A Rich Seam Of Suckers
Matt Taibbi on Robin DiAngelo and her pernicious bestseller 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. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category. If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.”
DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.
As we’ve seen many times. For instance, here. And here. And here. And if that doesn’t sound quite Maoist enough, there’s more.
And Jonathan Church on the same:
[According to DiAngelo,] the two “master discourses” of Whiteness are “individualism” and “universalism.” White people have been “socialized” from the moment they were born to see themselves as individuals rather than as members of racial groups, and to believe in a universal humanity or human nature. All of this obscures the nature of “systemic racism,” making white people incapable of seeing how they constantly reinstate and reinforce white supremacy with virtually every word they say, or do not say. That’s right. Even if you remain silent in inter-racial dialogue, maybe because you want to shut up and listen or because you are shy and prefer one-on-one interactions rather than the hurly-burly of groups, you are making a “move” of Whiteness which keeps you complicit in the preservation of white supremacy.
Readers who doubt the stupefying effects of Dr DiAngelo’s racial woo should note the number of replies to Mr Church in which his article is dismissed out of hand, triumphantly, by devotees of Dr DiAngelo, as the work of a white person displaying “white fragility,” and therefore invalid by default. As noted here recently, it seems we will purge the world of bigotry by embracing wholesale the mental habits of the bigot.
Have you noticed that Robin DiAngelo is getting lots of flack, whereas other race-hustlers like Ibram X Kendi, Ta-Nehesi Coates, and Layla F Saad aren’t getting any? It’s almost as if nobody dares criticise a Person of Color, whereas lily-white Robin has the privilege of being attacked from all sides.
Have you noticed that Robin DiAngelo is getting lots of flack, whereas other race-hustlers like Ibram X Kendi, Ta-Nehesi Coates, and Layla F Saad aren’t getting any?
Certainly much less. It’s a telling dynamic, one that’s reinforced by DiAngelo’s own blatherings, of course.
Not that I have any great sympathy for DiAngelo. She’s a grifter, a glorified conspiracy theorist, and possibly unwell. She’s yet another peddler of pretentious ethno-masochism tailored to the unhappy mental tics of pale progressives. That this queen of Kafkaesque question-begging has flourished, so rapidly and lucratively – $12,000 a pop for two hours of inanity – probably tells us something about the state of academia and the culture of our self-imagined betters. Such that this ludicrous woman, this L Ron Hubbard of wokeness, has been sought out and employed by everyone from Amazon to Seattle public schools.
’..L Ron Hubbard of wokeness…’
/applause
Not that I have any great sympathy for DiAngelo.
Would never have guessed. 🙂
……and now meet our teaching staff.
and now meet our teaching staff.
That sound you hear is dark laughter.
dark laughter.
Racist!
You see, it’s the really, really smaaaart people who hate themselves. The way that you can tell that they’re smart is because they hate themselves. Smart people understand this logic.
The problem I have with calling this Kafkatrapping is Kafka (K or whatever his character’s name was) never seemed happy about his predicament. But look at all the happy, smiling faces of the white people holding up that book. Though in a sense I do get it. Over the last couple of months when I’ve awoken to find yet again that I failed to turn into a giant bug overnight and must continue on in this supposedly higher life form, I am a bit disappointed.
But look at all the happy, smiling faces of the white people holding up that book.
Oddly enough, the thing that came to mind was seeing hostage videos.
Or perhaps not oddly at all.
Here’s the utterly charming, not-at-all-pompous, anti-racist Green Party councillor and (hopefully) soon-to-be-arrested Ian Driver, striving to be less white.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/493284-west-self-hatred-humza-yousaf-scotland-facts-feelings/
soon-to-be-arrested Ian Driver
He seems to be a classic small town crank. If it wasn’t race it would be rights of way, or licensing or something…
Scottish Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf
I fully support his attempts to decolonise Scotland and encourage all BAME Brits who hate the white oppressor to immediately move to Scotland in order to fight the good fight. I might even chuck in a few quid to help them on their way.
You know what they call this kind of grift in Ruritania?
Robbin’ The Anglo. 🙂
Robbin’ The Anglo. 🙂
Fetch his coat, someone. And matches.
soon-to-be-arrested Ian Driver
One must appreciate the mental gymnastics required to write this conclusion: “Peaceful direct action such as…the destruction and defacing of offensive statues and memorials has always been…a legitimate part of protest.”
There’s just nothing quite so peaceful as smashing things that other people wrongly appreciate.
