Robin DiAngelo wrote a book entitled White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People to Talk About Racism. The book is, as you would expect, a collection of ridiculous statement that are cheerfully accepted by radical leftists, but ignore historical background in an effort to convince white people that we are all born racists. Even Rolling Stone Editor Matt Taibbi finds the book to be possibly the dumbest thing ever written. He points out that DiAngelo says there is nothing for whites to do but “strive to be less white,” and to deny that theory is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. Huh? Taibbi relates this to the ordeal by water used in the Middle Ages where a supposed witch was thrown into a river. If she drowned, she was not a witch. But if she floated, she was, and was promptly executed as a witch. It was superstitious nonsense then and DiAngelo’s book is nothing different today. Here are some of the quotes I found interesting in her book.
“You could not have had a conversation about women’s right to vote and men’s need to grant it without naming women and men.”
This is true, but does not necessarily pit men against women, which is her basic premise. That there are only two genders is something that conservatives, and most of the world, have long agreed, but it is not necessary to separate them into groups which are contending against one another. Certainly many men did not want women to vote. But that was not true of most men. The march of women for voting rights gained attention from men who simply had not considered that women would want to vote. Generations of the man as the protector and provider and the woman as the mother and homemaker were inbred and both men and women needed to rethink this tradition. That is what the marches did, but in the end, had men not said to themselves, “Oh, that makes sense!” women would still not be voting since it was men who had to give them the vote! DiAngelo, as do most liberals, totally ignores the historical background behind her arguments. Generations ago, even most men were uneducated and voting did not exist at all. Liberals like DiAngelo want to forcibly “build Rome in a day” when most change must be gradual if it is going to really work.
“Multiracial people may not be seen as “real” people of color or “real” whites.”
Then why was half African/half white American Barack Obama considered our first “black” president?
“I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color.”
This I agree with totally, though not for the reasons she explains. White progressives (Democrats) have systematically forced blacks onto Welfare and expanded it to the point that it seems more advantageous at least in the short term to remain on it. Thus blacks have ended up in poorly maintained housing in all-black neighborhoods with failing schools and no chance of advancement. Rescue is always promised by white progressives (Democrats), but never delivered after the black vote has once again put them into office. Examples: Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, Baltimore, and on and on.
“I repeat: stopping our racist patterns must be more important than working to convince others that we don’t have them. We do have them, and people of color already know we have them; our efforts to prove otherwise are not convincing.”
This woman’s argument is that if you are born black you are a victim and if you are born white you are a victimizer. If you are born white, you will succeed in life, but if you are born black you will fail. She is proven wrong by the facts. Whites who are poor and uneducated remain unsuccessful in life. Blacks who become educated and escape the morass white progressives have forced them into succeed. Opportunities for advancement are not provided through more free money, housing and food, but rather through education and job training. One liberal (progressive) professor argued that mathematics is racist. If this be the case, no black American can ever hope to understand mathematics or to enter any field of work that demands he/she use it. What nonsense! To suggest that one’s skin color automatically guides one’s thoughts and actions is as absurd as to suggest that one’s hair color guides one’s thoughts and actions. We have long since gone beyond the idea that all redheads have quick tempers and all blonds are dumb! Let us then accept that while I see your red hair or your blond hair or your black or white skin, it does not make me like or dislike you, promote or demote you because of it.
“The simplistic idea that racism is limited to individual intentional acts committed by unkind people is at the root of virtually all white defensiveness on this topic.”
Perhaps because the definition of racism is: prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group. Prejudice, discrimination and antagonism always manifest themselves in actions and/or words. Thus racism is not subconscious, ever-present, and inbred in every white person, nor is it simplistic to suggest that it is not. If I do not demonstrate prejudice, discrimination or antagonism against someone because of their racial or ethnic group, then I am not being racist. Period.
“Racism is the norm rather than an aberration.”
In many parts of the world this is true. Indeed, throughout history and across the world even today, groups of people discriminate against and even kill members of other ethnic or racial groups. But in the United States as in Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, racism is far less than in most countries of the world.
“Pause for a moment and consider the profundity of this message: we are taught that we lose nothing of value through racial segregation. Consider the message we send to our children—as well as to children of color—when we describe white segregation as good.”
