I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It!, page 10
From whence, then, spring DiAngelo’s supra-racial superpowers? She notes that many whites have “no sustained relationships with people of color,” while extant “cross-racial relationships” are not “authentic.”173 Her own, on the contrary, pass the authenticity test. DiAngelo is cut from the white-groupie mold. Sometimes this type be tough-as-nails, sometimes she be flower-child flaky, sometimes she be demure in a print floral, sometimes she be brazenly exposed or in form-fitting gear. Always, she be a coyly seductive white temptress. She be so down wit da hood dat she be speakin Ebonics like, girl, she be bawn into it. She be givin’ fiery speeches at rallies in solidarity wit her “Black sista’ and brotha’.” Whereas “relationships with white people tend to be less authentic for people of color,”174 DiAngelo fancy dat peeps of color be trustin’ her.
Just before the gathering, a woman of color pulled me aside and told me that she wanted to attend but she was “in no mood for white women’s tears today.” I assured her that I would handle it.175
[A woman of color] tells me that although these [racist] dynamics occur daily between white people and people of color, my willingness to repair doesn’t, and that she appreciates this.176
Sis’ DiAngelo be so hip, she be so chill, she be so fly, they’ll “often give [her] a pass” on a racial slip.177 But what make her be so unique? How she come to pozess “advanced skill” in navigating race relations? Is it cuz she be havin’ Black coworkers? As it happens, so do most white Americans. Maybe she be hangin’ out in the locka’ room at half-time wit de Harlem Globetrotters. Dey all be havin’ a jolly good time, dey be havin’ lotta dem cross-cultural relations, praize de Lawd, Lawdy-lawd, I do declar’! But does that make her “more racially aware than other whites”? DiAngelo mocks the “insidious” racism of pseudo progressive whites who proclaim “I have friends of color, so I can’t be racist.”178 Fair enough. But what shingle be hangin’ on her front lawn if not “Some of my best friends be peeps of culla”? DiAngelo don’t just be chillin’ with Black folk. She don’t just be Jezebel on the back porch listenin’ to her plantation darkies sing ’em spirituals. She be protectin’ Black folk as she “can certainly bear the brunt of a hostile response less painfully than people of color.”179 And she be knowin’ Black folk; she be havin’ a special pipeline to dem; she be channelin’ dem. She might not be Rachel Dolezal passin’ as Black, but DiAngelo be her first cuzzin speakin’ to white people in her Whoopi Goldberg faux dreads what Black folk be feelin’.180 White Fragility is peppered with these Black-knowing asides: “Having to navigate white people’s … racial superiority is a great psychic drain for people of color”; “People of color certainly experience white solidarity as a form of racism”; “The following example illustrates … the frustration that people of color feel”; “For people of color, our tears demonstrate our racial insulation and privilege”; “Trying to explain away our racism does not fool people of color”; and on and on.181
It’s hard to say which grates more: that DiAngelo presumes to be privy to what Blacks feel or that she presumes to be privy to what all Blacks feel. In the meantime, DiAngelo admonishes white people to show “humility” when they talk about race;182 she rues that “white Northerners who came down South to save black people had some patronizing or condescending attitudes”; she chastises the “racism” of a white woman who presumed that “she could best speak for a black man”; she cautions those whites who believe that they are “different from other white people” on race matters to “stop and take a breath.”183 Speaking of which, it takes one’s breath away the lack of self-awareness of this coach in self-awareness. DiAngelo psychoanalyzes that white racism can wear the mask of benevolence as “we also use blacks to feel warmhearted and noble. We are drawn to those who … we can ‘save’ from the horrors of their black lives with our abundance and kindness.” She goes on to observe that in one strain of racist ideology, “white people are the saviors of black people … noble, courageous, and morally superior to other whites.”184 It is a tribute to the power of self-righteous purblindness that DiAngelo doesn’t see the irony in these words. In her antiracist rage, DiAngelo can also be unintentionally revealing of the white demons astir in her intracranial space. She tells the convoluted story of a white couple who reportedly purchased an inexpensive home and then a handgun. The upshot? “I immediately knew they had bought a home in a black neighborhood.” This brilliant deduction doesn’t prevent DiAngelo in the next breath from decrying white racism that “associated crime with people of color” and that assumes “black neighborhoods are inherently dangerous and criminal.”185 Didn’t she just do that? She tells another anecdote about academic colleagues at her new job who caution her against moving into certain neighborhoods. “I now knew where the people of color were concentrated.”186 It did turn out these areas were half non-white, but maybe they were also high-crime areas. It’s not always and only about race—unless you’re a racist. She excoriates “the glee the white collective derives from blackface and depictions of blacks as apes and gorillas.”187 How can the “white collective” not include her, or is she depersonalizing and distancing herself from her own demons by projecting them onto the “white collective”? One can’t help but recall Jean-Paul Sartre’s description of the antisemite who, as it were, gets off on his own obscene desires while he denounces Jews:
He can glut himself to the point of obsession with the recital of obscene or criminal actions which excite and satisfy his perverse leanings; but since at the same time he attributes them to those infamous Jews on whom he heaps his scorn, he satisfies himself without being compromised.