This sorry tale of a yoga business cowed into closure after 19 years is just incredible:
https://coloradosun.com/2020/06/29/kindness-yoga-closure-during-black-lives-matter/
They did everything right, but in the end they couldn’t keep you with the constantly-changing demands of their woke BIPOC employees. They were accused of “performative activism” and “tokenization of Black and brown bodies” and the mob came for them.
It’s an amazing read. I’d love to hear what you make of it, David.
Sorry – “keep up with the constantly-changing demands”
Need to learn to read what I write before I hit ‘post’!
Oh, and I forgot to mention the connection to your post:
The owner of the yoga studio in question (or should I say ‘former yoga studio’) is attempting to demonstrate his contrition and willingness to change by reading – you’ve guessed it! – ‘White Fagility’
I’d love to hear what you make of it, David.
I don’t have time to parse it, but I suppose the lesson is pretty obvious. Recognise your enemies and their twisted psychology, and don’t play the games that your enemies have chosen. You can’t win. And won’t win. Because that’s the whole point.
[ Added: ]
It isn’t about credible grievance or a desire for understanding. There’s no good-faith accommodation to be had, no mutual respect, however much you twist and contort, and piss all over yourself. Just perpetual deference and the threat of more. It’s a game of spite and domination.
See also this.
You can’t win. And won’t win. Because that’s the whole point.
Exactly. The game is rigged.
She’s a grifter, a glorified conspiracy theorist, and possibly unwell.
She is a purveyor of hooks and barbs aimed at soft, fuzzy minds. Throughout history we see time and again her kind, at every scale and selling a breed of thought that never ends well.
“… here we have a senior member of the Scottish Nationalist Party and Scottish Government apparently complaining that Scotland is full of native Scots.”
It’s been obvious for years that the Nationalists can’t bloody stand Scotland. As I always say, if they love it so much, why do they want to change everything?
And while I’m loath to praise anything from RT, “Anger has ripped down many things; rarely has it built anything to replace them” is absolutely spot-on. As Roger Scruton put it, more verbosely:
Sadly, there are precious few “mature people” in public life these days.
Need to learn to read what I write before I hit ‘post’!
I feel your pain.
One instructive passage from the yoga article:
Abraham, who moved to Colorado from Eritrea in 1982 and began practicing at Kindness in 2001, said he never experienced racism at Kindness. “As a Black person, I have been asking this myself the last few days: How come I never felt it? How come I never experienced it?”
When your “racism” is only noticed by young Angry Studies majors, I think you can sleep soundly at night knowing that you’re not the one with a racism problem.
Also, having been part of a company that expanded to too many sites, leaving no capital reserve for riding out any difficulties, I gotta say that the Instagram dumpster fire may have been the last straw for the yoga company, but I don’t think it was the only factor.
The comments under Taibbi’s and Church’s articles are profoundly depressing, the vast majority of them springing the Kafkatrap.
But what I’d like to know is where do these idiots think this is leading? What’s the endgame? Clearly it’s not a world in which all people live together in peace and harmony, because that’s “white” apparently. So what is it? A world in which they’re categorized at birth, and are treated differently according to that categorization? A world in which one’s background is studied in obsessive detail to determine one’s precise “race”, a return to the days of quadroons and octoroons, only with more “sensitive” names? Official documents stating one’s “race”, to be produced for every transaction? Because that sounds a hell of a lot like Nazi Germany or Apartheid South Africa to me.
How the hell are people falling for this unmitigated bullshit? Taibbi nails it in his final sentence: “It’s almost like someone thinks there’s a benefit to keeping people divided”.
How the hell are people falling for this unmitigated bullshit?
There’s a high to be had in browbeating, leverage and petty, if inventive, malice. For some, it’s quite intoxicating and its own reward.
OT, but how welcome. An organisation with an actual spine: https://www.civicart.org/national-civic-art-society-statement-on-the-removal-and-vandalization-of-public-statues
But what I’d like to know is where do these idiots think this is leading? […] How the hell are people falling for this unmitigated bullshit?
Why does a junky keep poisoning themselves, and returning to those who’ve sold them poison, even long after the consequences have become obvious?
the Instagram dumpster fire may have been the last straw for the yoga company, but I don’t think it was the only factor.
Given the owner’s absence for three years and the PWYW Business model, I concur. Kung Flu was the more likely culprit, as most businesses of any kind can’t weather three months of zero revenue.
Interesting how the Kindness employee who seems to be at the center of this didn’t notice her boss’s horrible racism till she was getting ready to open her own yoga business.
But what I’d like to know is where do these idiots think this is leading?
For the ideologues behind this thinking, the end game is power and control. They’re adrenaline junkies who get off on a permanent revolutionary state. They neither know nor care to know what kind of world lies on the other side. They believe that they will be the politburo, the dictatorship of the proletariat. They don’t really have a blueprint for wielding that power. The wielding of power alone is what they live for.
