A Fragile Moment
By: Joanna Cohen
Tags: Books, Politics, Culture, Race, Philosophy

The left could hand Trump four more years

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

When I first started writing about Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility in early June, I could find exactly one other writer who was willing to call out this “must-read” for the exquisite work of hucksterism it actually is.

That was Jonathan Church, who, in August 2018 wrote a piece for the website Quilette called “The Problem with ‘White Fragility’ Theory.”

Nearly two years passed before Church wrote another piece called, “Dear White People: Please Do Not Read Robin DiAngelo’s ‘White Fragility.”

Now, at long last, more writers, journalists, and authors as well as educators and just really smart thinkers are starting to shine a light on the cult of DiAngelo and her dangerous, absurd ideas. (Comparisons to Scientology and tent revivals are not uncommon.)

First, we have reporter, author, and Rolling Stone contributor Matt Taibbi’s scathing and brilliant dismantling of White Fragility, published on his website on June 28th. He writes:

“DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory.”

Then there’s Columbia University professor John McWhorter’s July 15th piece for The Atlantic, “The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility,” in which he writes:

“I have learned that one of America’s favorite advice books of the moment is actually a racist tract. Despite the sincere intentions of its author, the book diminishes Black people in the name of dignifying us.”

And later: “White Fragility is, in the end, a book about how to make certain educated white readers feel better about themselves. DiAngelo’s outlook rests upon a depiction of Black people as endlessly delicate poster children within this self-gratifying fantasy about how white America needs to think — or, better, stop thinking. Her answer to white fragility, in other words, entails an elaborate and pitilessly dehumanizing condescension toward Black people. The sad truth is that anyone falling under the sway of this blinkered, self-satisfied, punitive stunt of a primer has been taught, by a well-intentioned but tragically misguided pastor, how to be racist in a whole new way.”

On July 16th, Jonathan Chait wrote a piece for New York Magazine called “Is the Anti-Racism Training Industry Just Peddling White Supremacy?”, which is accompanied by a photo of DiAngelo. He writes:

“It’s easy enough to see why executives and school administrators look around at a country exploding in righteous indignation at racism, and see the class of consultants selling their program of mystical healing as something that looks vaguely like a solution. But one day DiAngelo’s legions of customers will look back with embarrassment at the time when a moment of awakening to the depth of American racism drove them to embrace something very much like racism itself.”

I’ve been trying to tell you, people. Do you believe me now?

The same day McWhorter’s piece came out, The New York Times Magazine published a story by Daniel Bergner called, “‘White Fragility’ Is Everywhere. But Does Antiracism Training Work?,” which is also accompanied by a photo of… guess who?

I’d been waiting for a piece like this.

Not because I give a rat’s rump about anything DiAngelo has to say, but because I found it odd that an author could have a book on the Times best seller list for nearly 100 weeks without any major magazine doing an in-depth profile of her.

Sure, DiAngelo has made countless appearances on television and radio and podcasts, but she always speaks about the ideas in her book, never about herself — or never much about herself.

If you Google, say, author Elizabeth Gilbert, whose book Eat Pray Love was on the Times best seller list for 187 weeks, you can find out the city in which she grew up, her mother’s name, the titles of short stories and articles she’s written and for whom, what time she gets up in the morning, her favorite karaoke bars. In other words: details.

The Times magazine piece says DiAngelo grew up “around the Bay Area in California.”

Huh?

It includes the names of people she addressed in her antiracist workshops and corporate presentations. (Cha-ching!) But when the article gets to her personal life, it becomes oddly vague. For example, it mentions but does not name her parents, her two sisters, or her daughter. It says she “took a job counseling pregnant teenagers,” but doesn’t say where.

As a former magazine factchecker, I can tell you that kind of vagueness would not have flown with our editors. At best, the lack of detail would’ve been seen as laziness on the part of the reporter. At worst, it would’ve raised questions about whether the subject had any intent to conceal or deceive.

In either case, the missing information would need to be nailed down prior to publication— not only to make the story as rich as possible but, more important, to make sure we hadn’t been had. Good writers don’t just take their subject’s word for it. They independently verify everything they’ve been told to make sure it’s true.