Replace “Jews” with “whites,” and, voilà, you have DiAngelo. While inveighing against the manifold perversions of those awful white people—they delight in grotesque images of Blacks as apes and gorillas—she excites and satisfies her own depraved leanings “without being compromised.” It doesn’t seem impertinent at this juncture to wonder if DiAngelo is the best choice for “diversity trainer.” It is also cause for wonder why Black people even need her. Her function in a typical meeting is to provide “feedback” to white members of the group as to why Black group members find this or that remark of theirs to be racist. Are Black people so inarticulate, so fragile, that they need DiAngelo to act as their interlocutor? It might also be wondered whether Black participants are nearly as thin-skinned and hypersensitive as she makes them out to be. Unlike DiAngelo, they aren’t paid per microaggression.
* * *
Robin DiAngelo gives snake-oil salesmen a bad name. Yet White Fragility sat on the New York Times bestseller list for close to two years and has sold nearly a million copies. She’s a hot-ticket item on the lecture circuit and the toast of the town. She wowed host Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show. In the immortal lyrics of Marvin Gaye, What’s going on? The DiAngelo template performs for the powers-that-be the useful function of pretending to fight racism while leaving all the institutions and structures sustaining it intact. An interracial group of employees gathers; DiAngelo, the Avenging Angel of African-American Affliction, dishes out “feedback” to the assembled whites; the Karens tear up, the white dudes lash back; DiAngelo delivers another round of “feedback.” The exercise keeps repeating for an hour. Bingo! Racism has been “interrupted.” This vapid charade brings to mind the air-raid drills in the 1960s. A teacher writing on the blackboard suddenly about-faces and shouts “Take Cover.” The students dive under their seats “face turned away from the window” just in case the glass shatters. The skeptical grade-schooler can’t help but muse, “If a nuclear bomb drops on the school, flying glass is the least of my worries.” DiAngelo’s “interruptions” are as effective as these drills. It’s hard to believe Black people are fooled and taken in by, let alone develop an “authentic cross-cultural relationship” with DiAngelo. More likely, they roll their eyes in bemusement at this “cracker” in her stupid faux dreads, while the whites walk out bitching to themselves about that “white b****.” It was a political moment rich in irony during the 2020 presidential campaign when, whereas President Trump defunded “racial sensitivity training” and Joe Biden defended it, each time a session ended, the Republicans picked up and the Democrats lost a few more exasperated white votes. To be sure, a coterie of “progressive” whites revel in these rituals of self-abasement. Like Dostoyevsky’s underground man, they feel “downright definite pleasure. Yes, pleasure, pleasure! … The pleasure came from being too clearly aware of your own degradation.” As it happens, this masochism pays a political dividend. The more you openly admit to your racist demons, the more you demonstrate how superior you are to those other whites in denial. German liberals are quite practiced in this passionsspiel as they publicly beat their breasts denouncing Nazi phantoms to show the world how beautiful they themselves are. There’s another dimmed chamber in this S&M Theater of the Absurd. DiAngelo nurses a special loathing for “self-indulgent,” “narcissistic” professional white women. She devotes an entire chapter to chastising these “White Women’s Tears.” Transparently at play is the seething ressentiment of someone who “grew up in poverty” and, frankly, is none too bright. She exploits her new-found power to exact revenge by calling out the “racism,” real and confected, of these Karens, savoring in the spectacle of their public humiliation, browbeating them, bossing them around, putting them in their place, beneath her, getting the attention she always craved but they always got. At times she sounds like a drill sergeant. She comes off as less a “diversity trainer” than a psycho personal trainer “actively working to interrupt racism” by scheduling “sessions” with her clients, “coaching” them to “build” “racial stamina” and “endure discomfort,” to “work through” their white fragility, to do the “hard, personal work,” and to feel the “trauma,” and instructing them when they can “take a breath,” so as to develop their “advanced skill” at fighting racism. It’s only a matter of time before the ever-enterprising DiAngelo (she currently charges in the 5-digits per gig) be marketin’ an exercise video, she be bustin’ de chops of dems Karens, as dey be sweatin’ in dems Alaia leotards, bendin’ over, shaking dems booties, raisin’ dems fists in de Black Power salute, like Beyoncé at de Super Bowl. “Interrupt racism! Interrupt racism!,” DiAngelo be howlin’ as she be crackin’ her whip, struttin’ her stuff, grindin’ her stilettos. Damn, she be so fine, she ain’t be no wallflowa no mo’! Beads of hot sweat now be drippin’ down dems Karens’ foreheads as dems minds be driftin off … off … off … to coitus interruptus wit de gardener.
