#Peddling the idea that ‘all white people are racist’ for profit

The wholesale intellectual fraud that is “white fragility” has so infested our culture that Oprah Winfrey, the world’s first female black billionaire, is criticizing America as hopelessly and intractably racist.

For this we can thank the white liberal academic Robin DiAngelo, whose book “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism” — first published in 2018 by a small press — has become a textbook of liberal orthodoxy and a totem of radical chic.

DiAngelo’s thesis: All white Americans are racist. All white Americans are a product of white supremacy and are actively or unwittingly complicit in maintaining this power structure. If you say you are not racist, that is only proof that you are racist. If you believe you are not racist, same thing. Black people exist in America only to be oppressed by whites. In DiAngelo’s worldview, any progress black Americans have made is because white Americans have allowed such growth as pacifiers.

She conveniently has no answer to this most terrible problem, but since DiAngelo’s business model is predicated on racism as unfixable, this is a cynical and wonderful outcome for her. So the only thing for a racist white liberal to do is buy “White Fragility” (which has made her a reported $2 million so far) or hire her for diversity training (anywhere from $30,000-$40,000 for a few hours) — as major corporations from Levi’s to Amazon to Goldman Sachs have done, with little to no actual diversity in top-level jobs resulting.

DiAngelo, in her earnest, infuriating, Goopy, Pacific-Northwest-liberal-way, can only offer prescriptions to us white racists as: “Breathe. Listen. Reflect . . . Take the time you need to process your feelings.”

This, in short, is everything that’s wrong with her book: It’s all about privileged white people. It not only doesn’t see blacks, it doesn’t explore the black experience in America in any meaningful way. Instead DiAngelo degrades the legacies of the few black icons she briefly invokes. Her book is actually deeply racist — blacks barely exist here. It’s all about white privilege and pain, but I suppose, in the funhouse-mirror logic a trickster like DiAngelo employs, this only makes sense.

DiAngelo on Jackie Robinson:

“Robinson is often celebrated as the first African American to break the color line and play in major league baseball . . . 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. Imagine if instead, the story went something like this: Jackie Robinson, the first black man whites allowed to play in major league baseball.’”

Yes, how much better and more accurate to strip Robinson of not just his courage, fortitude, athleticism and dignity but his legacy as a nonviolent civil rights activist who became the first black television color commentator for Major League Baseball, a key figure in founding the black-owned Freedom National Bank in Harlem, and the first black vice president of a major company — a beloved American hero.

DiAngelo on Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech:

“One line of King’s speech in particular — that one day he might be judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin — was seized upon by the white public because the words were seen to provide a simple and immediate solution to racial tensions: pretend that we don’t see race, and racism will end. Color blindness was now promoted as the remedy for racism, with white people insisting that they didn’t see race or, if they did, that it had no meaning to them.”

DiAngelo’s perversion of King’s original meaning is immoral and disgusting.

As for Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, Marco Rubio, Barack Obama? “They support the status quo,” DiAngelo writes, “and do not challenge racism in any way significant enough to be threatening.”

To cite other prominent, influential black leaders who dominate American politics and culture — from Michelle Obama (the most admired woman in America in 2019, according to Gallup) to LeBron James to Beyoncé to Jay-Z, Michael Jordan, #MeToo founder Tarana Burke, Serena Williams, Susan Rice, Condoleezza Rice, Chris Rock, Rihanna, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Ryan Coogler, Stacey Abrams, Tiger Woods, Virgil Abloh, Spike Lee, Chadwick Boseman, Colson Whitehead, Pharrell, Stephen Curry, Donald Glover, Issa Rae, Janet Mock, Bryant Gumbel, Tiffany Haddish, Simone Biles, Dave Chappelle, Kanye West, Jacqueline Woodson, Colin Kaepernick, Viola Davis, Lester Holt, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Meghan Markle, Samuel L. Jackson (highest-grossing actor ever), the late Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna, both subjects of deep national mourning — would negate DiAngelo’s dangerous, bulls—t thesis that America values only whiteness in thought, leadership and culture.

