Thank you for the write-up. However, I profoundly disagree with the premises of White Fragility. Why? Because DiAngelo’s starting premise is that race is and always must be really important. And I object to that. In fact, I think that ‘believing race is something real and important’ is a necessary precursor to racism.
(And yes, I believe her book to be racist against white people and yes, anti-white racism is a thing. It’s true that in the US context white racism against non-white people is more frequent and often more harmful, but that doesn’t make anti-white racism OK. It’s like saying that men often sexually assault women, so if a woman sexually assaults a man that’s totally fine because women are an oppressed demographic. Nope, that is not how ethics works.)
So what do I believe? I think that a person’s skin colour should be seen as a minor physical detail of no importance. I believe in Martin Luther King’s dream:
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.
I have a dream that one day out in the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by their character.”
A world where people are judged not by the colour of their skin but by their character. Imagine that. I know that we are far from that world today, but it seems to me that our efforts should be directed at getting closer to MLK’s dream world. And that books like DiAngelo’s, however well-intentioned, which demand that we see skin colour as really important, are in fact taking us further away from the ideal.
I agree about the desired end state (race becoming irrelevant). That doesn’t mean that pretending that we are already there is an efficient way to actually get there. Perhaps it could, if all people agreed to do that, starting now. But that is not going to happen.
To put it bluntly, imagine being a black guy, and whenever you meet a white guy, there is a 1⁄3 chance he will call his friends to beat you up, and a 2⁄3 chance he will smile at you and say “race is completely irrelevant in real life, right?” Speaking for myself, this (including those friendly whites) would drive me crazy.
On the other hand… be the change you want to see in the world, right? How can we get the society of racial irrelevance, if we are not allowed to create even tiny spaces of racial irrelevance without being rebuked for somehow supporting white supremacy by doing so? Is it even possible to be a friend with someone, if you are never allowed to disagree? (Wouldn’t black people benefit from having networks of white friends, instead of mere “allies”? Friends = near mode; allies = far mode. Allies support you verbally if your situation pattern-matches their political beliefs; friends actually help you in your specific situation.)
If the alternative is being a black guy who has a 1⁄3 chance of being beaten up, and a 2⁄3 chance of meeting white people who are super nervous in his presence, never laugh, and immediately profoundly apologize for expressing any different opinion… how much of an improvement is that?
Thank you for a thoughtful response. I agree that the current situation in the US is very far from the desired end state and I don’t want to deny the real problems that exist. I’m just deeply concerned that the proposed ‘cure’ is a new permutation of the same disease.
Edited to add: I would also argue that proposing a direction of travel toward the ideal world is not the same as pretending we’re already there.
I also think that moving the lens of public attention away from racism would make it easier to try solutions to other problems that disproportionately affect black people. As just one example, the system of funding schools from local property taxes means that affluent areas have nice well-funded schools and impoverished areas generally don’t. Systemic reform of school funding to be more equal per child would improve the education available to disadvantaged children (who are disproportionately black). It’s an example of a race-blind policy change that would improve racial justice, and it won’t get attention while everyone is yelling about racism. And yet, even in a world with zero racism (which is not our world), kids born in a poverty trap will have difficulty getting out of the trap and if those kids start off disproportionately black then you will get a situation of ongoing racial disparity in outcomes.
Tl;dr if we spent less time thinking about racism and more time on effective ways to alleviate disadvantage you would get a better and fairer world and also one with less racial disparity.
As just one example, the system of funding schools from local property taxes means that affluent areas have nice well-funded schools and impoverished areas generally don’t.
State and federal funding actually make up for the difference these days:
Considering federal, state, and local funding, almost all states allocate more per-student funding to poor kids than to nonpoor kids, though only a few—Alaska, New Jersey, and Ohio—are highly progressive. A handful—Nevada, Wyoming, and Illinois—are weakly regressive, and the majority have a weakly progressive distribution of funding to poor versus nonpoor students.
Note: There are a variety of reasons we might want school with poor students to get more funding, but that’s a different question than whether they get less funding right now.
The issue is when the right hand beats down the black man while the left hand proclaims that it doesn’t see color. The aspiration is good, but it’s still correct to see color if other people are already aggressively seeing color.
I think your comment assumes bad faith. You assume that the right hand will beat down the black man. That is wrong and discourteous.
You also ignore the point about the direction of travel: we should move toward a world where race is less important, not toward a world where race is more important. We already know what happens if you go the other way. There are places which have entrenched politics based on each racial group getting an entitlement, like Malaysia and Lebanon (the Lebanese system has religious groups instead). It’s a stable equilibrium and it’s a bad equilibrium. Those are not happy countries. The USA doesn’t want to end up like them.
>You also ignore the point about the direction of travel
I wrote:
> The aspiration is good, but it’s still correct to see color if other people are already aggressively seeing color.
That is me agreeing about the direction of travel, and making the point that it’s a mistake to unilaterally “go all the way” while a bunch of other people haven’t gotten on the way. Does this make sense? I don’t see anything in your comment responding to what I said, other than you saying my comment assumes bad faith. Which is true, except I’m not “assuming” bad faith, I’m trying to further explain the hypothesis that’s being presented, namely that you / the context you’re embedded in contains a substrate of bad faith.
As of August 2021 in the USA, “the right hand is beating down the black man” is an accurate (if metaphorical) statement about the territory.
What White Fragility (and many other sources) are saying is that the people who have power need to first use that power to stop the beatings. And it helps to note who the victims are, because it is ~5x more efficient to focus on the ~20% of the population that is being “beaten down” than to make race-neutral changes.
