The Most Important Line Robin DiAngelo Ever Wrote (and Which Everyone Missed)
A maze of mirrors whose every image reflects ... what, exactly?
Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility and leader of countless corporate workshops, has written another book. Or, maybe she hasn’t. Matt Taibbi (link below) makes a compelling case that Nice Racism, DiAngelo’s new book, is merely a rehashing of White Fragility. Matt writes that Nice Racism makes the same points over and over, repeating the same short list of ideas present in the earlier book. He likens the experience to “being strapped to an ice floe in a vast ocean while someone applies metronome hammer-strikes to the same spot on your temporal bone over and over,” a description that certainly lessens any desire I might have had to buy it.
Not that I did. I read White Fragility and would have written about it myself, had it not been so ably covered by people like Matt and The New Republic’s J. C. Pan. I wouldn’t be writing about it now, in fact, if it weren’t for the fact that neither Matt nor DiAngelo’s other critics have quoted the one sentence I consider her most important and revealing. It appear in the first few pages of White Fragility, right after she declares that “This book is intended for us, white progressives who so often—despite our conscious intentions—make life so difficult for people of color.”
White progressives undoubtedly do make life difficult for people of color on a regular basis. They’re products of their culture, after all. But then comes the line that brought me up short. When I recall how it felt when I first read it, I sometimes imagine that cartoon sound effect of a film reel screeching to a halt. The line reads as follows:
“I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color.”
Wait, what? Did I get that right? Back up and let me read it again:
“I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color.”
There is so much delusion packed into this short sentence that it’s hard to know where to begin. Let’s start with a brief material analysis of the conditions faced by Black people in this country. Black household wealth is, on average, one-tenth that of white household wealth. That means Black families are far more likely to face daily difficulties paying for food, housing, transportation, medical care, and other essentials.
The unemployment rate for Black Americans is typically double that of non-Hispanic whites. As of this writing, the white unemployment rate is 5.9 percent and the Black unemployment rate is 10 percent. I’m pretty sure that causes a lot of “daily damage.”
Black Americans are also twice as likely to be impoverished as white Americans. Black children are three times as likely to live in poverty.
The average Black household earns 59 cents for every dollar earned in an average White household. The difference comes to roughly $29,000 per year.
The incarceration rate for Black Americans is six times that of white people.
Even before the pandemic, Black people died 3.6 years earlier on average than white people.
The infant mortality rates for Black infants is 2.3 times that of White people.
Black children are 7-10 times more likely to die of asthma as White children. (As someone with severe asthma myself, I know how terrifying a bad attack can be.)
Communities of color, especially Black and Hispanic, are hardest-hit by environmental pollution. For example Hispanic and Black communities have higher exposure to 14 critical pollutants. Landfills and hazardous waste sites are most frequently located in Black and Brown communities. Water contamination is also greater in communities of color, which are also disproportionately suffering from the consequences of climate change. (Think New Orleans after Katrina, for example.)
This is far from an exhaustive list of structural racism’s effects on the lives of Black and Brown people in this country. But feel free to read it again, and then repeat after me: “I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color.”
It’s not just that this sentence is wrong. It’s also profoundly narcissistic. It suggests that the behavior of DiAngelo and white people like her is more important than any of the quantifiable miseries many Americans of color face every day.
I have often thought it would be interesting to commission a survey of Black and Brown single parents working in the fast food industry and ask them:
“Would you rather have a living wage, paid sick leave and family leave, and regular work hours so you can arrange for child care (which has been made affordable), or would you rather have a million white people reflect on their innately racist nature in expensive workshops?”
I don’t have the right to speak for others, but I can hazard a guess about the results.
This is Di Angelo’s critique of white progressives: “None of our energy (is) going into what we need to be doing for the rest of our lives: engaging in ongoing self-awareness, continuing education, relationship building, and actual antiracist practice.”
Here’s my critique of White progressives: They’re not fighting hard enough for a Green New Deal that would bring jobs to communities of color and reduce the deadly poisons in their air and water. They’re not building a new labor movement that will bring good jobs to Black and Brown Americans, as unions once did. They’re not considering bold new programs to address wealth inequality. They’re not fighting to cancel student debt, which will reduce the racial wealth gap. They’re not demanding a minimum wage of at least $15 (it should actually be much more), which would boost earnings for nearly one in three Black workers and one in four Hispanic workers.
Instead of raising these concrete opportunities to reduce the “daily damage” done to people of color, DiAngelo offers anecdotes like one Matt cites about her inappropriate behavior a dinner party with a Black couple in college. She doesn’t have much to say about the Black and Brown victims of structural racism who can’t attend college at all.
(In that anecdote, DiAngelo also throws in that she was “a minority myself—a woman in a committed relationship with another woman,” making it an act of performative self-abasement that also affirms she’s not one of the really bad oppressors. As she often does, she exculpates herself even as she pretends to criticize herself.)
Matt observes that DiAngelo’s attacks on individualism sound more than a little like white extremist speech. But there’s another way to look at it, which is that she isn’t rejecting individualism at all: she’s simply elevating it to a group level. DiAngelo insists we are all defined by our group identities. But from then on it’s “me, me, me.” Look at white me at a dinner party. Look at white me being insensitive to a Black colleague. Look at white me doing the right thing and owning my own actions. We white “me’s” need to spend the rest of our lives talking about our collective “me-ness.”
They gazed into the Abyss, the Abyss gazed back, and both are the eternal Me.
This problem isn’t limited to DiAngelo. It’s part of a broader phenomenon that might be called “collective individualism.” This worldview says there is no longer a national “we” of citizens, much less a global “we” of human beings. There are only collective “Me’s.” Place a crown on another incarnation of Me, and presto! I’m a monarch.
