I figured this out the other day.
Just as “White Privilege” is really class privilege sanitized for white progressives’ protection…
…so, too, is “white fragility” in fact “blue fragility” – the inability of “blue-state” progressives to reconcile their class advantages with their white prog guilt.
And both, also, are one sweet bit of grifting, if you got in on the ground floor:
DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” article was, in a sense, an epistemological exercise. It examined white not-knowing. When it was published in 2011 in The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, it reached the publication’s niche audience. But three years later it was quoted in Seattle’s alternative newspaper The Stranger, during a fierce debate — with white defensiveness on full view — about the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society’s casting of white actors as Asians in a production of “The Mikado.” “That changed my life,” she said. The phrase “white fragility” went viral, and requests to speak started to soar; she expanded the article into a book and during the year preceding Covid-19 gave eight to 10 presentations a month,
This is verging on becoming, if not a full-fledged “Berg’s Law“, at least a corollary to the 7th.
John McWhorter does an excellent take-down of DiAngelo’s screed in The Atlantic, see The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility
I’ve read a few critiques of D’Angelo’s book. I’ve concluded that she’s essentially a white, liberal racist, deflecting on other people’s alleged racism, to hide her own. She is pretty much using anecdotal evidence to support her arguments.
Another paragraph from McWhorter’s take-down of D’Angelo’s screed,
It reminds me of people who have not updated their worldview or fashion sense in over half a century, like guys who still wear duck-tail haircuts or aging hippies in tie-dye t-shirts.
You think THIS is psychosis? Try this on for size:
African American History Museum Calls Individualism, Science, Hard Work ‘Whiteness’
It’s like we stepped through the looking glass and everything good became bad – overnight.
Governance & social engineering by slogan is a bad idea.
If white people are supposed to be so fragile, how did they come to rule the world?
Look at the concept of “white fragility” as a projectile designed by the racist far-left to destroy the “liberal” center-left. It is as meaningless as the phrase “white privilege” to people who are not on the Left, a nonsensical sequence of syllables. It is a self-defeating concept; if my whiteness keeps me from understanding the black experience, surely the black experience prevents black people from understanding — much less judging — the white experience of the world. The idea that blacks can understand the white experience because they have been immersed in the white experience but are not of the white experience, well, that is just a peculiar expression of the black experience that I, as a white person, can not be expected to credit. It has nothing to do with my white reality. There are no universal human truths, after all. There are only racial (or gendered) truths
BTW I do not believe what I just wrote. I was demonstrating how stupid racial thinking is. I believe that every human being was created in the image of God, and this universal truth allows for a common human experience that surpasses cultural constructs like racial thinking.
Phew.. you had me going until the BTW. Yep, there is only one reality, no matter how much demagogues will try to tell you otherwise. And since the demise of Neanderthals, there is only one humanoid race as well, no matter what census questions say. My white-skinned friend from South Africa loves to put down African-American as a race on questionnaires and forms. And usually hilarity ensues with requisite minds blowing up and foam appearing at the mouth.