promotes the idea of whiteness as the ideal for humanity well beyond the West.” — White Fragility

Wow.

Here, she presents this very typical ignorant and sheltered view of the world by presenting the USA as the centre of the universe, stating outright that people of other countries all over the world are doomed, dooomed!, to be deluded into thinking that white people fart rainbows and that they should be setting up shrines to Tom Cruise in their bedrooms.

It’s not occurred to her that, gasp, other countries have their own mass media, their own corporate culture etcetera etcetera. Even in Japan, where despite Uncle Sam having both shadowed the Rising Sun following WW2 and still possessing a military presence there, their mass media and corporate culture are still very distinct. In fact, Japan’s corporate culture couldn’t be more opposite to that of the USA if it tried! She’s thoroughly absorbed in her homeland’s propaganda, overestimating its influence on foreign people by a huge margin. Is whiteness valued outside of America? Actually, yes.

Not because Sammy boy says so, though.

In fact, a fair complexion has historically been held as the “beauty standard” in countries like China and the UK well before the USA even existed. Stupid that it is either way, the reason is rooted in class — the lower classes generally spent more time working outside, so the tan accrued “gave away” their poverty. By contrast, upper class folk spent more time inside and consequently sheltered from the sun, and so whiteness became associated with them, and therefore considered desirable. That’s not to say outside cultures can’t have an effect though; the British Empire’s presence in India reinforced the age-old “whiteness” problem there. Ironically in the UK of all places, it’s been superseded by a new beauty trend where everyone should be tanned as much as possible, even if it means layering on the fake stuff until they look like hairless orangutans.

So I repeat Ms. DiAngelo (I know she can’t hear me, I’m just a fruit loop), nobody gives that much of a frick about US culture outside of the US. It’s not a slight, because I’m sure the same is very much true of the US when it comes to other countries too. I don’t expect Americans to fawn over BBC News and have Carry On film posters plastered all over their homes, for example. We watch some of your movies sometimes and keep up with the big news (from our own mass media outlets), but we’re fully developed countries in our own right, with our own cultures.

Reinventing terms and flaws in the theory.

In the book, she needlessly redefines terms. Like the whole “racism is a structure” quote… eh, we already have a term for systemic racism, it’s called… systemic racism. Racism’s always been a catch all term for any kind of professional or personal racism, there’s no need for these swings and roundabouts. Same thing for “white fragility”, it’s just a buzzword for a closet racist.

OK, small niggle out the way, now onto the theory.

First of all, I’m going to say that I don’t actually think Ms. DiAngelo is all that far off the mark, theory-wise. In fact, I’d say she’s got many of the right elements, but as she does throughout the book at times, puts 2 + 2 together and ends up making 5. If I use her as the benchmark for the average American, I can make sense of how it could build a picture of how many Americans think.

First I’ll touch upon how she sees society as a nursery bed for building “inner racism” in white Americans. She’s very fond of throwing around the term “conditioning” and uses it like so, so many before her (including the author of A Clockwork Orange, no less) in a way that suggests that you just have to repeatedly cram an idea into a person’s head and hey presto, it’s permanently ingrained.

Even with just my A-Level psychology though, I know that this is a fantastical myth. Conditioning is not hypnosis or NLP, but a process that requires continual reinforcement and even more relevantly here, to be able to consciously form a link with the conditioned behaviour. Whether that’s positive/negative reinforcement of the behaviour or as in classical conditioning, a stimulus. This consciously acknowledged and tied association then results in an automatic behaviour. As a result, this is incompatible with Ms. DiAngelo’s theory, as she states that this underlying racism and the concept of white identity are under-the-skin phenomenons that people generally just accrue unconsciously from the year dot.

Speaking of consciousness, DiAngelo is a proponent of the theory of unconscious bias, weaving it into her theory and even charging thousands of dollars for 45 minute talks about it. The thing is, the concept of unconscious bias is, to put it kindly, sitting on shaky ground. Even more so is unconscious bias training which seeks to “undo” the unconscious behaviours. The problem with that is science shows that bias doesn’t necessarily translate into action; in fact, people only act on them around 16% of the time. (correlation r = .40) and in action, it’s been observed that UBT actually can make things worse. The idea that biases are unconscious is groundless psychoanalytic babble anyway — building theories on theories.