At this stage, it attracts the sociopaths among us who get off on tormenting those around them. For those types it is a legitimized outlet for their antisocial, antihuman tendencies. They’re the bullies from the school yard and worse they’re the quiet ones who seethed and were resentful of everything and everyone around them but had no outlet of expression until now.
“What a piece of work is man…”
I’m just finishing reading this book (reviewing it for victorygirlsblog tomorrow). It’s a 169 page Kafka trap. However, I actually think it’s important to read because by the end you understand the DiAngelo doesn’t really believe a word she’s saying. This is schtick for the race rubes. This is money to be made over a Leftwing induced moral panic. She shamelessly plagarizes Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, Peggy McIntosh’s risible list of “white privilege” markers and has turned it into a thriving business.
White people have been “socialized” from the moment they were born to see themselves as individuals rather than as members of racial groups, and to believe in a universal humanity or human nature.
Is she a standard-issue race grifter, a standard-issue communist, or both?
Let’s begin with the important premise that she’s lying. Specifically she’s projecting in service of studiously ignoring a very uncomfortable reality. This entity that’s always described in ephemeral language – White Supremacy – already had a term: culture. To point out that white culture is responsible for individualism is a Marxist setup conditioning people to collectivism. However, to also claim that “universal humanity” is also a wyt debil trick is to compliment white culture to nearly everyone, at least on the subconscious level. They do this a lot as David has selflessly noted over the years.
In other words a foreign “other” culture that you find impossible to emulate (that’s the “white” in “white supremacy”) that is self-admittedly better than your culture by every conceivable measure (there’s the “supremacy” bit). A lot of the dissonance seems to come from constantly trumpeting how well white people are doing while simultaneously claiming that theirs is the inferior culture.
My guess, she’s just a typical commie who finds race to be the most effective wedge for the least amount of effort.
How the hell are people falling for this unmitigated bullshit?
Because our education system for the last 40 years has worked against students learning how to think clearly, let alone coherently debate ideas. You can’t be a victim of a Kafka trap unless you accept the basic premise — or as Ayn Rand describes it, the “sanction of the victims”. You accept the Left’s “social justice morality” so you end up apologizing for your own existence.
How many fingers, Winston?
Slightly OT but I highly recommend this interview from 1984 with a former KGB agent. He pretty much nails what has been going on for the last 50 years or more.
https://tinyurl.com/y8624xgs
as David has selflessly noted over the years.
[ Admires fingernails, licks own eyebrows. ]
Because our education system for the last 40 years has worked against students learning how to think clearly
Yes! And that’s the BEST case scenario. Many, many students are actively trained as proto-marxists and fed the fringe of the fringe left dogma.
It’s beyond time for the so-called silent majority to wake up to this, as all strategies to deal with the left are moot if you allow them to churn out enemies by the millions every year via the schools they completely control. But no, point out to a rock-ribbed Republican who “hates socialism” that the school system they support is socialist and watch the justification hamster wheel go WHHHHRRRRR.
It seems to me that a white person trying to act, think, or be less white only emphasizes their inescapable whiteness all the more. A cat cannot be less of a cat if it learns to bark. A moth disguised as tree bark is a moth and still prey to birds.
Old fashioned of me I guess but if I’m going to loathe myself it’s going to be for things I’ve thought or done not because someone has decided I should for the sake of their amour-propre.
How the hell are people falling for this unmitigated bullshit?
The $64,000 question (I’m old – so sue me).
Some interesting thoughts above, but my read on this is that we are seeing a long-evolving culture war between the elites and the proles over control of Democracy. Many of those who consider themselves to be intelligent and educated and fervently don’t want to end up on the side of the proles are desperately (and honestly) trying to climb aboard the fashionable ideology train.
Unfortunately they’re sacrificing their humanity and integrity to do so.
licks own eyebrows
With the back of your paw, how I picture it.
Interesting how the Kindness employee who seems to be at the center of this didn’t notice her boss’s horrible racism till she was getting ready to open her own yoga business.
That.
(Wouldn’t it be nice if one could just upvote stuff…)
DiAngelo doesn’t really believe a word she’s saying
Interesting, Darleen. Congratulations (or should that be commiserations?) on making it through the book!
Perhaps I will need to read your blog report, but in what way do you consider her to be dishonest? I would have said that she is genuinely racist and certainly believes in the inherent supremacy of whiteness and the need for it to be handicapped in the pursuit of an equitable colour utopia. I’m sure she’s not averse to making personal gains along the way either. But you think she doesn’t actually believe any of her shtick?
