I am in my mid-50s and over the last year, my late-20s daughter has moved back into our house after 4 years at an East Coast private university working on a Doctoral Degree, because of Covid.
This is her daily woke worship ritual:
1. Read, remember or discover something that someone said, did or thought (usually from some subreddit or another or some memory of how her mother or me treated her or one of her siblings).
2. Come upstairs from her basement bedroom, fuming.
3. Find her mother or me, or both.
4. Angrily describe the injustice to us.
5. Call the perpetrator (usually us or some other family member) some name: bigot, homophobe, racist, etc.
6. Be outraged until she discovers some other thing that upsets her.
Repeat for infinity.
There is no joy or humor in her life. But she has worshiped this way in our house for months. It is her ritual. Of course, nothing ever changes because that's not the point. The point is to be OUTRAGED.
I think this is what DeAngelo is doing. And everyone of her ilk. Don't resolve anything. Don't make progress. BE OUTRAGED!
“I was excited and felt an immediate need to let them know I was not racist,” she explains, adding: “I proceeded to spend the evening telling them how racist my family was. I shared every racist joke, story, and comment I could remember my family ever making…”
When someone tells you they're incapable of self-awareness, believe them.
If she truly is non-racist, she would simply go to dinner with people of color and enjoy the evening with them talking about sports, family stuff, business, or anything else. Her selfinvolved need to talk about race shows her disregard for anything about the people except their color. That is the definition of racism. She needs to forget about “other white people” and focus on working on her own sad personality.
What is a whole class of well-meaning people to do when they have everything and it's still not enough? Well, they join a cult - anything that will explain both their misery and their abundance. There is a reason why cults - from Charles Manson to EST to Nxium target the richest among us. And why people who struggle to put food on the table are less likely to fall for a charlton who promises them enlightenment.
Robin DiAngelo is a variant of Mad Cow Disease. I live in a small city with a lot of wealthy white liberals who love this Robin DiAngelo crap. It's just guilty white liberal masturbatory masochism. Back before the lockdown if I went to a dinner party I could be certain that one or more of the people at the table would gas on about how much they hated living in a place with so little diversity. I'd sit there thinking it wasn't like anyone forced them to live here. Much cheaper to live in Baltimore or Detroit or the South Side of Chicago. The head of our sweet little botanic garden got his board to read DiAngelo. Then they sent out an email about how racism would not be tolerated anymore at the garden. I asked them for a specific example of racism and they couldn't come up with any. But nonetheless they insisted white supremacy and white fragility are a serious threat. These people are sick in the head. White supremacy and fragility is not a problem. Mentally ill white liberals are the problem.
Thank you Matt. DiAngelo is an awful, self-loathing, condescending, race-baiting Marxist huckster. A good friend of mine, an educated man of color, asked me to read WF. I agreed. When it arrived, I took it on vacation to read on the beach. (white privilege alert!) After finishing the second chapter, I called him to verify that there wasn't some demented child abuse edition of the book that I may have ordered. He assured me that, that thought, was simply more evidence of my natural and incurable white racist behavior. I asked, "And that doesn't even feel, much less sound, racist to you?" The damage this woman has done on adults should be embarrassing to adults.
A white woman who is by her own admission uncomfortable interacting with people from other races assumes all other white people share this trait (we don't), then constructs elaborates rules that she demands we all use in interactions with people who aren't white. Then she makes a ton of money at it.
A story: my partner is Latino and I am white. A few years ago, we went through a period where we were having focused weekly conversations about various issues in our relationship. One week, the issue we chose was "one of us is brown and one of us is white."
Afterwards, I told a progressive white friend about this, and her first reaction was: "Oh, that must have been so uncomfortable!" No, I told her, it was a Tuesday at our house. That was an easy conversation; sex, money and housework are the tough ones.
Fast forward a couple of years, and she's terminating my contract with an agency she works for because I'm not aligned enough with their woke agenda.
The problem isn't that progressives have taken over the conversation about race. The problem is that people who are uncomfortable talking about race have taken over the conversation about race.
