If you encounter an idea for which, however watertight the argument leading to it, you hear it in the voice of Insanity Wolf, screaming at you, a voice that absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead, then maybe you should reject that idea, even if you do not have a refutation of it.
Anyone speaking in that voice, even if outwardly quiet and reasonable, wants something that you should not give.
There’s definitely a real point in there, in that suspicion is warranted and “little red riding hood” is a cautionary tale. “Roll over and believe whenever asked to” is not the right play.
At the same time, that “maybe” is critically important. Without it, you end up becoming insanity wolf yourself, snapping at your actual grandma and any vaguely-wolf-shaped clouds. Baring teeth is a display of weakness, and should be avoided as long as possible in favor of something closer to “No Chad” so that it’s easier to separate the truth from the power plays.
Notice the presupposition worked in at the start: “you have been socialised into racism.” Therefore your opinions are invalid. Your thoughts are invalid. Your reaction to being told this is invalid. Every objection is invalid. You are invalid. Anything but immediate subservience is invalid. You must say “of course I was; I’m glad I finally found out about it so I can change.” No other response is valid.
All of the objectionable conclusions there are in your own words, but you’re responding to them as if she had actually said them rather than just fit the caricature despite trying to sound good. It’s fair enough to notice that this “grandma” has an awfully long snout and to distrust her, but there’s still a big leap between there and an unqualified “This is insanity wolf”.
There are other explanations that fit [this summary of] the book. It’s also conceivable that she just has a sincere belief that white people have been socialized into racism (even if they don’t realize it yet) and a lack of awareness of the caricature’s she’s fitting. People usually aren’t aware of the caricatures they fit, and often have beliefs that they think are more self-evident-upon-examining than they are, so it doesn’t seem like a big stretch at all.
This caricature fitting can sometimes be due to simply poor communication, but it can also be due to harboring a bit more of the caricature than they realize and would accept if they knew. You kinda have to point it out (and in a non-hostile way) before you can distinguish between “sloppy communication”, “imperfection that escaped notice”, and “endorsed malintent”. “Innocent until proven guilty” is super important, so give her the rope and wait to see if she’ll hang herself with it or pull herself out of the caricature.
In particular, you predict that “No other response [will be seen as] valid”. But what if the response were “Well shoot. I hope I’m not doing anything racist. Can you explain to me what exactly is racist about it so that I can make sure not to do it?” and additional sincere questions about any bit that doesn’t make sense about her story? If you were to do that without a hint of bared teeth yourself, what response do you think you’d get, exactly?
Condescension is the immediate response I’d anticipate for sure, and probably attempts to disengage before getting anywhere interesting, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Assuming she doesn’t actually make a convincing point, and that you don’t allow things to turn confrontational, what happens when you finally get to the point where the flaws in her reasoning start to get hard to avoid? Sociopathic willful lying is definitely a possibility, and if you get that, then yeah, insanity wolf confirmed. But I also wouldn’t be surprised if she were to get genuinely befuddled and not know what her own response is going to be, because no one has actually challenged her and made her think like that. Do you think you have a way of showing that this latter option isn’t on the table?
According to the OP, DiAngelo says the responses of “denial, withdrawal, deflection, conspicuous wokeness, emotional outbursts, and so forth” are “examples of white people not getting with the program” and “function to avoid confronting and dismantling white supremacy”. I think that’s enough to call Insanity Wolf on it.
DISAGREEMENT? GUILTY!
SILENCE? GUILTY!
WALK AWAY? GUILTY!
AGREEMENT? GUILTY!
TEARS? HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! GUILTY!
I doubt if a conversation with DiAngelo would get very far. There is nothing that a white person can say, including what I’ve said here, that her scheme cannot classify as “White Fragility” and therefore deem invalid. There’s probably someone right now reading this whole discussion and mocking the White Fragility on display. (ETA: Hey there! SMUGLY MOCKING ALL THIS WHITE FRAGILITY? GUILTY!)