The problem with the research behind unconscious bias theory in that a) Any reasonably sane person is of course aware of their biases, let’s not pretend otherwise and b) the research is built on IAT, a test supposed to measure a person’s unconscious bias. One “groundbreaking” study supposedly showed the presence of unconscious bias in doctors, but when the data was looked at more closely, they found that those who scored higher on the IAT (and therefore should be more biased), actually treated blacks and whites more equally. Those who scored lower were more likely to give preference to black patients. In fact, Dr. Hart Blanton has observed that IAT scores can shift just by showing takers a picture of black Americans on a picnic. This is the one of the problems with DiAngelo’s reductionist conclusions — the human psyche and social behaviour is far more complex.

That said, I’ll finish this point on a more positive note and hark back to my point about DiAngelo having the right elements.

I could see how a number of white Americans (no generalising here folks) without the benefit of a balanced and relatively unbiased education, in tandem with a lack of critical thought, could take in a deeply skewed perception of their country and carry it throughout life and because of a lack of critical thought from themselves and others around them, leaves their beliefs unchallenged, letting them sink closer and closer to the heart.

You see this is dangerous on both fronts, as a) It means they’re not equipped to have their beliefs challenged, and so they don’t know how to handle it when they are challenged and b) These beliefs become something so close to their hearts that having them challenged triggers a deeply emotional response. Tie these factors together and you have a cocktail of frustration and anger.

The second and final part of this point (God this is getting stupidly long, isn’t it?) is where she’s aiming her gun as far as systemic racism is concerned. She seems to believe that it’s the institutions themselves that are racist, and this forms part of her argument about the invented difference between racism (professional) and racial prejudice (personal). Basic common sense dictates that institutions themselves are insentient structures, and therefore are incapable of being racist. No, it’s the people driving them that infect these structures with racism, letting their closet or even open racism distort their professional judgement.

We can see this with Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.

Concerning the latter, we observed the disgusting event unfold and the racism not even stopping at the coroner’s office. The police officers handling the situation, those with the power, let their racial prejudices corrupt their professional conduct which ultimately led to his death. Then, in act of something between cronyism and racism, the original coroner, the one with the power in his branch of the law, let *his* bias interfere with his professionalism so much that he fabricated a bogus reason for Floyd’s death, to make it look as if it was his own fault. Thankfully an independent coroner was brought in to show the first one up for what he was — a downright racist charlatan.

Breonna’s case shows us the same problem from a different angle. The police there, once again with the power in their branch of the law, obviously let their racism interfere with their conduct, which led to her death. This time we have a trail leading up to the murder though; the “no-knock” warrant. A law that allows police officers to initiate a raid at any residence without any prior warning — they’re literally allowed to go in all guns blazing. Then because of, excuse my French, shitty law-making, police officers are granted protection even if they end up murdering like they did Breonna, because of a loophole that makes it so that police officers can never be considered aggressors when acting in a professional capacity. The result is borderline farcical and has resulted in countless life-changing injuries and murders for victims, and that goes for any race. (Hold your breath, I am go to tie this in with racism but first, I just want to highlight how ludicrous this loophole really is.

Tracy Ingle above, is the most ludicrous example of the “no-knock effect” I’ve heard about. In 2008, the police conducted one such raid on his home and Ingle, believing armed robbers were breaking in, intended to scare them off with a non-working gun. The American police being so poorly trained, did what they always do in this kind of situation and just started firing off rounds. Twenty bullets in total. Ingle was hit by five, taken to hospital and put in intensive care. During this time, the police expected to find drugs but found none.

Here’s the part that you won’t believe.

The police, evidently now in a bind because they’d put an innocent, defenceless man in ICU, went to the hospital, removed him from intensive care for questioning and then, here’s the punch line, charged Ingle with the assault of the police officer who’d shot him.

