'White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism' by Robin DiAngelo

In thinking about how to approach this critique, I remind myself actively that “Rome was not built in a day...”  Certainly I can see—even feel—the sincerity and deep personal commitment in Robin DiAngelo’s attempt to address how the consistent campaigns of terror and apartheid called white supremacy have so thoroughly pervaded the American landscape, that it is impossible for the whites within not to experience some form of white privilege just as a fact of existence.  But my problems with her thesis and subsequent argumentation start at the very beginning, with her project’s title:  White Fragility.  (If I have judged this book by its cover, it is exactly because I have read it from cover to cover.)  I am willing to accept White Fragility’s genuine desire to acknowledge the [rather time-worn] problem of racism in America. But acknowledging a problem should be step one of a multi-step process to fixing it.   Labeling the problem “white fragility” is already…a problem.  The term implies an impotence diametrically opposed to what whiteness has ferociously and relentlessly wrought in this country for the Indigenous, Blacks and other non-Europeans:  destruction, devastation and imposition of a social order at the victims’ expense for the express purpose of extracting wealth systematically and unjustly, subjugating in order to either eradicate or profit from other human beings and their unalienably endowed resources in perpetuity.  My disappointment with DiAngelo’s argument is its inability to adequately take responsibility for this truth.  Thus, she perpetuates the problem she is attempting to solve.

Academic, political and social discourse regarding race in America tends to focus on malicious intent.  This two-dimensional, misguided, and puerile understanding of how American racism works is what keeps it alive.  DiAngelo does attempt to address this point early on.   But in so doing, she completely misses the point:  “If your definition of a racist is someone who holds conscious dislike of people because of race, then I agree that it is offensive for me to suggest that you are a racist when I don’t know you (p. 13).”  Her argument should have been a frontal assault on why still in 2018 (the year her book was published) white people would even appeal to such a reductivist notion of racism as “conscious dislike” of other races, in the first place.  I’m not suggesting it’s ludicrous to incorporate antipathy into the definition of racism, given all of the renown historical and contemporaneous horror stories documenting the brutal and sinister ways that racism has been unilaterally acted out in this country (the dismissal of U.S. slavery as a preterit event, over and done with in the past; the Chinese Exclusion Act; the Trail of Tears; 4500 lynchings b/t 1877 & 1950; George Stinney, Jr’s execution by electric chair in the state of SC at the age of 12…)  But in addition to the incredible cruelty and viciousness intrinsic to the popular understanding of how racism has presented itself in America’s past,  there should be just as clear an awareness of why these brutish, nasty and mean-spirited occurrences ever transpired in the first place:  conquest and control of capital to facilitate convenience, comfort, and commercial success for whites.  Racism exists to accommodate and make practical—and psychologically palatable—the prosperity colonization is expected to provide for its colonists.  “Conscious dislike” is hardly the issue (though it’s frequently necessary to wrest assets away from their rightful owners).  The consequences of colonization is what DiAngelo’s argumentation should have hewed to: eradicating the Indigenous for the expropriation of their land and sovereignty, then pauperizing and paralyzing the imported Black human cargo socially and politically, relegating them to permanent peonage, all  to enrich the heirs of Europe—a process most commonly known as the pursuit of prosperity.

It would have been far more instructive and productive for Dr. DiAngelo to train her thesis toward advantage for whites as a critical ingredient of racism (irrespective of whether or not any antipathies are harbored), specifically pointing out the ways that pursuit of said advantage produces colossal collateral damage and expense for Non-whites which a) completely are taken for granted as right and meritocratic, though they be egregious crimes against humanity and other human rights’ violations, and b) have yet to be properly acknowledged, restituted or repaired. Instead, she gets lost in the weeds of how to go about expressing to whites that the basic pursuit of their values and lifestyles propagates racism and white supremacy, and in such a way as to propagate racism and white supremacy. Everything about White Fragility maintains the comfort, convenience and advantage for whites when ostensibly that was what the book was trying to deconstruct and dismantle.