(Disclaimer: I haven’t read DiAngelo’s book, and I know very little about her as a person. I’m curious about the question ‘what’s the nearest reasonable version of this strategy, and what would a conversation look like with a reasonable proponent of that strategy?’.
I can’t speak to whether any of that resembles how an actual conversation with DiAngelo would go, and I don’t mean to vouch for DiAngelo’s overall epistemics in any of the following. I expect the epistemics are pretty bad. But my experience has been that the flip side of ‘motte and bailey is popular’ and ‘pop culture makes good ideas memetically evolve into terrible ideas’ is ‘there’s often a much more reasonable version of a thought pattern that’s conceptually close to the unreasonable version’.)
The ‘everything you do except agree with me shows how wrong you are’ thing is really scary, because it can create a situation where confirmation bias has complete dominion and ~no evidence can allow you to update away from your original assumption (it reminds me of outgroup-Bingo).
But it also reminds me a bit of New Atheists’ frustrations with arguing with religious people. New Atheists ended up generating long lists of names for various wrong patterns of reasoning and argument, in part because they were exasperated at how religionists’ confirmation bias caused them to just keep generating more and more new Objectively Terrible rationalizations for the same old falsified claims.
The human mind is a bottomless well of rationalization, when it wants to be. Trying to refute every single object-level argument is a hopeless task (especially when you’re arguing against a religionist who’s smarter than you, or has spent more time studying the topic). But you might hope to categorize a certain kind of mistake, and/or recognize a root cause underlying many different specific mistakes. And this might indeed start looking like a Bingo card, after the fiftieth argument by a religionist gets shot down with yet another canned Fallacy Name; but that doesn’t mean the New Atheist is wrong.
So if DiAngelo is convinced enough in her view of X, and is frustrated by what appears to her to be an endless series of easily-refuted rationalizations for not-X, then I can understand why she might want to have Extremely General Counter-Arguments she can use to defeat a wide variety of objections in one fell swoop.
That still doesn’t address the problem of ‘what if you’re really sure X is true, but in fact X is false? how do you ever escape from believing X?’.
I’m not sure how to address that problem in general, other than:
Being generally epistemically cautious and rigorous, so you end up highly confident of fewer false things.
Being cautious about the strategies ‘round an opponent’s argument off to a general category and refute the category’ and ‘identify the root cause of an opponent’s argument and show the cause is epistemically suspect’; use them relatively sparingly, and put unusual effort into testing your hypotheses about such categories and causes.
Trying to stick to the object level where possible, and having some conversations where the ground rules are ‘we’re not going to use those Extremely General Counter-Arguments’.
Doing conversation in a way that causes people to rationalize and dissemble less / causes them to be more reflective about what’s really in their head. (Circling?)
When I imagine a DiAngelo-Kennaway conversation going really well, I think I imagine a version of Kennaway who clearly signals in the conversation that he’s open to criticism and admitting fault when it comes to his judgment/impartiality/character/virtue, so DiAngelo has Bayesian evidence that she’s not engaging with the equivalent of an Imperviously Rationalizing Religionist. Then DiAngelo acknowledges the Epistemic Trap problem, and explicitly notes examples in the conversation where she updated both upward and downward in her subjective estimate of ‘how racially defensive/biased Kennaway is’ (or something like that).
Then the conversation can perhaps proceed productively from there, even though both parties think the other side is totally wrong and have various theories about why they’re so wrong.
That’s not my ideal version of how this kind of conversation goes; it’s just the thing my brain tags ‘least unlikely’ when I condition on the conversation being substantive, honest, friendly, and productive.
At the opposite extreme, it might be like trying to demonstrate to an anosognosic — or to be more even-handed, two anosognosics trying to demonstrate to each other their major impairments.
To reiterate my point, it’s entirely fair to notice that this “grandma” has an awfully long snout and to distrust her. I’m with you on that. I pick up on the same patterns as you. It’s a real problem.