I admit I have never read White Fragility. (Life is too short.) But this woman sounds like a horrible human being who, rather than simply admit she is a horrible human being, generalizes her horribleness to all those who look like her and now makes money on it. And she gets away with it because white liberals separate the chosen from the damned by level of guilt.
Another great article, Matt. Keep up the great work! Between you, Glenn and Bari I don't understand how more people aren't frightened by the direction the far left is taking the Democratic Party and how pseudo academic work is being socialized and taught like its peer reviewed scientific theory
Matt writes, "No: DiAngelo’s brand of bourgeois Spencerism is ascendant, tipsy with itself and encouraged now by a Republican backlash. At this point there’s nothing we can do but hang on and wait for the dinner to be over, and God knows how long that will take."
Jesus Christ no, Matt! Nihilistic passivity is not the answer. Standing up to these racist bullies and demanding an instantiation of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream is the answer. "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." Let’s aggressively defend that ideal, not unproductively sneer from behind our computer screens.
I am reminded to the sort of evangelist preacher who rails relentlessly on in detail about the struggle against the temptations of homosexuality. I think at this point, people recognize that they are describing their own inner demons as if everyone had those urges, thereby revealing themselves. DiAngelo does the same thing with racism, but with even less self-awareness.
Pointing out that DiAngelo is racist and dumb isn’t going to cut it. We need to be educating people about the origins of critical race theory, which is a fusion of the ideas of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School and the French postmodernists like Foucault. Only when we have a macrocosmic view of all these ideologies, which have destroyed the American humanities and most of American culture and art, can we repair the damage.
I find the modern self-loathing, self-flagellating white liberal guilt in America to be deeply, deeply troubling. It's coming from people who increasingly seem to be unhinged. Their whole 'born with the Original Sin of being white and thus worthless' schtick seems to me to be nothing more than a contemporary manifestation of the whole post-slavery notion that there will be a revenge race war in America, and the white folks are going to get murdered when it comes. Charles Manson preyed on the same crap in his own wee cult world.
Reading a grovelling, pandering, pathetic book by some mentally unbalanced snake oil saleswoman (she comes from a fucked-up background) won't save you from a never-coming race hate bullet, penitent and fearful whitey, trust me. Ironically, the anti-white racism that filth like this worthless book is perpetuating is starting to have real-world ramifications in race relations, allowing anti-white sentiment to be spoken much more freely, and this, in turn, ratchets up the race-revenge-based paranoia of the people who read this shit to 'absolve' themselves in the first place. What a finger-licking-good Kentucky Fried cluster fuck.
Unfortunately, this race hate contagion has infected the UK. A top-selling book on this increasingly race-fractured, fractious island (we always take our lead from across the Atlantic) recently was Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by a middle class black English writer named Reni Eddo-Lodge. I read as much of this race-hate-cum-anti-white-apologist book as I could. Ms. Eddo-Lodge posited in the text that the reason that Asian grooming gangs in the UK had picked on mostly white girls was because they had absorbed Western beauty standards, were brainwashed into finding white girls more attractive than brown-skinned girls, and thus raped vulnerable teens accordingly! At that point I roared and threw the fucking book across the room, for obvious reasons. I have no desire to read the twisted-mind ravings of a racist lunatic, no matter how critically feted she may be by fawning Guardian-reading, self-loathing sniffy liberal types.
All this racism, more and more pointed towards white people these days, is just divide-and-conquer swill, to give people a bogeyman (black or white) at different-coloured eye level to rail against, instead of looking up at the elites slowly and joyously strangling us all and fighting back against them. Idiots like Eddo-Lodge and DiAngelo make a bad sociological situation much, much worse, whether by accident or by design. And I don't know or care which one of these it is anymore. There's money in them thar race hate peddling. Sick of it all, top to toe, dick to dorsal.
Woke worship!
I am in my mid-50s and over the last year, my late-20s daughter has moved back into our house after 4 years at an East Coast private university working on a Doctoral Degree, because of Covid.