She shamelessly plagarizes Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
A single, white, mother of four, friend of mine was working her tail off to put all her kids through university. Her eldest daughter had to study this essay in one her classes. She was in the minority in the class but still found herself on the receiving end of criticism as the “prof” tried to make the lesson personal.
What really bothered the girl was the fact that she was sitting next to her black friend who grew up an only child in an 18,000 sq. ft. home in one of the toniest neighbourhoods in one of the toniest towns. Her father was chief of surgery and her mother was a radiologist. They had come from wealthy families in the Caribbean, had servants, and went to private schools. According to the “prof” she had nothing in her knapsack to unpack.
It opened my friend’s daughter’s eyes.
She shamelessly plagarizes Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, Peggy McIntosh’s risible list of “white privilege” markers
The nasty, sly old bag crops up in the second item here.
Actually, the first item isn’t entirely unrelated.
Also this, on Professor Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and “critical race theory.”
Our betters, remember.
Wouldn’t it be nice if one could just upvote stuff…
I believe there was some kind of website based around that principal? I wonder how that’s working out?
principle dammit 🙁
The nasty, sly old bag crops up in the second item here.
A bit harsh on her, but fair.
As I look around I’m continually reminded that America put a man on the moon with a population of 200 million and that today has a population of ~330 million.
That’s a lot of fat/cancer that could stand trimming
but in what way do you consider her to be dishonest?
The more I worked my way through the book, the more I came to believe that DiAngelo is like O’Brien in 1984. He’s not a Big Brother True Believer(tm) as he’s torturing Winston. The absurdities, lies, contradictions that must be believed is the province of those outside the Party Elite. O’Brien knows 2+2=4 and always will be, but that is irrelevant (even counter productive) to gaining power for power’s sake.
DiAngelo is only too happy and delighted to recount stories of her intervening with fragile whites and making sure they really do see 5 fingers.
DiAngelo is like O’Brien in 1984
Fair enough, thanks.
I don’t disagree, except that I’m not sure there really are any core principles to wokeism. It’s all about power (lefties project!) and performance. And she does both very well.
And she does both very well
Yep. And the best way to deal with her is not play her game according to her rules.
That Lionel Shriver piece from Sept 2018 sure holds up well. Per his thesis, I can say from experience that calling out a snowflake’s fragility as the thinly-disguised aggression it is makes for a powerful rhetorical tool. They’re just not used to being called out for their manipulative dishonesty, and holding a mirror to their noses and forcing them to see what nasty little shits they are often leads to spectacular tantrums.
“I did not hurt your feelings, nor anybody else’s. Your claims to the contrary make you and your friends look like infants who can’t handle a normal adult conversation. Between your belittling of everybody’s emotional strength and maturity, and your attempts to manipulate me into grovelling for forgiveness for no damn reason, your own behavior is worlds more offensive than anything I might have said.”
To this day, I’ve never had one offer me an apology for their attempted trickery. Just a lot of denial and insistence that I’m the only bad guy in the room. *sigh* Still, it’s a small victory just to be able to knock them off-balance, and most of them lack the skill to retake the initiative after.
Terry Crews, unperson:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/06/actor-terry-crews-we-must-ensure-blacklivesmatter-doesnt-morph-into-blacklivesbetter-receives-furious-responses/
…DiAngelo doesn’t really believe a word she’s saying.
I suspected as much as soon as I saw the words “former corporate consultant“.
… here we have a senior member of the Scottish Nationalist Party and Scottish Government apparently complaining that Scotland is full of native Scots.
DiAngelo is only too happy and delighted to recount stories of her intervening with fragile whites and making sure they really do see 5 fingers.
I think it’s important to remember that it wasn’t good enough for Winston to just see 5 fingers. He also had to truly love Big Brother. He was doomed either way, but by loving Big Brother he totally capitulates to the system and forfeits himself, his individuality, his soul if you will. Why DiAngelo ultimately fails, why all authoritarian, collectivist ideologues eventually fail, is that very few people can really love Big Brother.
Cancel culture strikes deep. In Montana. This coach was the coach of a friend’s son. By all accounts a good and decent man. This guy travelled hundreds of miles from Montana to Houston to visit her son when the kid was dying of cancer. Notice the requirements for him to be able to return to his job. Pathetic. Meanwhile Facebook moderators speak of taking up Iran’s bounty to kill the POTUS.
https://www.montanarightnow.com/missoula/darby-football-coach-suspended-for-one-year/article_816ef86a-bb1e-11ea-97ac-efd4f9167ee2.html
“To point out that white culture is responsible for individualism is a Marxist setup conditioning people to collectivism.”
