White fragility

A very important subject, sadly marred by having been written by a sociologist.

I read the book because I knew that I am the target audience, a white, middle-class American who holds many progressive social values dear. I know I need some help sorting out my thinking on race, so I turned to DiAngelo for that help. Unfortunately, she is an academician, and so her ability to connect with me as an actual human being is severely limited.

Here is why I hate academic writing, using the subject of this book as an example. They took the word “racism,” which everybody has been using forever, with a commonly understood meaning. They redefined it so they could use it to talk about a social phenomenon they wanted to study. Then they say, “No, you're using the word wrong. We changed the meaning; get on board.” They use the power of their position to commit acts of intellectual violence against speakers of the language.

These people literally get paid to study things like racism and talk about them. It's their job to come up with ways to talk about the fact that our entire system is built from the ground up to favor whites and disfavor blacks. It is literally what they do for a living. And yet the best they can do is redefine “racism” so that, perfectly predictably, hoards of people will protest, rightly, “But I'm not a racist. I've been using that word my whole life and I know what it means, and it doesn't mean me.” And then the conversation–the very important conversation which must happen–gets shut down. All because the incompetent academicians can't do their job and come up with a new word or whatever it would take (don't ask me; it's not my job) to have that conversation.

I wish they would do it right, because we can't not talk about this; we can't not make huge changes as individuals and as a society. We have to end racism (in both the normal and academic definitions) and white supremacy. We have to talk about it without putting people off because of badly defined words. Please, sociologists, help us out!

Having said all that, and with reservations put aside, DiAngelo has written a good book and raised many good points and I am glad I read it, difficult though it was.