The DiAngelo shtick would be comical were it not so sinister. Under the cloak of fighting racism, DiAngelo exacerbates it as she sows discord, suspicion, even hatred between Blacks and whites. She doesn’t “interrupt” racism. She props it up; she buttresses it. Is it a fluke that “business leaders” (her phrase) and their media servants have embraced her? Consider these facts. The Bernie Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020 revealed the potential for building a radical working-class movement in the U.S. Whereas Bernie did not make major inroads among African-Americans as a whole, Blacks under 30 overwhelmingly supported him. The George Floyd protests put on vivid display the convergence of interests between Black and white young people, as they rallied en masse, as one, united, against police brutality and, behind it, against the system that has brutalized all their lives. No doubt, it’s still a long uphill battle before a sustained mass interracial political coalition crystallizes. But what is DiAngelo’s message to this nascent movement? In the guise of “interrupting” racism, she transmits to “white people” the message that they—the white working class and the white billionaire class, all of them together, without any distinction—control the power and wealth in this country. They form a homogeneous master-class. “Whites control all major institutions of society and set the policies and practices that others must live by.”188 DiAngelo presents a long list enumerating the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of white persons. For example, “Ten richest Americans: 100 percent white.” Her conclusion? “They represent power and control by a racial group.” In other words, Jeff Bezos and his white Amazon workers “control” as a “racial group” his $100 billion.189 DiAngelo is the flipside of the white alt-right nationalists stoking race hatred by telling white workers that “they” are out to take away “our” privileges. Sure, she says these white privileges constitute ill-gotten gains, but the bottom line is the same: if “they” get their way, we lose big time. What is DiAngelo’s message to Black people? Beware! Don’t trust white people! They’re all racists, racists to the core! Every last one of them! They’re hard-wired for racism; it’s in their DNA. Behind even—nay, especially—the gentlest of smiles and protestations of solidarity, the “white collective” is filled with “glee” at “depictions of blacks as apes and gorillas.” That’s what the white folk marching beside you against police brutality really think of you. Your enemy is not the billionaire class. It’s the white “racial group” that controls everything. For Jeff Bezos, DiAngelo’s message is a godsend. It not only pits Amazon workers against each other, it also lets him personally off the hook: Hey, I’m not the problem. Didn’t you hear Robin? It’s all us whites who are making life miserable for Black people. We’re all guilty, we’re all sinners. DiAngelo avows that “I am eager—even excited” to fight racism. So let’s take a hypothetical. Bezos hires her to conduct a “session” with the workers in an Amazon warehouse. “By the way, can you tell me what you’re going to say?” “Sure, I’m going to tell your workers,
Although racism is real and you should always be at the ready to fight it whenever it rears its ugly head, you all, Black and white, have a helluva lot more in common. You’re all, Black and white, trapped in dead-end jobs. You all earn poverty wages. You all don’t have medical coverage, holiday pay, job security, a pension. You’re all super-exploited by an insatiably greedy bloodsucking vampire bastard. He’s forever concocting diabolical schemes to divide you. He hands whites a few more crumbs than Blacks. He elevates whites a half notch higher on the totem pole. But at the end of the day, you’re all his slaves. If you want a better life for yourselves and your children, you’ve got to be decent and fair to each other. If there’s a racial incident, you don’t need idiotic “diversity trainers” like me to set things straight. I’m just put here to stir up trouble and sow hate between you. Figure out among yourselves how to settle it, you’re smart enough. Take the hotheads to the wise heads. Remember, even Nelson Mandela’s white jailers came to respect him. Mutual respect is possible, and you all have too much to lose if you let racism drag you down. And then organize together, as one because you are one, to overthrow