“To put it bluntly,” she writes, “I believe that the white collective fundamentally hates blackness for what it reminds us of: that we are capable and guilty of perpetrating immeasurable harm and that our gains come through the subjugation of others. We have a particular hatred for ‘uppity’ blacks, those who dare step out of their place and look us in the eye as equals.”

In DiAngelo’s uncompromising opinion, America has an incurable birth defect. And you fevered white liberals rending your garments, taking her workshops, launching deep internal investigations into your own racism — DiAngelo considers you, her customers and cult members, the worst offenders of all. Part of the white liberal motive in attending her seminars, she told the New York Times, was so “they can say they heard Robin DiAngelo speak.”

Wow.

Let me say it again: If anyone is racist here, it’s Robin DiAngelo. She peddles the kind of sophomoric, solipsistic, illogical crap on par with “The Secret,” another pop-culture phenomenon brought to us by Oprah and one positing that getting what you want is a matter of wishing hard enough.

Consider that DiAngelo promotes the idea, taught by other racial-sensitivity groups and outlined on the African-American History Museum’s website, that traits such as self-reliance, independence, hard work, rational thinking, planning for the future and delaying gratification, being on time, having a love for the written tradition, proper use of language and politeness all belong to white culture and are used to keep black Americans down.

While reading “White Fragility,” I also came across a reprint of a 2003 profile of the late author Toni Morrison in The New Yorker. “Being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from,” Morrison said. “It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it. It’s richer than being a white male writer because I know more and I’ve experienced more.”

DiAngelo would no doubt have told Morrison — a genius, an American original, Pulitzer winner for fiction and Nobel Prize Winner for Literature — that she was delusional. After all, DiAngelo’s philosophy would tar Morrison as a traitor to her race for embodying such inherently white values, ones that don’t come easily to blacks and therefore keep them at sociocultural, legal and economic disadvantages.

Now that’s a theory David Duke could love.

One of my favorite metrics for how out-of-touch The New York Times has become is their reader comments section. It’s amazing to see their paying readership grow increasingly apostate, especially in response to a recent and lengthy profile of DiAngelo.

Of 1,125 comments, here’s reader favorite No. 1, from someone named Itunu:

“I’m a Nigerian living in Senegal, and I suppose living in a place where everyone looks like me is a privilege in itself. So perhaps my critique is colored by this privilege, but I must admit that I’m deeply offended by some of the claims of her training. Rationality and writing are ‘white values’? Is anyone else seeing how condescending and disempowering it is to be told that our fate as black people rests in white people finally deciding to change their ways? Jackie Robinson was ‘allowed’ to play. What about: Jackie Robinson fought and won his struggle to play. Let’s fight for greater equality without upholding and rehashing racist tropes and stereotypes.”

Reader favorite No. 2, from Kali in San Jose, California:

“DiAngelo’s grift in selling lawsuit protection to Fortune 500 companies packaged as antiracist workshops is cynical. It is also potentially dangerous. If workshop attendees actually take her ‘theories’ seriously: whites are more rational, scientifically inclined, binary etc than blacks and therefore hiring criteria should be altered? This is nonsense on stilts and in normal times an eyeroll and soft chuckle would suffice. These are not normal times. Fortune 500 companies pay this scam artist $15k a pop to spew this nonsensical racialism masquerading as antiracism so [they] can continue to underpay their employees, relentlessly chase share price, export jobs overseas to reduce labor costs — all with a nice ‘antiracist’ smile . . . This New York Times piece takes her way too seriously with a perfunctorily skeptical footnote barely detectable.”

Also barely detectable: Just how much DiAngelo has profited and what she’s doing with all that money. The Washington Free Beacon reported last month that once they began investigating DiAngelo’s online claims of charitable donations to “racial justice” groups — including rent to the Native American tribe that once lived in Seattle! — she took them all down. Days later that page was edited, with DiAngelo promising to donate 15 percent of her after-tax income, “suggesting,” the Beacon said, “she had not previously, as the page exhorts, given a percentage of her income large enough that she could ‘feel it.’”

Last weekend, Internet sleuths posted photos implying DiAngelo may own at least four homes. Any reference to such wealth is near impossible to find. Seems the only thing worse than being a white lady in America who profits off stoking racism is being transparent about it.