Either/Or

Robin DiAngelo Wants White Progressives to Look Inward | ⁦@IChotiner⁩ https://t.co/tXAmj2CdRn

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) July 14, 2021

 DiAngelo’s success was not entirely without controversy: critics claimed that her definition of “white fragility” was broad and reductive and that DiAngelo, who is white, condescended to people of color. Carlos Lozada, of the Washington Post, wrote, “As defined by DiAngelo, white fragility is irrefutable. . . . Either white people admit their inherent and unending racism and vow to work on their white fragility, in which case DiAngelo was correct in her assessment, or they resist such categorizations or question the interpretation of a particular incident, in which case they are only proving her point.” In The New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh wrote that DiAngelo “makes white people seem like flawed, complicated characters; by comparison, people of color seem good, wise, and perhaps rather simple. This narrative may be appealing to its target audience, but it doesn’t seem to offer much to anyone else.”

Admittedly I'm very either/or about this, but as a white person, I can do one of two things:  examine my own racism, which I'm likely to find is profound and disturbing; OR I can resist any such categorizations in any particular or general circumstance, and only prove the point about my racism I'm refusing to otherwise examine.  The option that this makes white people "flawed" and "complicated" is not meant to appeal to an audience; that's a secondary problem, that I am complex but the "other" is either evil or wise.  The flip side of racist animosity in America is still the "magical Negro."  Guess who came up with those categories?

Self-examination is not for the faint of heart.  You will note here, for instance, the insistence inherent in the question, that "racism" is a bad thing, and not all white people are "bad", ergo...

Your work starts from the premise that history and society have made all white people racist. But I was trying to figure out whether you were making a structural critique or offering structural solutions to racism, in part because so much of the book is about workshops.

The foundation of the United States is structural racism. It is built into all of the institutions. It is built into the culture, and in that sense we’ve all absorbed the ideology. We’ve all absorbed the practices of systemic racism, and that’s what I mean when I say we are racist. I don’t mean that individuals have conscious awareness of anti-Blackness, or that they intentionally seek to hurt people based on race. That’s not what I’m referring to when I make a claim like all white people are racist. What I mean is that all white people have absorbed racist ideology, and it shapes the way we see the world and the way we see ourselves in the world, and it comes out in the policies and practices that we make and that we set up.

And we've had this discussion before; but last time around we called it "affirmative action."  We had to get rid of that; it threatened to work:

What needs to change structurally?

Well, the homogeneity alone at the top guarantees that advantage would be built into those systems and structures by the people in the position to build them in. This doesn’t have to be conscious or intentional, but, if significant experiences and perspectives are missing from the table, they’re not going to be included. If a group of architects is around a table designing a building and all of them are able-bodied, they’re simply going to design a building that accommodates the way they move through the world. It’s not an intentional exclusion, but it will result in the exclusion of people who move differently.

You have to have multiple perspectives at those tables, and you can’t just take the additive approach, like, “Oh, well, we included some more diversity,” if you don’t also address power. That’s what I wanted to say. You can have policies that appear to be neutral, but, because we don’t account for just centuries of social discrimination, the impact of those policies will not be neutral. (emphasis added)

That part I emphasized?  We derided that as "tokenism."  Ask your grandfather; I'm sur he remembers.

Shit, this is a book I need to read:

Your book is a critique of individualism, by which you mean, as you put it, “Our identities are not separate from the white supremacist society in which we are raised, and our patterns of cross-racial engagement are not merely a function of our unique personalities.” What is the problem with individualism?

Individualism cuts the person off from the very society that the concept of individualism is valued in. That’s the great irony, right? If we were in a more community-oriented or collective-oriented society, we wouldn’t value being an individual the way that we do. We have been conditioned to see that as the ideal, that every one of us is unique and special and different, and if you don’t know somebody specifically you can’t know anything about them.

Of course, on one hand, that’s true, right? I don’t know everybody’s experience and life stories and so on, and we are also members of a social group. By virtue of our membership in this social group, we could literally predict whether you and I were going to survive our birth—and our mothers also. It’s like saying, you know, upon my birth, it was announced, “Female,” and then I have been completely exempt from any messages about what it means to be female. We wouldn’t say that, because we know that the moment I am pronounced female, an entire set of deep cultural conditioning is set into place.

I don’t think anybody would say, “My gender has had no influence whatsoever on my life.” When it comes to race, we want to take ourselves out of any kind of collective experience. These are observable, describable, measurable patterns. Does every single person fit every pattern? Of course not, but there is a rule that the exception of course makes visible. 

We'll end with the anecdote that proves you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him think:

You have many scenes throughout the book of you talking to people at workshops, and sometimes they get contentious. You write that after one training session two people, “a white woman, ‘Sue,’ who had been sitting next to a white man, ‘Bob,’ approached me and declared, ‘Bob and I think we should all just see each other as individuals.’ Although in my work, moments like this occur frequently, they continue to disorient me on three interconnected levels. First, I had just gone over, in depth, what was problematic about individualism as a means to ‘end racism.’ How could Sue and Bob have missed that forty-five-minute presentation?” In several of the scenes you get annoyed or frustrated with people for not getting the point of what you’re saying. Is there a tension between seeing white people as irredeemably racist and fragile, and also thinking that the best way to change their consciousness is to berate them a little bit in these group settings?

I’m explaining. I don’t know that I’m berating at that point. It’s, like, “O.K., let me help you understand why that is actually a problematic response. Let me break it down for you and explain.” I’m an educator, right? So I want you to understand what that does, how that functions in the conversation. Having just laid that out, yes, I do continue to feel frustrated, because I do have an expectation that people will have some insight or at least some food for thought. When it’s framed as “We think this,” as if they actually didn’t hear any part of it, as if they have no sense that I have a different take on it and that take might have some weight or some value in relation to theirs, that does throw me off. There is a kind of scratching of the head that happens. You would think at this point I would be used to it, but not always. 

We don't need no education; we don't need no thought control.

The proper response to an analysis of racism in America is not “I’m not part of the problem” or “You’re analysis is flawed!” The proper response is self-examination.

As I said, self-examination is hard.