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Published by Beacon Press in 2018, has now become . The book鈥檚 success did not come by chance.
White Fragility鈥檚 author, Robin DiAngelo, has nurtured the concept since 2011, with a paper she published in the . A former education professor, DiAngelo for the much more lucrative business of providing racial sensitivity training to those unable to grapple with the racial realities of their workplaces.
Despite grandiose claims of establishing a 鈥渟ociology of dominance,鈥� the book contains little thought-provoking material and makes several problematic assumptions.
Insider status
DiAngelo centres on what she identifies as the racism of the well-educated liberal elite, whom she perceives as enacting racism while maintaining a progressive, anti-racist stance. She then positions herself as an insider in this cultural milieu, using this vantage point somehow to both challenge racism and, along the way, build a career.
White fragility is a form of racial control that protects 鈥渨hite dominance,鈥� which is why DiAngelo seems to be teaching others how to manage its toxic display. DiAngelo positions herself as the only one capable of understanding the racist meanings of socio-cultural interactions and the only one to make a teachable moment out of it.
Homogeneity over difference
First, DiAngelo takes whiteness to be homogeneous. Phrases like 鈥渨hite collective,鈥� 鈥渨hite dynamic,鈥� 鈥渨hite voice,鈥� 鈥渨hite frame of reference,鈥� 鈥渨hite worldview鈥� and 鈥渨hite experience鈥� are all used to suggest a certain racial sameness.
Seeing racialization as containing different identities while denying the fact that , falsely suggests that all whiteness is to be treated equally. It is a similar stretch to suggest that whiteness makes one de facto entitled.
Consider the treatment of during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their have made the headlines. How reasonable is it to consider these workers entitled when they are not even extended basic human rights?
Capitalism and labour
Second, DiAngelo takes as racial markers factors that would be more fruitfully treated as aspects of systems that distribute advantages and disadvantages. She writes: 鈥淲hites produce and reinforce the dominant narratives of society, such as individualism and meritocracy.鈥�
But there is no race that could possibly have individualism ingrained in its collective thinking. Rather, it is something learned through the . What would DiAngelo say about whites in the post-Soviet or the post-communist bloc? Clearly, individualism, a value closely related to capitalism, was not a feature of the former communist regimes.
The book also assumes that there is some kind of an unspoken agreement among whites to protect their societal advantages, that cuts across class and other group allegiances. But this is not universal. While race and class are closely connected in the United States, as evidenced by the fact that racialized people are over-represented in , in the United Kingdom for example, . In Greece, .
A U.S.-centred understanding of race
Regardless of whether one grows up in Germany, the U.S. or Albania, DiAngelo argues, any person is socialized in a racialized context. New immigrants, she states, although they might not feel white and have stronger ethnic attachments, will have a 鈥渨hite experience externally鈥� as long as they pass as white. It is an astonishing display of arrogance to suggest that racial socialization does not differ by culture, ethnicity and nationality.
DiAngelo further illustrates her point with the example of a German woman who reiterated in a training session that she knew little about racism because she grew up in Germany. DiAngelo challenged the German woman to think about American films depicting African Americans and the messages she received in childhood about people from Africa. Despite the gross generalization of all Africans being the same and despite the hegemonic reasoning that American values permeate the world, could it just be that the woman in question has watched more German films, since she was not raised in the U.S.?
Such thinking disregards that other countries have their own : rural migrant workers versus urban dwellers in China, caste in India or class in South Korea, for example.
Racialist classifications
In arguing that white supremacy describes a socio-political system of domination based on racial categories, DiAngelo sees no issue with relying on this very same system of racial classification to draw her arguments.
Yet such racialist thinking is keeping white supremacy intact. What makes one white, for example? It is the biological 鈥�,鈥� as the late sociologist Stuart Hall would say 鈥� skin colour in this case.
Arguing that race and whiteness are social constructs but taking skin colour as the marker to define race is not that different from the 19th-century biological racism that linked race not with the colour of one鈥檚 skin but with or .
The refusal to consider contextual differences within whiteness maintains a binary understanding of race. Whiteness is either idealized by the mainstream or scorned by critical race theorists, as historian and philosopher have long argued. In both cases, whiteness is benchmarked as the standard of comparison vis-脿-vis race.
Understanding differences within whiteness might open up possibilities to overcome essentialist thinking, alter the distribution of material effects associated with racial classifications, build solidarity and construct alternatives to profiting from diversity training.
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