‘White Fragility’ and Robin DiAngelo, the Final Boss of White Women
Where to begin with White Fragility? It’s one of the most talked about titles of our current moment, having rocketed up the NYT’s best seller list, exploring one of the most complex, charged topics of our time.
And that’s a shame, because despite detailing a very real phenomenon, White Fragility is easily the most pernicious and misguided book I’ve read in years. It turns racism into an odd combination of original sin, mental illness, and biological determinism. It pathologizes a regular human response to what can be a career destroying accusation. Its underlying philosophy is racist in and of itself, towards both white people and especially POC. I would go so far as to say that the advice it gives with regard to race relations is downright harmful.
Is She Wrong Though?
The central concept DiAngelo explores is ‘white fragility,’ drawing upon decades of experience running diversity seminars. White fragility, according to DiAngelo’s definition, is when a white person rejects their complicity in white supremacy, typically in a diversity training setting. Fundamentally, to exhibit white fragility is to become defensive when someone accuses you of exhibiting racist behaviour.
In addition, DiAngelo believes that it’s impossible for white people to fully disconnect themselves from participation in white supremacy. All white people are racist, by default.
Along with a host of other dangerous ideas that I’ll get into, in DiAngelo’s world there is no defeating your biases. Her white diversity training subjects will never truly be cured of the disease of racism, simply because of who they are. They must continue going to implicit bias training until the day they die, and even then, they won’t really have redeemed themselves. It’s a convenient stance for someone who makes a living selling diversity seminars, and carries obvious allusions to a religious call to action.
White fragility as a concept also functions as a built-in defence mechanism against claims that DiAngelo’s diversity trainings are needlessly confrontational, simplistic, and ineffective. Her approach to this book and her wider career is actually kind of genius; you can’t refute it, because if you don’t like it, you’re a racist.
I’ll say that I believe that white fragility, in both diversity trainings and regular social settings, is a real phenomenon. It requires a very specific set of circumstances to be true, yes, but it does happen. DiAngelo states that “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”. I agree with this. Many (but not all) of the people that DiAngelo recounts in the book are indeed exhibiting these tendencies.
Many white people do not like being called out on their latent racist beliefs, or the ways in which their lives have benefitted from systemic inequity despite not having built that system themselves. In doing so, they commonly reveal problematic ways of thinking that has hurt other people. I might not use the word “fragile” to characterize this behaviour, but still. There’s a lot of shame involved with racism — it’s a profoundly shameful act — and people are naturally defensive when they’re accused of doing something shameful. We live in a society with structural racism that benefits various groups, but in general the human brain isn’t set up to immediately recognize these structures.
It’s good that we’re confronting our biases on a large scale, and were DiAngelo to simply detail these diversity training experiences, the book would be useful. But she goes way, way beyond that.
But of Course, You *Would* Say That…
Conveniently under DiAngelo’s reasoning, as a white person critically reviewing this book, I am exhibiting my own white fragility. Thus, my criticisms of the idea are bad faith arguments. DiAngelo has created a concept that is structurally immune from criticism.
This is not how sociological terms like this are supposed to work. It’s structured in a way that makes it impossible for the accused to refute it. The entire concept is circular and non-falsifiable. It’s the logic that’s used to convict people of witchcraft, not confront white supremacy.
According to DiAngelo, you either accept that you’re a racist, or you fight against the label, which just proves that you’re even more of a racist and fragile to boot. There is no way out.
But yet, it’s natural to defend yourself when accused of such a serious accusation. And yes, calling someone racist is an accusation. ‘Racist’ isn’t a label you can throw around casually. It’s a word that has the power to destroy entire careers. It’s one of the worst things you can be. People naturally do not like racists.
The higher ups at the company I work for have declared that if I am a racist, they will fire me (fair enough). Yet they’ve also explicitly endorsed this book, which says that I’m a racist already. So which is it? What happens to this term when these two realities exist simultaneously?
And it’s this specious reasoning, and the other logical leaps it requires, that drives White Fragility from being enlightening to profoundly misguiding. ‘White’ is a constantly shifting social construction, defining a group with no set boundaries or verifiable demographic estimates. Yet DiAngelo ignores these nuances. She’s all about ‘the white people,’ completely flattening the complexities of personal identity and indicting everyone who might be caught within this racial category, which is, whether they like it or not, the most important determinant of their identity.
New Stereotypes
Importantly, every white person in DiAngelo’s world is a secret right wing hick. According to her, the “glee” that white people felt when they witnessed a lynching is the same as the “curious satisfaction” the ‘white collective’ feels when they view the mass incarceration of Black people, and the “joy” they feel when they see blackface or Black people being represented by apes.
This is a grotesque and unfair characterization of modern white people. It is, frankly, racist. White Fragility is practically defined by its negative generalizations of white people. DiAngelo’s writing lines up perfectly with the world views of people who hold seriously racist attitudes towards white people, only it’s her, a white person, who is articulating them.