He’d actually been charged with assaulting the person that assaulted him. You’d think that justice would prevail in the normal legal process though, right? No, it gets even more absurd because guess what? He got sent down. Two appeals just reaffirmed the decision — eighteen years in prison for being attacked and an $18,000 fine.

Let’s just recap; Ingle attacked nobody, no drugs were found and even the police’s raid fell out of the legal timeframe anyway. On the flip side, the police put five bullets in him, five bullets that tore into his chest, knee, calf, arm and hip. Despite all of this, Ingle’s the one that goes down for nearly twenty years and the guilty police officers are cleared of wrongdoing because of these dopey, holey laws.

It sounds like a skit from The Simpsons involving Chief Wiggum.

Of course, these legal loopholes are not just an example of active stupidity, but also passively provides an invisible shield for people in law and order, one that protects them all from the consequences of acting improperly, allowing them to do as they please and act on their prejudices.

In the USA particularly, where it’s most evident that the law is badly infected with racism, it’s this passive glitch which provides massive power to the people driving this institution, despite it being clear that these people need their power checked most of all. (Decent police training wouldn’t go amiss, either.) So what the institution is not doing is being racist, but what it is doing is not being sufficiently comprehensive and precise so as to stop its representatives from being able to act on their personal prejudices, and since racism happens to be a big one, it’s passively enabling acts of personal racism in a professional setting.

Unfortunately but perhaps not surprisingly, this works for any and all prejudiced cops in the US system. One of the other officers involved with George Floyd’s death, Tou Thao, had previously punched and kicked a black man in alley, as his pregnant girlfriend watched, till the guy’s teeth shattered and leaving him hospitalised for four days. Despite that, combined with the fact that the victim was totally innocent with no criminal record, Thao escaped justice in that situation.

Robin DiAngelo

The final goddamn point (I never meant to let it go on for so long, promise!), and it has a distinctly ad hom flavour.

Yeah, go on, call me a jackass.

No but seriously, I felt the need to tack this on because DiAngelo is providing observations and personal takes on subjective matter, and so her own thoughts and feelings are an important factor.

The first thing I want to drop in, is her habit of doing apparent logical contortions:

“The story of Jackie Robinson is a classic example of how whiteness obscures racism by rendering whites, white privilege, and racist institutions invisible. Robinson is often celebrated as the first African American to break the color line and play in major-league baseball. While Robinson was certainly an amazing baseball player, this story line depicts him as racially special, a black man who broke the color line himself. The subtext is that Robinson finally had what it took to play with whites, as if no black athlete before him was strong enough to compete at that level.” — White Fragility

Umm, sorry?

Is that the subtext? Because I’m pretty sure nobody thinks “Jackie Robinson, first black guy to play baseball because, finally, a black man capable of playing at a white guy’s level!”

I mean, when I first read about this, my interpretation was “Wow, so this guy helped to break down racial barriers in American sport.” Now I might be a bit bonkers at times, but I don’t think I’m so far removed from reality that this is an unusual take. In fact, I’ve asked others and they’ve thought the same, and Mr. McWhorter himself thought it was bizarre.

This, and putting words into Martin Luther King’s mouth are perhaps the worst examples of her making 5 from 2 + 2.

Because her Robinson interpretation is not the norm, one can only assume that this was Ms. DiAngelo’s own take, and a damning one at that. No, I’m not making groundless accusations either — she herself admits to having heavily racist impulses, and cites numerous examples of her being racist and making laughably insensitive jokes about a black woman’s hair to her face.

This ties in with my next problem with Ms. DiAngelo — she projects, and she projects hard. She makes it clear that she thinks everybody is inherently racially prejudiced from a young age, apparently based on the fact that she is (oh, and some antique evidence and misrepresented data). She shows (to me) astonishing racism when she shares her own instinctive responses and thoughts in certain cross-racial scenarios; she was surprised that a black man had a good job, she was dubious about the Latino woman in her neighbour’s garden, assuming she must have been a burglar or something and when she went to attend a party outdoors and saw one white and one black group, she was actually scared that she might have to, oh god, mix with a small group of solely black people.