I am sorry, but exactly who is taught that we lose nothing of value through racial segregation? Who believes that white segregation is good? Is DiAngelo still living in the 1950s? She certainly isn’t living in 2020! We have desegregation laws that are supposed to allow black and white children to attend the same schools. That they often don’t is because teachers’ unions lobby Democrats to prevent black parents from sending their children out of the poor black inner-city schools and into the mostly white suburban schools. Would some white parents object? Sure. Ask some of the white Democratic leaders which schools they send their children to and you will find that most of them are in private, all white or mostly white schools. They won’t even lower themselves to allow their children to rub shoulders in the classroom with less affluent white children, much less black children, yet like DiAngelo they lecture us on our racism!
“For those of us who work to raise the racial consciousness of whites, simply getting whites to acknowledge that our race gives us advantages is a major effort. The defensiveness, denial, and resistance are deep.”
Of course it is. Many of us “advantaged” whites grew up in relatively poor families, put ourselves through college after having made grades high enough to get in rather than simply being admitted due to our skin color, worked multiple jobs for years and skimped and saved to get where we are now. Many other whites, who did not have parents who pushed them to work hard, or who lived in areas of the country where their schools were insufficient to prepare them for either work or college, have remained poor. Explain to them how advantaged they are!
“It’s been said that racism is so American that when we protest racism, some assume we’re protesting America.”
Whoever supposedly said this is an idiot! Was it in the 1619 project, perhaps, that thoroughly historically inaccurate view of the founding of America? For example, the Revolutionary War was not fought so that the British could not stop slavery here. Great Britain did not abolish the slave trade until 1807 and did not effectively end it until 1811, long after we had won our independence! Racism is a human trait, but it is taught, not inherited, and America, among all countries in the world has done more to eradicate it and more swiftly that any other country except the former British colonies I mentioned previously. Great Britain herself abolished the slave trade, but not until after many hundreds of years of her history. The United States abolished slavery, not just the slave trade, less than 100 years after declaring independence from Great Britain and gaining control over her own governance. I think that is a pretty impressive feat!
“The United States was founded on the principle that all people are created equal. Yet the nation began with the attempted genocide of Indigenous people and the theft of their land. American wealth was built on the labor of kidnapped and enslaved Africans and their descendants.”
Again DiAngelo ignores or is unaware of history. Every country in the world engaged in slavery and many still do. Many, like the Romans, made forays into other countries regularly simply to capture and bring back slaves. Slave labor built the pyramids and many other great monuments around the world. As for the attempted genocide of Indigenous people and the theft of their land, that too was a common practice. The Saxons pushed the Angles off their lands in England and they did not do it peacefully. Germanic tribes surged into Gaul after the collapse of the Roman Empire. The Normans took control of England in 1066. The Israelites invaded the Canaan land and displaced or killed its inhabitants. This is simply how people migrated from area to area hundreds of years ago. To blame our early settlers for doing what every other expanding civilization in the world had done before them as if it is somehow something for which we and we alone are guilty is disingenuous at best.
As for calling the killing of Native Americans “genocide,” that is a bit far-fetched. Genocide is the killing of a large group of people, the eradication of them. This was not the aim of the United States. The government needed more land for the people who continued to come to America, and thus pushed Indigenous people off their lands and farther and farther west, eventually allotting areas that were to be theirs and on which white settlers could not encroach. The killing of Native Americans was most often in defense against attacks by them as they attempted to protect their native lands. It was, as has happened repeatedly in history, a clash of two civilizations in which the stronger eventually succeeded and the weaker was in part assimilated. While our young country could have handled expansion better, DiAngelo uses it as a weapon against white Americans, just another example of their racism, when it was in fact a normal historical event as people moved from one area to another.
Perhaps DiAngelo is unware of the fact that many wealthy and free blacks in the early years of this country owned black slaves themselves and those indigenous people also owned slaves, black, white, and indigenous from other tribes. DiAngelo’s aim is to prove a point that makes absolutely no sense and she ignores historical fact to do so.
I could go on and on, but I have bored you enough. Suffice it to say that this is NOT a book that I recommend that you read unless you have a mental suicide wish.