Race and structural racism are social realities that hurt and kill every day, but the DiAngelos of this world don’t seem to see it. They look into the faces of people of color and see only themselves. They live in a mirror maze where everyone gazes lovingly at their own reflection and pretend it’s you they see. Money, health, shelter: they don’t exist. There is only the image, the maze, a corridor of “Me’s” refracting into infinity.
The result is an anodyne politics of symbolism over substance, as empty as a mirror and as breakable as glass. It offers perfect political cover for bankers who take the knee for Black Lives Matter while keeping the billions their banks robbed from Black communities.
I believe it’s important for white people to learn about racist behavior and work on changing it in themselves. But that’s a hollow and ultimately solipsistic exercise if it isn’t paired with a fight to change people’s daily lives. Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) said, “Ultimately, the economic foundations of this country must be shaken if black people are to control their lives.” That is the outcome corporations hope to avoid when they hire DiAngelo and others like her and require their employees to attend their sessions. It’s a safe bet that those sessions don’t include dialogues about the best ways to transfer the corporation’s wealth to poor people.
“Progressive” is a word that means different things to different people. To the extent that it’s descended from “liberal,” as that word was defined in my parents’ era, DiAngelo’s comment stands in stark opposition to the values that word summons. Old-school white liberals may have been naïve, but they believed in social and economic justice for oppressed groups. They knew that racism was real, even if they could not yet perceive some of the forms we recognize today.
Many progressives today, however flawed they may be in character, fight for policies that would concretely improve daily life for millions of people of color. The worst progressives, the ones who never examine their own innate prejudices, undoubtedly hurt others in their daily lives. That should stop. But people of color are dying every day because of material conditions. Sensitivity gurus like DiAngelo say their goal is to fight racism. But their real role is to inoculate wealthy white people and corporations against the anger of the multitudes and the prickling of their own consciences. They are the sensitive antennae of structural racism.
In one sense, DiAngelo’s sentence can be read as nothing more than a cynical marketing ploy. If progressives think they’re the worst thing people of color face every day, that’s more reason to buy her books and attend her trainings. As analysis, however, it blithely dismisses real human suffering even as it reinforces the conditions that perpetuate it.
To claim that progressives “cause the greatest daily damage to people of color” says nothing about progressives, but it says everything about Robin DiAngelo.
Links, notes, and further reading:
Our Endless Dinner With Robin DiAngelo, Matt Taibbi, TK News https://taibbi.substack.com/p/our-endless-dinner-with-robin-diangelo
On “White Fragility,” Matt Taibbi, TK News https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility
Why Diversity Training Isn’t Enough, J.C. Pan, The New Republic https://newrepublic.com/article/156032/diversity-training-isnt-enough-pamela-newkirk-robin-diangelo-books-reviews
Robin DiAngelo Is The “Vanilla Ice” Of Anti-Racism, Steve QJ, Medium https://medium.com/illumination-curated/robin-diangelo-is-the-vanilla-ice-of-anti-racism-c163a76655f5
Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpsee_e16.htm
Systematic Inequality, Center for American Progress https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2018/02/21/447051/systematic-inequality/
5 Things to Know About Communities of Color and Environmental Justice, CAP https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/news/2016/04/25/136361/5-things-to-know-about-communities-of-color-and-environmental-justice/
Environmental Racism Is Real, According to Trump's EPA, Vann R. Newkirk II, The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/the-trump-administration-finds-that-environmental-racism-is-real/554315/
The Economic State of Black America in 2020, Joint Economic Committee, US Congress
Black workers face two of the most lethal preexisting conditions for coronavirus—racism and economic inequality, Elise Gould and Valerie Wilson, Economic Policy Institute https://www.epi.org/publication/black-workers-covid/
Labor rights and civil rights: One intertwined struggle for all workers, Kyle K. Moore, Economic Policy Institute https://www.epi.org/blog/labor-rights-and-civil-rights-one-intertwined-struggle-for-all-workers/
Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025 would lift the pay of 32 million workers, Cooper, Mokhiber, and Zipperer, Economic Policy Institute https://www.epi.org/publication/raising-the-federal-minimum-wage-to-15-by-2025-would-lift-the-pay-of-32-million-workers/
Achieving Economic and Racial Justice for Black Workers: Policy Priorities for 2021 and Beyond https://www.epi.org/event/achieving-economic-and-racial-justice-for-black-workers-policy-priorities-for-2021-and-beyond/
Infant Mortality and African Americans, US Dept. of Health and Human Services
https://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/omh/browse.aspx?lvl=4&lvlid=23
Bold Policies for Economic Justice, William Darity, Jr. and Darrick Hamilton, The Review of Black Political Economy https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1007/s12114-011-9129-8
The comedian Brother Theodore paraphrased Nietzsche thusly: “I gazed into the Abyss, the Abyss gazed back, and neither one of us liked what we saw.”
Image: The Lady From Shanghai, by Orson Welles
Amen. DiAngelo's books are full of unsupported assertions that stoke liberal white guilt but offer little-to-nothing by way of a political strategy for achieving social and economic equality. What's more, the right-wing has a field day with some of the more absurd excerpts, and the result is that the entire social justice left is made to look absurd.
I do think she made a perfectly valid observation in her first book about how white people get defensive when confronted with accusations of racism, but okay, of course people get defensive about that, just like all humans get defensive when they feel themselves to be under attack. This defensiveness is why, I believe, so many corporate DEI seminars are ineffective or even backfire and why most conservatives would rather have a colonoscopy than attend one.
I think Taibbi goes too far in impugning her motives -- we really have no idea what her intentions are in promoting this line of thinking and she might be very well-intentioned. I'd rather focus on the merits of her ideas than speculate as to her motives.