Also, there’s a quote in the Times piece in which DiAngelo mentions a bit of encouragement she gave herself at the beginning of her career as a diversity trainer: “I’m gay, I’m liberal, I can do this.”

Normally, this would be an unremarkable line. But I found it odd because back in June, when I tried to find background or biographical information on the woman the entire woke world has hitched its wagon to and could basically find none — a Google search revealed that DiAngelo is married to a man named Jason Toews, who, according to the minutes of a 2019 City of Evanston, Illinois Board of Ethics meeting is also her assistant.

Again, absolutely nothing wrong with that, but why does the Times profile not mention it? Seems like kind of a big piece of information to leave out — just one missing detail in a single story about DiAngelo that’s part of a larger story about DiAngelo that’s missing a lot of details, and makes me ask: Who is this woman?

This tendency to leave out the details exists throughout White Fragility as well. As I read it (well, listened on Audible while resisting the urge to knock myself unconscious with a blunt object,) I kept wanting to call up the (always racially identified, but otherwise pretty opaque) friends and co-facilitators and workshop attendees DiAngelo mentions in her many cherry-picked anecdotes to find out if what she says happened actually did.

DiAngelo’s website says she’s “been a consultant, educator and facilitator for over 20 years on issues of racial and social justice” and that she’s worked with “a wide-range of organizations including private, non-profit, and governmental.” Again, no names, no specifics, no details.

The “Personal” section of her website is a single paragraph: “I grew up poor and white. While my class oppression has been relatively visible to me, my race privilege has not. In my efforts to uncover how race has shaped my life, I have gained deeper insight by placing race in the center of my analysis and asking how each of my other group locations have socialized me to collude with racism. In so doing, I have been able to address in greater depth my multiple locations and how they function together to hold racism in place. I now make the distinction that I grew up poor and white, for my experience of poverty would have been different had I not been white. (DiAngelo, 2006).”

The need for DiAngelo to cite herself in her own bio struck me as strange. Since she doesn’t say where that passage came from, I looked it up. It’s the first paragraph of an essay she wrote for The Official Journal of the National Association of Multicultural Education. So, she pulled some sentences from her own work that tell us virtually nothing about her, but includes the words “race” or “racism” five times?

This lack of specificity might be somewhat less worrisome if the following words didn’t come up repeatedly in connection with DiAngelo in the 1,226 comments on the Times piece, in recent Amazon reviews of White Fragility, and in what I can only hope will be an increasing number of journalistic and academic exposés:

Grifter.

Con artist.

Scammer.

Charlatan.

And my personal fave: PT Barnum.

I’ve been asking, begging, people to stop dropping cash in this phony preacher’s collection plate, go through deprogramming, and come back over to our side. The critical thinking side. The “we won’t cancel you” side. Because the W.F. cult members and the distinctly not merry band of cancel warriors out there are starting to resemble the very thing they hate most.

Taibbi nails this in his July 20th piece, “The Left is Now the Right,” he writes:

“The political right and left in America have traded villainous cultural pathologies. Things we once despised about the right have been amplified a thousand-fold on the flip.”

If you think that’s a huge exaggeration — think again.

To those who criticized the letter in Harper’s Magazine that warned about the increasing “ideological conformity” on the left, who called the letter just another example of people in positions of power using their rarified platform to sound an alarm over a trend that doesn’t exist — you are incorrect.

First, cancellation and the threat thereof is most definitely a trend. You may only hear about the cases that make the news, but I can promise you it’s everywhere.

Take aside any teacher or professor and ask if they feel like they’re walking on eggshells all the time. Take aside any journalist and ask how many pieces they’ve declined to write out of fear.

Take aside the former president and former board chairman of The Poetry Foundation who resigned after the statement they put out in support of Black Lives Matter was slammed on social media for being woefully insufficient. (Please read the letter and see if you’re not left asking, “Really? Really?”)

