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.
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.