This is her daily woke worship ritual:
1. Read, remember or discover something that someone said, did or thought (usually from some subreddit or another or some memory of how her mother or me treated her or one of her siblings).
2. Come upstairs from her basement bedroom, fuming.
3. Find her mother or me, or both.
4. Angrily describe the injustice to us.
5. Call the perpetrator (usually us or some other family member) some name: bigot, homophobe, racist, etc.
6. Be outraged until she discovers some other thing that upsets her.
Repeat for infinity.
There is no joy or humor in her life. But she has worshiped this way in our house for months. It is her ritual. Of course, nothing ever changes because that's not the point. The point is to be OUTRAGED.
I think this is what DeAngelo is doing. And everyone of her ilk. Don't resolve anything. Don't make progress. BE OUTRAGED!
“I was excited and felt an immediate need to let them know I was not racist,” she explains, adding: “I proceeded to spend the evening telling them how racist my family was. I shared every racist joke, story, and comment I could remember my family ever making…”
When someone tells you they're incapable of self-awareness, believe them.
If she truly is non-racist, she would simply go to dinner with people of color and enjoy the evening with them talking about sports, family stuff, business, or anything else. Her selfinvolved need to talk about race shows her disregard for anything about the people except their color. That is the definition of racism. She needs to forget about “other white people” and focus on working on her own sad personality.
What is a whole class of well-meaning people to do when they have everything and it's still not enough? Well, they join a cult - anything that will explain both their misery and their abundance. There is a reason why cults - from Charles Manson to EST to Nxium target the richest among us. And why people who struggle to put food on the table are less likely to fall for a charlton who promises them enlightenment.
Robin DiAngelo is a variant of Mad Cow Disease. I live in a small city with a lot of wealthy white liberals who love this Robin DiAngelo crap. It's just guilty white liberal masturbatory masochism. Back before the lockdown if I went to a dinner party I could be certain that one or more of the people at the table would gas on about how much they hated living in a place with so little diversity. I'd sit there thinking it wasn't like anyone forced them to live here. Much cheaper to live in Baltimore or Detroit or the South Side of Chicago. The head of our sweet little botanic garden got his board to read DiAngelo. Then they sent out an email about how racism would not be tolerated anymore at the garden. I asked them for a specific example of racism and they couldn't come up with any. But nonetheless they insisted white supremacy and white fragility are a serious threat. These people are sick in the head. White supremacy and fragility is not a problem. Mentally ill white liberals are the problem.
Thank you Matt. DiAngelo is an awful, self-loathing, condescending, race-baiting Marxist huckster. A good friend of mine, an educated man of color, asked me to read WF. I agreed. When it arrived, I took it on vacation to read on the beach. (white privilege alert!) After finishing the second chapter, I called him to verify that there wasn't some demented child abuse edition of the book that I may have ordered. He assured me that, that thought, was simply more evidence of my natural and incurable white racist behavior. I asked, "And that doesn't even feel, much less sound, racist to you?" The damage this woman has done on adults should be embarrassing to adults.
A white woman who is by her own admission uncomfortable interacting with people from other races assumes all other white people share this trait (we don't), then constructs elaborates rules that she demands we all use in interactions with people who aren't white. Then she makes a ton of money at it.
A story: my partner is Latino and I am white. A few years ago, we went through a period where we were having focused weekly conversations about various issues in our relationship. One week, the issue we chose was "one of us is brown and one of us is white."
Afterwards, I told a progressive white friend about this, and her first reaction was: "Oh, that must have been so uncomfortable!" No, I told her, it was a Tuesday at our house. That was an easy conversation; sex, money and housework are the tough ones.
Fast forward a couple of years, and she's terminating my contract with an agency she works for because I'm not aligned enough with their woke agenda.
The problem isn't that progressives have taken over the conversation about race. The problem is that people who are uncomfortable talking about race have taken over the conversation about race.
You should get paid simply for the pain of reading through that. You read it so that we don't have to. You have my deepest gratitude.