And still, big leap between there and an unqualified “This is insanity wolf”.
I doubt if a conversation with DiAngelo would get very far.
It’s not “a” conversation, as if “conversation” were one thing and the way you go about it doesn’t matter. If you were to go about it the way you’re going about it here, with presumption of guilt, it wouldn’t go far and it wouldn’t be her fault.
If you were to go about it in a way optimized for success, actually giving her the largest possible opening to see anything she might be doing wrong and to persuade you of good will, then it’s not so clear.
There is nothing that a white person can say, including what I’ve said here, that her scheme cannot classify as “White Fragility” and therefore deem invalid.
There’s nothing that can’t be classified that way by the scheme which you assert to be hers. It’s possible, if she really is nothing but 100% this scheme, that nothing a white person can say would get through.
However it’s also possible that your bald presupposition that there’s nothing else to her could be wrong, and that if you were careful enough in picking what you said, you could find something to say that gets her to deviate from this scheme.
As a general rule, asserting “Nothing can be done” suspicious—especially when nothing has been tried. It’s suspiciously convenient, and too absolute to be likely literally true. The times when a belief would be convenient for you are the last times you should be playing loose with the truth and dismissing known-falsehoods as “rounding errors”, since that’s when your motivated thinking can slip in and pull you away from the truth.
There’s probably someone right now reading this whole discussion and mocking the White Fragility on display.
Sure, that kind of thing definitely exists and is bad. It’s also not the only thing that exists.
I wonder, is there a name for that …fallacy/strategy (I don’t really know what else I could call it)
It looks a lot like judging witches. If they deny they are witches, they clearly are, because that’s what a witch would do. If they don’t deny it, well, they are just telling you the truth.
But what if the response were “Well shoot. I hope I’m not doing anything racist. Can you explain to me what exactly is racist about it so that I can make sure not to do it?”
There’s frequently the sentiment that it’s not on other people to do the work of explaining to white people that they are racist but that it’s the obligation for white people to figure that out themselves.
I understand why a black person might feel tired explaining to all the white people around them what exactly they did wrong.
The situation is quite different if instead this is a woke white person, acting angry of behalf of the hypothetical offended black people, and refusing to explain why. That is simply an attempt to take credit for fighting against racism, without actually spending any energy doing so (other than yelling).
There’s definitely a real point in there, in that suspicion is warranted and “little red riding hood” is a cautionary tale. “Roll over and believe whenever asked to” is not the right play.
At the same time, that “maybe” is critically important. Without it, you end up becoming insanity wolf yourself, snapping at your actual grandma and any vaguely-wolf-shaped clouds. Baring teeth is a display of weakness, and should be avoided as long as possible in favor of something closer to “No Chad” so that it’s easier to separate the truth from the power plays.
All of the objectionable conclusions there are in your own words, but you’re responding to them as if she had actually said them rather than just fit the caricature despite trying to sound good. It’s fair enough to notice that this “grandma” has an awfully long snout and to distrust her, but there’s still a big leap between there and an unqualified “This is insanity wolf”.
There are other explanations that fit [this summary of] the book. It’s also conceivable that she just has a sincere belief that white people have been socialized into racism (even if they don’t realize it yet) and a lack of awareness of the caricature’s she’s fitting. People usually aren’t aware of the caricatures they fit, and often have beliefs that they think are more self-evident-upon-examining than they are, so it doesn’t seem like a big stretch at all.
This caricature fitting can sometimes be due to simply poor communication, but it can also be due to harboring a bit more of the caricature than they realize and would accept if they knew. You kinda have to point it out (and in a non-hostile way) before you can distinguish between “sloppy communication”, “imperfection that escaped notice”, and “endorsed malintent”. “Innocent until proven guilty” is super important, so give her the rope and wait to see if she’ll hang herself with it or pull herself out of the caricature.