Ask the opinion writers and editors at The New York Times. (If you haven’t read Bari’s Weiss’s letter of resignation from the paper, you should immediately.) Ask Princeton professor Joshua Katz, whose cancellation was the subject of a July 14th piece by The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board.

Critics of the Harper’s letter also claim that the issues it raises are just a distraction from “what we really need to be talking about” like systemic racism.

Who’s trying to distract from that? Can’t we walk and chew gum at the same time?

Of course, systemic racism is a problem. But so is the fact that teachers can’t teach and journalists can’t write. So is the fact the parents are pulling their kids out of progressive schools because they’re sick of banging their heads against a brick wall.

And it is not just white people who feel this way. Not by a longshot.

The Harper’s letter was signed by 153 people, including Salman Rushdie, Bill T. Jones, and Atul Gawande. Not to mention Gloria Steinem, Garry Kasparov, and Noam Chomsky — not exactly folks who aim to “distract” from the most important social and political issues of the day.

Those who signed the letter are ideologically, ethnically, racially, and professionally diverse. And they’re trying, with grace and dignity and reason to stop a train that’s barreling in the wrong direction.

You don’t have to agree with every opinion held by every person who signed the letter. I disagree with a lot of them. But not on the need to protect open and civil debate. When a columnist or academic or author (what up, Robin D.) writes something I take issue with, I make my case against it. Or not. But I don’t call for their erasure.

I don’t attempt to cow them into silence or bully them into accepting my ideas or policy demands — because I know they’d only be doing that out of fear. And from that fear would grow resentment and anger and, eventually, hate.

That’s when the real trouble begins.

In his July 24th column for The New York Times, “Trump Doesn’t Speak for the ‘Silent Majority’,” Jamelle Bouie writes, “To Trump and his allies, the country is filled with “shy” supporters just waiting for the right time to reveal themselves; they think they can rally this public to their side with a violent demonstration of ‘law and order.’ They think they can run the Nixon playbook again, not realizing that to the broad middle of the country, they are the ones who represent the politics of division, disruption and disorder.”

I could not disagree more.

I believe there is a silenced majority — of all colors — in this country. And it’s not “shy” Trump supporters on the right, it’s exasperated Trump haters on the left. It’s not right-wingers who are excited by the revival of the Nixon playbook, it’s lefties who are dismayed that their own have become the circular firing squad President Obama warned about.

It’s a maddening frustration over how people on the left don’t see that by trashing the Harper’s letter, by Twitter-shaming people out of their jobs, by evangelizing White Fragility— they are driving their allies directly toward Donald Trump.

People who could never imagine supporting Trump are starting to get where the guy is coming from. Just like his supporters on the right, they feel stymied and shut down, baffled and disheartened. By continuing to induce that response, the left runs the very real risk of producing a widespread if quiet backlash that stems not from rationality but from emotion. A whole bunch of “f-you woke folk” votes, if you will. Combine those with the Bernie Bros who won’t go for Joe and what do you get? Four more years of you know who.

And when it comes to denying “people in power” the ability to express their opinions, please don’t start with the argument that it’s about time they got a taste of their own medicine.

No one — repeat, no one — on the left is arguing that there’s not a power imbalance along racial lines in virtually every institution in America that must be corrected. We want to correct it.

No one on the left is arguing that the racism which prevents people of color from getting better education, health care, housing, and jobs doesn’t need to be eradicated. We want to eradicate it.

But that is a different discussion.

This discussion is about what happens when a whole bunch of smart people suddenly become either brainwashed by some dumb book or hardened by misguided dogma to the point where rational, reasonable, open debate becomes impossible.

Make no mistake. Despite all the rosy poll numbers for Biden, I guarantee there is a large and growing group of voters on the left who are so fed up that they will vote for Trump in November.

In public, they’ll say all the right things about racial justice and equality, and in private they’ll cast their vote for the worst president in history.

And if he wins a second term, it won’t just be because of those on the right who think being asked to wear a face covering is an affront to their personal liberty. It’ll also be because of those on the left who were too angry, righteous, inflexible, and indoctrinated to see that they’ve been steadily paving the way for four more years of Trump.

When it happens, don’t say I didn’t warn you.