I admit I have never read White Fragility. (Life is too short.) But this woman sounds like a horrible human being who, rather than simply admit she is a horrible human being, generalizes her horribleness to all those who look like her and now makes money on it. And she gets away with it because white liberals separate the chosen from the damned by level of guilt.
Another great article, Matt. Keep up the great work! Between you, Glenn and Bari I don't understand how more people aren't frightened by the direction the far left is taking the Democratic Party and how pseudo academic work is being socialized and taught like its peer reviewed scientific theory
Last summer, the CEO of my large corporate company sent out a newsletter praising White Fragility and suggesting we all read it. Tells you something.
Oh please please Matt Taibbi, make this one generally available, it is just too rich & hilarious not to share on Twitter
Matt writes, "No: DiAngelo’s brand of bourgeois Spencerism is ascendant, tipsy with itself and encouraged now by a Republican backlash. At this point there’s nothing we can do but hang on and wait for the dinner to be over, and God knows how long that will take."
Jesus Christ no, Matt! Nihilistic passivity is not the answer. Standing up to these racist bullies and demanding an instantiation of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream is the answer. "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." Let’s aggressively defend that ideal, not unproductively sneer from behind our computer screens.
I am reminded to the sort of evangelist preacher who rails relentlessly on in detail about the struggle against the temptations of homosexuality. I think at this point, people recognize that they are describing their own inner demons as if everyone had those urges, thereby revealing themselves. DiAngelo does the same thing with racism, but with even less self-awareness.
Pointing out that DiAngelo is racist and dumb isn’t going to cut it. We need to be educating people about the origins of critical race theory, which is a fusion of the ideas of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School and the French postmodernists like Foucault. Only when we have a macrocosmic view of all these ideologies, which have destroyed the American humanities and most of American culture and art, can we repair the damage.
I find the modern self-loathing, self-flagellating white liberal guilt in America to be deeply, deeply troubling. It's coming from people who increasingly seem to be unhinged. Their whole 'born with the Original Sin of being white and thus worthless' schtick seems to me to be nothing more than a contemporary manifestation of the whole post-slavery notion that there will be a revenge race war in America, and the white folks are going to get murdered when it comes. Charles Manson preyed on the same crap in his own wee cult world.
Reading a grovelling, pandering, pathetic book by some mentally unbalanced snake oil saleswoman (she comes from a fucked-up background) won't save you from a never-coming race hate bullet, penitent and fearful whitey, trust me. Ironically, the anti-white racism that filth like this worthless book is perpetuating is starting to have real-world ramifications in race relations, allowing anti-white sentiment to be spoken much more freely, and this, in turn, ratchets up the race-revenge-based paranoia of the people who read this shit to 'absolve' themselves in the first place. What a finger-licking-good Kentucky Fried cluster fuck.
Unfortunately, this race hate contagion has infected the UK. A top-selling book on this increasingly race-fractured, fractious island (we always take our lead from across the Atlantic) recently was Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by a middle class black English writer named Reni Eddo-Lodge. I read as much of this race-hate-cum-anti-white-apologist book as I could. Ms. Eddo-Lodge posited in the text that the reason that Asian grooming gangs in the UK had picked on mostly white girls was because they had absorbed Western beauty standards, were brainwashed into finding white girls more attractive than brown-skinned girls, and thus raped vulnerable teens accordingly! At that point I roared and threw the fucking book across the room, for obvious reasons. I have no desire to read the twisted-mind ravings of a racist lunatic, no matter how critically feted she may be by fawning Guardian-reading, self-loathing sniffy liberal types.
All this racism, more and more pointed towards white people these days, is just divide-and-conquer swill, to give people a bogeyman (black or white) at different-coloured eye level to rail against, instead of looking up at the elites slowly and joyously strangling us all and fighting back against them. Idiots like Eddo-Lodge and DiAngelo make a bad sociological situation much, much worse, whether by accident or by design. And I don't know or care which one of these it is anymore. There's money in them thar race hate peddling. Sick of it all, top to toe, dick to dorsal.