In particular, you predict that “No other response [will be seen as] valid”. But what if the response were “Well shoot. I hope I’m not doing anything racist. Can you explain to me what exactly is racist about it so that I can make sure not to do it?” and additional sincere questions about any bit that doesn’t make sense about her story? If you were to do that without a hint of bared teeth yourself, what response do you think you’d get, exactly?
Condescension is the immediate response I’d anticipate for sure, and probably attempts to disengage before getting anywhere interesting, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Assuming she doesn’t actually make a convincing point, and that you don’t allow things to turn confrontational, what happens when you finally get to the point where the flaws in her reasoning start to get hard to avoid? Sociopathic willful lying is definitely a possibility, and if you get that, then yeah, insanity wolf confirmed. But I also wouldn’t be surprised if she were to get genuinely befuddled and not know what her own response is going to be, because no one has actually challenged her and made her think like that. Do you think you have a way of showing that this latter option isn’t on the table?
According to the OP, DiAngelo says the responses of “denial, withdrawal, deflection, conspicuous wokeness, emotional outbursts, and so forth” are “examples of white people not getting with the program” and “function to avoid confronting and dismantling white supremacy”. I think that’s enough to call Insanity Wolf on it.
DISAGREEMENT? GUILTY!
SILENCE? GUILTY!
WALK AWAY? GUILTY!
AGREEMENT? GUILTY!
TEARS? HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! GUILTY!
I doubt if a conversation with DiAngelo would get very far. There is nothing that a white person can say, including what I’ve said here, that her scheme cannot classify as “White Fragility” and therefore deem invalid. There’s probably someone right now reading this whole discussion and mocking the White Fragility on display. (ETA: Hey there! SMUGLY MOCKING ALL THIS WHITE FRAGILITY? GUILTY!)
(Disclaimer: I haven’t read DiAngelo’s book, and I know very little about her as a person. I’m curious about the question ‘what’s the nearest reasonable version of this strategy, and what would a conversation look like with a reasonable proponent of that strategy?’.
I can’t speak to whether any of that resembles how an actual conversation with DiAngelo would go, and I don’t mean to vouch for DiAngelo’s overall epistemics in any of the following. I expect the epistemics are pretty bad. But my experience has been that the flip side of ‘motte and bailey is popular’ and ‘pop culture makes good ideas memetically evolve into terrible ideas’ is ‘there’s often a much more reasonable version of a thought pattern that’s conceptually close to the unreasonable version’.)
The ‘everything you do except agree with me shows how wrong you are’ thing is really scary, because it can create a situation where confirmation bias has complete dominion and ~no evidence can allow you to update away from your original assumption (it reminds me of outgroup-Bingo).
But it also reminds me a bit of New Atheists’ frustrations with arguing with religious people. New Atheists ended up generating long lists of names for various wrong patterns of reasoning and argument, in part because they were exasperated at how religionists’ confirmation bias caused them to just keep generating more and more new Objectively Terrible rationalizations for the same old falsified claims.
The human mind is a bottomless well of rationalization, when it wants to be. Trying to refute every single object-level argument is a hopeless task (especially when you’re arguing against a religionist who’s smarter than you, or has spent more time studying the topic). But you might hope to categorize a certain kind of mistake, and/or recognize a root cause underlying many different specific mistakes. And this might indeed start looking like a Bingo card, after the fiftieth argument by a religionist gets shot down with yet another canned Fallacy Name; but that doesn’t mean the New Atheist is wrong.
So if DiAngelo is convinced enough in her view of X, and is frustrated by what appears to her to be an endless series of easily-refuted rationalizations for not-X, then I can understand why she might want to have Extremely General Counter-Arguments she can use to defeat a wide variety of objections in one fell swoop.
That still doesn’t address the problem of ‘what if you’re really sure X is true, but in fact X is false? how do you ever escape from believing X?’.
I’m not sure how to address that problem in general, other than:
Being generally epistemically cautious and rigorous, so you end up highly confident of fewer false things.