On that same note, the book is full of dubious statements (read: stereotypes) about white people that should require substantive evidence, but are instead offered as truisms. Almost everything that DiAngelo talks about derives from anecdotal experiences in diversity seminars, not sociological studies. She says things like “all white people are socialized to fundamentally hate blackness” and “anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities”. Highly provocative claims, which should require evidence in the form of studies or statistics to back them up in an empirical way. DiAngelo offers none. We are expected to simply agree with these charged assertions about a racial group. Besides racially categorizing the US Congress and various sport teams, DiAngelo rarely cites empirical studies confirming what she says, especially with regard to the ways various groups ‘really feel’ about something.
Robin’s Guide to Race Relations
DiAngelo falls for the common problem among left wing white people wherein POC are treated as a monolith. They are not. They’re not all left wing, they don’t all believe the same things, and they cannot be collectivized the way she believes they can be. Some of the best critiques of this book have come from non-white reviewers (Carlos Lozda in the Washington Post, Kelefa Sanneh in The New Yorker, and Thomas Chatterton Williams in The American Scholar) calling out her way of viewing the world. What does that say?
Yet DiAngelo constructs a universe where there are really only two types of people: white people, and everyone else. That’s it. They’re extremely different, will never truly understand or form connections with one another, and inhabit a universe whose racial dynamics will never change. We are fundamentally incapable of judging each on based on the content of each other’s character. And if you think you’re getting along well with non-white people, white person, you actually aren’t. They all secretly think differently behind your back.
This is, of course, a horribly corrosive way to conduct race relations. It encourages a form of racial essentialism. DiAngelo’s general method of analysis will not help people get along. It’s how you resolidify white identity, not undermine it. It’s how you encourage white people to think of themselves as besieged and alone, increasingly surrounded by people who secretly dislike them. The fact that this way of viewing the world is being valourized is alarming, because as citizens of racially diverse countries we have an important duty to form a collective identity that must purposefully not focus on race — a national identity.
If I believed what DiAngelo says on this point (I don’t), why would I want to be friends with non-white people if this is what they really think of me? And why would they want to be friends with me? Why would we ever open ourselves up to one another if our differences are so irreconcilable? This logic will make you needlessly suspicious of non-white people, and vice versa.
But I Love Black People!
Indeed, it’s clear that DiAngelo is certainly suspicious of what non-white people think of her. She’s devoted her entire life to interrogating her feelings on this subject. DiAngelo strikes me as the kind of white woman who, behind all the woke veneer, is afraid of non-white people, especially Black people. She’s that white woman in your life who has an aggressively active anti-racist social media presence, but still can’t help clutching your arm when you walk by a group of Black people at a bus stop. This is seen most clearly with DiAngelo’s recounting of the BBQ in the park, where the possibility of (gasp) joining a group of Black people arises a primal fear in her. She openly admits to harbouring racist thoughts in this passage, and naturally assumes that all white people must share these feelings.
It’s astounding, the amount of projection this book contains. The neuroticism and narcissism that oozes from its pages. White Fragility reads like an inadvertent psychological study of a white woman who is so pathologically afraid of POC that she came up with a special term, white fragility, just to rationalize that fear. Only not just rationalize it, shame the rest of us into believing that we all secretly feel the same way she does.
You get the impression that Robin hasn’t had a single normal interaction with a Black person in her entire life. Despite claiming that she has friends who are Black — where have we heard that before? — the stories she recounts of interactions with Black people all have an odd tension to them. Every conversation has a stilted, HR Hell-like awkwardness to it. The passages about her apology to a Black web developer especially come to mind. I get the feeling that DiAngelo has very little real life experiences of having multiracial friend groups, or dating someone of a different race.
Ironically, the book is full of paternalism and implicit condescension towards non-white people. POC are almost entirely powerless in DiAngelo’s world, and seem to exist purely as simple racialized beings for the complex, flawed white people to examine their faults against. Not as whole people with a complex array of identities, oppressions, and privileges. Their entire destiny is tied to whatever white people allow them to do.
The Problem of Language
Related to the vague Human Resources-centred worldview that she wants us to live our lives by, much of DiAngelo’s language about what we’re supposed to do about our whiteness is slippery, confusing, and pseudo-intellectual. When it comes time to get some answers on how to actually fix the problem of racism, the book goes nowhere. It devolves into a soup of academic jargon and bizarre virtue signalling.
DiAngelo claims that her goal is to be ‘less white’. Now, does that sound odd coming from someone who is white and who will never not be ‘white’? “To be less white is to break with white silence and white solidarity, to stop privileging the comfort of white people”. Sentences like this (and there are a lot of them) make little sense to people outside of the niche subset of academia that studies ‘whiteness’. What does ‘stop privileging the comfort of white people’ mean? What does it mean to be ‘uncomfortable’? Who decides what’s acceptably uncomfortable and what isn’t? What does ‘white solidarity’ mean?
