Matt Taibbi is one of the investigative journalists that I follow regularly. He has written a number of important books, with his most recent publication
being I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street , chronicling the police murder of Eric Garner.
He recently produced an interesting review of the national best-seller, White Fragility. I have not read this book for a number of reasons, one of them being that I suspected that it was exactly the sort of treatise that Taibbi describes it as being. (I have done that sort of anti-racist “training” before, thank you very much.)
Below is an excerpt of Taibbi’s review. He describes a book promoting a perspective based on the worst aspect of post-modernism. (And I do not think post-modernism is a bad thing, necessarily.)
Or you can read the entire (free) version of it here.
If you have read the book, I am happy to hear your reaction to Taibbi’s critique.
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. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.
If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.”
DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia. . .
. . .For corporate America the calculation is simple. What’s easier, giving up business models based on war, slave labor, and regulatory arbitrage, or benching Aunt Jemima? There’s a deal to be made here, greased by the fact that the “antiracism” prophets promoted in books like White Fragility share corporate Americas instinctive hostility to privacy, individual rights, freedom of speech, etc.
Corporate America doubtless views the current protest movement as something that can be addressed as an H.R. matter, among other things by hiring thousands of DiAngelos to institute codes for the proper mode of Black-white workplace interaction. . .