this wretched, corrupt, god-forsaken system. You can’t eliminate every fleeting, non-p.c. thought passing through your head. The mind is a tricky business. A famous philosopher was once asked whether he analyzed his dreams. “Analyze my dreams?” he responded in shock, “I have trouble enough making sense of my waking hours!” There’s the conscious, the subconscious, and the unconscious, the rational and the irrational, and a myriad of other posited and uncharted compartments as well as byways and highways linking them. “I am sorry to have to say,” Martin Luther King rued, “that the vast majority of white Americans are racist, either consciously or unconsciously.” You can’t wait until everyone’s thoughts are simon-pure. You don’t have the time, and they never will be. You cannot police your thoughts, and it’s probably better that way. Were it otherwise, you wouldn’t be human. You’re fallible, you’re imperfect vessels. You weren’t born, and your minds can’t be, immaculate. You shouldn’t acquiesce in your inner demons, but you shouldn’t become neurotic about them or let them paralyze you either. Good deeds get the last word: they speak doubly louder than words, and trebly louder than a stray thought. If, however, you set your minds to building solidarity based on your common interests, you can eliminate, if not noxious thoughts, then—what’s a thousand times more important!—a noxious system that robs you of a fair chance at life’s happiness. You need to act now, or it’s never. Your country stands on the precipice, your planet is dying. Your impure thoughts can wait. You need to keep your eyes on the prize. The C.E.O. wants to fool you into believing it’s your psyches that need changing. But it’s the system that needs changing. If you unite to change the system, then your psyches will fall into place. It’s common struggle, common sacrifice, that produces mutual respect, even mutual love. A connection that binds will be forged by you, united in the heat of battle facing a common enemy, each marching beside the other, each lifting the other, each protecting the other. You don’t become better persons by each of you, singly, struggling with your racist demons. You become better persons by all of you, together, struggling against an antihuman system. Fuck the session! Fight the system! Unite! Unite! Unite! To save yourselves, and your planet! You have nothing to lose but your chains! You have a world to win!
As “eager—even excited” as DiAngelo is to “interrupt” racism, it’s most unlikely that she would deliver this message. She might be dumb, but not that dumb. She knows exactly what Bezos would say: “Robin, you’re interrupted!”
Chapter 5
Ibram X. Kendi’s Woke Guide to
Who’s Hot and Who’s Not
Ibram X. Kendi first emerged as a public personality in 2016 after his chronicle, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, won a National Book Award.190 In 2019, he published How to Be an Antiracist,191 a distillation of his “definitive history” interspersed with his sophomoric, soporific odyssey from racist to antiracist. It cannot be said that one actually learns anything from these tracts. He presents neither interpretative framework nor overarching thesis nor historical context. Instead, he’s assembled The Woke Guide to Who’s Hot (Antiracists) and Who’s Not (Racists). Although Stamped comes equipped with a robust scholarly apparatus,192 its only novelty is to shoehorn the epithets racist or antiracist, segregationist or assimilationist into every other sentence. He has written less a definitive history than an exhaustive, and exhausting, taxonomy that’s as supple as a calcified femur and as subtle as an oversized mallet. It proceeds from the fatuous, almost juvenile, conceit that fastening binary, wooden labels on the actors and ideas incident to Black history will shed light on it. His companion volume, How to Be an Antiracist, is a jumble of politically correct bromides leavened with “Afrocentric” mysticisms, none of which, if juxtaposed beside each other, cohere and most of which, if taken literally, are bizarre. On close inspection, his manual proves to be more fashion statement than political manifesto. The singular value of his books is that they comprehensively collect the rhetorical posings and posturings of woke culture. If, after parsing Kendi’s oeuvre, it’s revealed to be bankrupt, the reader can safely leave behind this genre of fanzine history and move on to greener conceptual pastures.193