These were the times in the book that I felt visceral emotion — angry enough that, I’ll be totally honest, I wanted to slap her. For being so precious as much as being so judgemental, for which there is no excuse if you are self-aware as she claims to be. For her evidence of children being inherently racist, she quotes a book about children studied when segregation was well and alive, and for the more recent data, she quotes a study which got two groups of kids, one black and one white, to do an experiment whereby they share resources, deciding for themselves whether to share equally between their own and the outside group. Ms. DiAngelo implies as if all the children were biased towards their own.

This was not the case.

In fact, even amongst the younger group where kids were much less likely to share outwith, a considerable number of them did still show a lack of bias by sharing equally with the other group:

So if young kids are exhibiting racist tendencies, then it’s encouraged by people around them and not as Ms. DiAngelo wants people to believe, inherent. Hell, we’ve even all heard of this story about the sweet black and white boys who call themselves brothers:

…and how they intended to get the same haircut so “they’d look the same”, to prank/confuse their teacher. (See Ms. DiAngelo, I can use anecdotes too!)

When I think of things like this and all the other problems in our sociologist’s book, I can’t help but think that our White Fragility author is either too sheltered in her academic bubble or has a more insidious desire to fan the flames of racism to keep it alive, so she can carrying on making $20k for three hours work.

(OK, that really is conjecture. Sort of.)

These kids aren’t the only ones — despite how hard she might push it, I’ve never had racist preconceptions about anyone either. This was despite me not having much interaction, and no truly personal one, until I was in secondary school. In the late 90s and early 00s and amongst 600,000 people, the entire combined ethnic minority population in my home county was 1%. In fact, the one and only memorable interaction I had with any ethnic minority before secondary was when my primary school invited in a group of guys from Trinidad to give us a presentation of their culture.

Because I’d had so little exposure to outside culture at that point, it was a wonderful and stimulating experience to see these guys dressed up in wonderfully vibrant kente cloth and giving us a performance on the steel drums, allowing us to have a little play and also eat some mango.

Did it occur to me that the guys were very dark-skinned? Of course it did! Wouldn’t you notice four tall black guys, especially dressed in such bright colours, in an otherwise white room? Goes without saying, I think. Did I think anything of their skin colour beyond the very fact of it being what it was? Not at all. I took them as I found them and glad I did, because they proved to be interesting and talented people.

Now of course, kids aren’t immune to racism. On occasion, even I heard the odd racist sentiment. The ill-informed sweeping statements and “send ’em back” sentiments, but because I thought for myself, I came to the conclusion “How can you judge people you’ve never met? That’s not right”, and that’s how I’ve always been. When I got to secondary school and there was a Portuguese biracial girl in our form group (homeroom for our American friends), of course it occurred to me that she was somewhat darker skinned, but again, there was nothing with that. No apprehension, no doubts, nothing. My first actual impression of her was about the way she looked, but it was her face rather than her skin. It was “She looks nice.” and though it may be asinine to make such a judgement based on looks, it proved to be true in this case.

After I read the book and I had time to chew it over, I came to a second conclusion about DiAngelo’s preconceptions and judgements, one that, if she really is legit, incredibly sobering — she’s much more prejudiced than my typically moderate, white British parents. Using Ms. DiAngelo’s “surprised to see a black man in a good job” example as a benchmark, my parents, who are far from the most progressive in the world, have never expressed surprise at something like that. When my mother’s recounted that the black male obstetrician who had to put his hand you-know-where when I was being delivered, she’s never shown any shock or rejection in the idea that a black man could be doing that job, only that another man put his hand up there! Similarly, they’re never remotely surprised to see a successful black businessman, doctor or otherwise.

Hell, I’ve even watched them express disgust and calling for the sacking of a white teacher who cut off the hair of a black child, and again, they’re far from the most “woke” people I know.

This is sobering because if Ms. DiAngelo really is the benchmark for racial progression in the USA, that is truly, very sad because it tells just how much further behind the country is compared to the rest of the world, and even the rest of the world isn’t nearly perfect in that regard either!