Thank you for the write-up. However, I profoundly disagree with the premises of White Fragility. Why? Because DiAngelo’s starting premise is that race is and always must be really important. And I object to that. In fact, I think that ‘believing race is something real and important’ is a necessary precursor to racism.
(And yes, I believe her book to be racist against white people and yes, anti-white racism is a thing. It’s true that in the US context white racism against non-white people is more frequent and often more harmful, but that doesn’t make anti-white racism OK. It’s like saying that men often sexually assault women, so if a woman sexually assaults a man that’s totally fine because women are an oppressed demographic. Nope, that is not how ethics works.)
So what do I believe? I think that a person’s skin colour should be seen as a minor physical detail of no importance. I believe in Martin Luther King’s dream:
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.
I have a dream that one day out in the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by their character.”
A world where people are judged not by the colour of their skin but by their character. Imagine that. I know that we are far from that world today, but it seems to me that our efforts should be directed at getting closer to MLK’s dream world. And that books like DiAngelo’s, however well-intentioned, which demand that we see skin colour as really important, are in fact taking us further away from the ideal.
This is… complicated.
I agree about the desired end state (race becoming irrelevant). That doesn’t mean that pretending that we are already there is an efficient way to actually get there. Perhaps it could, if all people agreed to do that, starting now. But that is not going to happen.
To put it bluntly, imagine being a black guy, and whenever you meet a white guy, there is a 1⁄3 chance he will call his friends to beat you up, and a 2⁄3 chance he will smile at you and say “race is completely irrelevant in real life, right?” Speaking for myself, this (including those friendly whites) would drive me crazy.
On the other hand… be the change you want to see in the world, right? How can we get the society of racial irrelevance, if we are not allowed to create even tiny spaces of racial irrelevance without being rebuked for somehow supporting white supremacy by doing so? Is it even possible to be a friend with someone, if you are never allowed to disagree? (Wouldn’t black people benefit from having networks of white friends, instead of mere “allies”? Friends = near mode; allies = far mode. Allies support you verbally if your situation pattern-matches their political beliefs; friends actually help you in your specific situation.)
If the alternative is being a black guy who has a 1⁄3 chance of being beaten up, and a 2⁄3 chance of meeting white people who are super nervous in his presence, never laugh, and immediately profoundly apologize for expressing any different opinion… how much of an improvement is that?
Thank you for a thoughtful response. I agree that the current situation in the US is very far from the desired end state and I don’t want to deny the real problems that exist. I’m just deeply concerned that the proposed ‘cure’ is a new permutation of the same disease.
Edited to add: I would also argue that proposing a direction of travel toward the ideal world is not the same as pretending we’re already there.
I also think that moving the lens of public attention away from racism would make it easier to try solutions to other problems that disproportionately affect black people. As just one example, the system of funding schools from local property taxes means that affluent areas have nice well-funded schools and impoverished areas generally don’t. Systemic reform of school funding to be more equal per child would improve the education available to disadvantaged children (who are disproportionately black). It’s an example of a race-blind policy change that would improve racial justice, and it won’t get attention while everyone is yelling about racism. And yet, even in a world with zero racism (which is not our world), kids born in a poverty trap will have difficulty getting out of the trap and if those kids start off disproportionately black then you will get a situation of ongoing racial disparity in outcomes.
Tl;dr if we spent less time thinking about racism and more time on effective ways to alleviate disadvantage you would get a better and fairer world and also one with less racial disparity.
State and federal funding actually make up for the difference these days:
https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-get-fair-share/
Note: There are a variety of reasons we might want school with poor students to get more funding, but that’s a different question than whether they get less funding right now.
Ok thanks for the correction. I’ll pick a different example next time.
The issue is when the right hand beats down the black man while the left hand proclaims that it doesn’t see color. The aspiration is good, but it’s still correct to see color if other people are already aggressively seeing color.
I think your comment assumes bad faith. You assume that the right hand will beat down the black man. That is wrong and discourteous.
You also ignore the point about the direction of travel: we should move toward a world where race is less important, not toward a world where race is more important. We already know what happens if you go the other way. There are places which have entrenched politics based on each racial group getting an entitlement, like Malaysia and Lebanon (the Lebanese system has religious groups instead). It’s a stable equilibrium and it’s a bad equilibrium. Those are not happy countries. The USA doesn’t want to end up like them.
>You also ignore the point about the direction of travel
I wrote:
> The aspiration is good, but it’s still correct to see color if other people are already aggressively seeing color.
That is me agreeing about the direction of travel, and making the point that it’s a mistake to unilaterally “go all the way” while a bunch of other people haven’t gotten on the way. Does this make sense? I don’t see anything in your comment responding to what I said, other than you saying my comment assumes bad faith. Which is true, except I’m not “assuming” bad faith, I’m trying to further explain the hypothesis that’s being presented, namely that you / the context you’re embedded in contains a substrate of bad faith.
As of August 2021 in the USA, “the right hand is beating down the black man” is an accurate (if metaphorical) statement about the territory.
What White Fragility (and many other sources) are saying is that the people who have power need to first use that power to stop the beatings. And it helps to note who the victims are, because it is ~5x more efficient to focus on the ~20% of the population that is being “beaten down” than to make race-neutral changes.
This strikes me as omitting relevant variables.
Is it not true that the right hand is also beating the poor, for example?
Is the right hand beating orphans?
Is the right hand beating the mentally ill?
Why are we treating race as the ur-conflict. I believe it’s one of many.