Being cautious about the strategies ‘round an opponent’s argument off to a general category and refute the category’ and ‘identify the root cause of an opponent’s argument and show the cause is epistemically suspect’; use them relatively sparingly, and put unusual effort into testing your hypotheses about such categories and causes.
Trying to stick to the object level where possible, and having some conversations where the ground rules are ‘we’re not going to use those Extremely General Counter-Arguments’.
Doing conversation in a way that causes people to rationalize and dissemble less / causes them to be more reflective about what’s really in their head. (Circling?)
When I imagine a DiAngelo-Kennaway conversation going really well, I think I imagine a version of Kennaway who clearly signals in the conversation that he’s open to criticism and admitting fault when it comes to his judgment/impartiality/character/virtue, so DiAngelo has Bayesian evidence that she’s not engaging with the equivalent of an Imperviously Rationalizing Religionist. Then DiAngelo acknowledges the Epistemic Trap problem, and explicitly notes examples in the conversation where she updated both upward and downward in her subjective estimate of ‘how racially defensive/biased Kennaway is’ (or something like that).
Then the conversation can perhaps proceed productively from there, even though both parties think the other side is totally wrong and have various theories about why they’re so wrong.
That’s not my ideal version of how this kind of conversation goes; it’s just the thing my brain tags ‘least unlikely’ when I condition on the conversation being substantive, honest, friendly, and productive.
At the opposite extreme, it might be like trying to demonstrate to an anosognosic — or to be more even-handed, two anosognosics trying to demonstrate to each other their major impairments.
To reiterate my point, it’s entirely fair to notice that this “grandma” has an awfully long snout and to distrust her. I’m with you on that. I pick up on the same patterns as you. It’s a real problem.
And still, big leap between there and an unqualified “This is insanity wolf”.
It’s not “a” conversation, as if “conversation” were one thing and the way you go about it doesn’t matter. If you were to go about it the way you’re going about it here, with presumption of guilt, it wouldn’t go far and it wouldn’t be her fault.
If you were to go about it in a way optimized for success, actually giving her the largest possible opening to see anything she might be doing wrong and to persuade you of good will, then it’s not so clear.
There’s nothing that can’t be classified that way by the scheme which you assert to be hers. It’s possible, if she really is nothing but 100% this scheme, that nothing a white person can say would get through.
However it’s also possible that your bald presupposition that there’s nothing else to her could be wrong, and that if you were careful enough in picking what you said, you could find something to say that gets her to deviate from this scheme.
As a general rule, asserting “Nothing can be done” suspicious—especially when nothing has been tried. It’s suspiciously convenient, and too absolute to be likely literally true. The times when a belief would be convenient for you are the last times you should be playing loose with the truth and dismissing known-falsehoods as “rounding errors”, since that’s when your motivated thinking can slip in and pull you away from the truth.
Sure, that kind of thing definitely exists and is bad. It’s also not the only thing that exists.
I wonder, is there a name for that …fallacy/strategy (I don’t really know what else I could call it)
It looks a lot like judging witches. If they deny they are witches, they clearly are, because that’s what a witch would do. If they don’t deny it, well, they are just telling you the truth.
There’s an article from the Sequences on the subject.
Is it really the same?
The example it opens with is the absence of sabotage “proving” the existence of saboteurs, and the Salem witch trials are mentioned in the comments.
It could be called “witch-finding”.
There’s frequently the sentiment that it’s not on other people to do the work of explaining to white people that they are racist but that it’s the obligation for white people to figure that out themselves.
I understand why a black person might feel tired explaining to all the white people around them what exactly they did wrong.
The situation is quite different if instead this is a woke white person, acting angry of behalf of the hypothetical offended black people, and refusing to explain why. That is simply an attempt to take credit for fighting against racism, without actually spending any energy doing so (other than yelling).
“Isn’t that what you’re being paid to do, Miss DiAngelo?”
There is, but it sounds like something out of R.D. Laing’s “Knots” (which I would recommend to everyone).