Not the first time they’ve tried this trick. Liberation Theology pulls the same sleight-of-hand from the opposite direction asserting, essentially, that Christians are already collectivists.
“Because our education system for the last 40 years has worked against students learning how to think clearly, let alone coherently debate ideas. You can’t be a victim of a Kafka trap unless you accept the basic premise — or as Ayn Rand describes it, the ‘sanction of the victims’.”
Yes.
“Slightly OT but I highly recommend this interview from 1984 with a former KGB agent. He pretty much nails what has been going on for the last 50 years or more.”
See also the work of Anatoliy Golitsyn. I found out about him while I was contributing to the late lamented Counting Cats in Zanzibar, and I recall writing a post in which I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the guy. However, if he was a fantasist, he was a highly perceptive one. I’m still not sure if the “Long-Term Strategy” cooked up between the Soviets and ChiComs in the early ’60s (in which the Sino-Soviet split was a deliberate play to knock the West off-guard) is real, but everything I’ve seen over the last few years makes me wonder what would be different if it wasn’t.
“Individualism” and “universalism” have given us what freedoms we have, and are the only solvents to the injustices of racism and ethnic hatred which have yet been discovered. And yet, here we are, now.
Maybe they will find a statue of Frederick Douglass to destroy, to blot out an individualist and universalist. His Letter to his former “master” is great Fourth of July reading.
He said, of his escape from slavery:
“From that time, I resolved that I would some day run away. The morality of the act I dispose of as follows: I am myself; you are yourself; we are two distinct persons, equal persons. What you are, I am. You are a man, and so am I. God created both, and made us separate beings. I am not by nature bond to you, or you to me. Nature does not make your existence depend upon me, or mine to depend upon yours. I cannot walk upon your legs, or you upon mine. I cannot breathe for you, or you for me; I must breathe for myself, and you for yourself. We are distinct persons, and are each equally provided with faculties necessary to our individual existence. In leaving you, I took nothing but what belonged to me, and in no way lessened your means for obtaining an honest living. Your faculties remained yours, and mine became useful to their rightful owner. I therefore see no wrong in any part of the transaction.”
No one is a mere appendage of another, nor of a race. We are separate, individual.
Happy Fourth of July to you Americans, who still own yourselves, and haven’t yet given over your brains to the DiAngelos of the world! Guard your freedoms well.
“To point out that white culture is responsible for individualism is a Marxist setup conditioning people to collectivism.”
Not sure where I found this but I think this is precise, “The cure for racism is individualism, but the people who make a business of it have only collectivist solutions.”
Fun with headlines . . .
The anger and despair of Leicester residents sent to, er, Coventry
Well, at least it’s only 26 miles.
Such a mystery why Leicester has to go into lockdown. Truly, a puzzle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma:
DiAngelo doesn’t really believe a word she’s saying.
That would at least explain the routine incoherence and disregard for facts. As noted previously, in the comments following this,
Assuming, of course, anyone dared ask.
Per his thesis,
Lionel Shriver is a she-person. And I do like the line, “Progressives seem especially prone to disguise one feeling as another.”
“I suspected as much as soon as I saw the words “former corporate consultant“.”
She gives us real corporate consultants a bad name.
Such a mystery why Leicester has to go into lockdown.
I’ve noticed that the media don’t seem puzzled as to why Leicester was singled out for a surge in KungFlu, but I guess they just think it’s a random occurrence.
She gives us real corporate consultants a bad name.
Boxes of expired, softened fruit are available behind the bar. For a reasonable price.
[ Puts down plastic sheeting. ]
A solution to ‘the exhaustion of having to explain your Blackness’ (apparently):
https://t.co/FZsg01ijcI
“Half of you don’t even have a college education!”
https://twitter.com/wayotworld/status/1278235717349539840
Via Ed West (@EdWest) on Twitter
OT but This is shocking; and they wonder how any woman could possibly feel unsafe around ‘trans women’.
“Half of you don’t even have a college education!”
[ Swipes for today’s open thread. ]
Point comments that way.
Thanks, Nemo.
Lionel Shriver is a she-person.
I stand corrected, though I am reminded of the silliness of those demanding that publishers purchase manuscripts from authors of the correct skin tone, plumbing, and lifestyle choices. I guess some people can sense those characteristics through ink on paper, but I obviously lack such abilities.
Question for young DiAngelo: does “white fragility” imply “Italian fragility” too?
The Case of the Racist Dad
Benjamin Boyce discusses a live-streamed working business meeting of the New York City Community Education Council (CEC).
Words.
Cannot.
Express.
Enjoy!