DiAngelo has an endlessly expanding repertoire of phrases that preface a given behaviour with ‘white,’ which the reader is expected to immediately understand the meanings and implications of. White silence, white solidarity, white comfort — these terms are highly subjective and lack universally understood definitions. And like ‘white fragility,’ are commonly applied in a hostile or bad faith way.
These passages are based on the premise that there’s an agreed upon definition of ‘whiteness’ that’s somehow distinct from the concept of literally being a white person, when in reality there is not.
In fact, what even is ‘whiteness’? Is it adherence to European culture and customs? Is it the refusal to confront a racist system? Is it to simply be of European descent? For DiAngelo, it’s just about anything that can make a white person seem bad in a given context. Being polite in a charged conversation? Whiteness. Belief in the value of objectivity? Whiteness. Belief in individualism? White supremacy. Since whiteness doesn’t have a real definition, it can be attached to any behaviour, and override all other considerations. But in all cases, it’s used as a pejorative. You’re supposed to feel bad about it. What if I don’t feel bad about it?
Whiteness is a thing that as white people, we’re all supposed to be leaving behind while at the same time it’s inescapable. We will never not be white. We just have to fight against it, and feel bad about it, forever.
Similarly, DiAngelo never conclusively defines ‘racism’ in the book. She just chooses to be endlessly deferential to whatever non-white people say it is, regardless of how unworkable those definitions collectively become. I get the impression that at a basic level, she is personally incapable of pushing back against anything a non-white person says.
For DiAngelo, POC are full of knowledge that cannot be questioned or challenged under any circumstances. Lived experience is prized above all else. There is a very real need to take seriously the perspectives and stories of people who have experienced oppression, but DiAngelo takes this idea too far, and comes across as patronizing. Sometimes non-white people are just wrong or misguided about things, because they’re full human beings.
The Trainings
DiAngelo’s inability to view people as individuals as opposed to members of immutable collectives brings me to yet another bad aspect of this book: the total lack of empathy that she affords her white, primarily female diversity training subjects in her anti-bias trainings. It goes without saying that DiAngelo has zero class analysis when it comes to power and privilege and everyday life, yet she also manages to gloss over the very real workplace power dynamics that take place in modern diversity seminars, and the stress that comes with them.
DiAngelo is completely bewildered that after all these years, white people still resent being hauled into her seminars and be called racist in front of their coworkers. She takes particular issue with white women who end up crying during these experiences. It’s horrible of these women to show such emotions in these settings, DiAngelo says, regardless of how needlessly uncomfortable they’ve been made to feel. She goes so far as to invoke the memory Emmit Till, a Black teenager who was lynched because he said the wrong thing to a white woman who reacted emotionally about it. It’s such a disproportionate and unfair comparison, and speaks volumes about the uncomfortable atmosphere of these trainings.
In another weird bout of paternalism towards Black people, she says that a white woman’s tears — even in a diversity training setting — initiates a kind of fight or flight response within Black people present and becomes a matter of ‘life and death’ for them. I simply do not believe this. I do not believe that Black people are really that uncomfortable, or dare I say, fragile, when faced with a white woman crying in a diversity seminar. Annoyed and awkward maybe, but not terrified.
Worse still, DiAngelo talks about how when she wants to cry in these situations (which apparently happens frequently), she goes into a corner and cries silently so as not to ‘centre herself’ and ‘bother’ the non-white people present. This is so odd to picture. I cringe at it.
Who is This Book For?
White Fragility perfectly encapsulates the kind of narcissistic and performative mode of thinking that many left leaning, well-off white people hold. The kind of white people who live and breathe social justice, but have suspiciously few non-white friends. It posits that the key to solving problems of racial inequality is to endlessly pontificate about the minute aspects of your thoughts and attitude. And that somehow your behaviour, not that of say, the unironic racist down the street or Mitch McConnell, inflicts the most damage on POC on a daily basis. It is truly the ultimate manifestation of this misguided philosophy. For a book that highlights structural racism, it argues that racism is a personal problem, centring the individual, not the system.
There’s nothing radical about this book, and it gives little advice about pursuing real, tangible action. It simply encourages a form of emotional self flagellation. To naval gaze and feel bad about who you are. To enjoy the catharsis brought on by your white guilt. To be open about how much you hate the perpetually incorporeal concept of ‘whiteness,’ and dive into the often times confusing world of ‘whiteness studies’.
It’s shocking how oblivious DiAngelo is to how ineffective and counterproductive her worldview and diversity training strategies are. Yet this is the woman who we’re supposed to be listening to to solve racism. Much has been written about whether or not anti bias training have any effect at all, and may even be counter productive. This book certainly makes me believe that it isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do. If you want to actually learn about racism, read The Wretched of the Earth and Racecraft. Both much better books. Both written by POC.
