The Misanthropic Rants of a White Fragilist
Richard Gale & Gary Null PhD
Progressive Radio Network, July 13, 2021
The fury over racism that has been raging across the nation following the criminal, unnecessary deaths African American citizens by police and deranged White supremacists, is now becoming embedded in corporate boardrooms, legislative assemblies, school and university policymaking, and the left and right media. To an outside observer, it may appear that it is reaching a peak of many diverse disjointed voices, sometimes seemingly incoherent, speaking against and past each other. When issues of race become so polarized within a politicalized social context, the entire message for raising anti-racist awareness becomes lost in the static. But that happens to be the place we find ourselves now. Fortunately, many progressive anti-racial organizations and local movements, such as Black Lives Matter, Color of Change, Live Free USA, Resource Generation, Rainbow Coalition, Equal Justice Initiative, among others, have managed to keep themselves above the cacophony of institutional noise. In the past we have always supported public demonstrations against social injustice in all of its forms and manifestations.
Over the years, in our efforts to share unbiased criticism and constructive solutions into controversies and debates over racism and social and economic inequality, we have recently singled out Robin DiAngelo’s writings and her bestseller White Fragility. We have done so because we find that the deeper underpinnings of her message are fundamentally flawed and put forth an elitist position that theoretically silences any constructive debate about race, even if held on neutral grounds. Attorney David Burke describes the book as “snake oil masquerading as insight.” Moreover, White Fragility is intellectually fragile, impoverished by a lack of convincing facts to buttress her premises and in some cases mangling facts altogether in order to convince Whites of their guilt-ridden birthright. For example, her claim that Congress is 90 percent White hasn’t been true for several decades. Then we find some twisted logic such as “I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color. I define a white progressive as any white person who thinks he or she is not racist, or is less racist.”
White Fragility is largely based upon the controversial theory of implicit bias that attempts to explain racism as a deep-seated systemic problem. Implicit bias is defined as “unconscious favoritism toward or prejudice against people of a particular race, gender, etc.” It is understood as being based upon unconscious associations and feelings. Despite DiAngelo basing her premise upon implicit bias as something hardwired, as if it were programmed into the brain at birth, she notes “we simply do not understand how… implicit bias work.” This is perhaps one of her very few correct observations. A growing number of psychologists are showing empirically that in practice the Implicit Association Test (IAT) is horribly inaccurate. The theory fails to predict behavior. Implicit bias training, which DiAngelo regularly offers to educational institutions and corporations, has been largely unsuccessful. In his book Reinventing Racism: Why White Fragility Is the Wrong Way to Think About Racial Inequality, economist and philosopher Jonathan Church has analyzed the deep flaws in implicit bias theory in great depth. Together this raises a further question as to whether implicit bias actually exists as any kind of absolute condition. Since DiAngelo believes that all Whites own unhealthy racial perceptions towards people of color, and therefore they are in principle irredeemable, she is implying this implicit racial bias is genetically inherited. Consequently, DiAngelo is preaching a form of cloaked scientific determinism that could have enormous detrimental repercussions in the future if it were to become a standard course in our schools’ menus. In effect, similar to the doctrine of scientific materialism espoused by the larger community of neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, modern Skeptics, and the New Atheists, she is advancing a misanthropic dogma against the entire human race. This is secular religion at its very worst.
However, not dissimilar to the delusional metaphysical realism held by cognitive scientists who believe the mind and consciousness are only the products of neural firings and dendrites, White Fragility’s critical foundation is not even a conceivable scientific theory. It is bereft of sound empirical evidence. It is frankly illogical. And because DiAngelo has written a national best-seller, the universities, school systems and media have swallowed it whole. Perhaps because DiAngelo holds a PhD, she can write gibberish and therefore it is fine and permissible. Here, White Fragility’s gibberish is simply something untestable. All you need is a dash of blind faith, spiced up with very low self-esteem and a propensity towards acute episodes of identity anxiety, and a person can believe in the existence of anything.
If DiAngelo were to substitute “White” in her book’s title with any other racial or ethnic group, it is difficult to imagine a university would keep her employed. It would be perceived as blatant racism. It would elicit a collective outrage and no doubt she would unanimously be canceled. Hopefully the White Fragility craze is running out of steam. Whatever hint of intelligent rigor that may be found in DiAngelo’s book is being quickly observed as a hoax, a sleight of hand. Her recently published follow-up book Nice Racism is a further excursion into a theater of the absurd. It has been bombarded with terrible reviews on Amazon. Matt Taibbi describes his anguished experience to read Nice Racism as “being strapped to an ice floe in a vast ocean while someone applies a metronome hammer-strikes to the same spot on your temporal bone over and over.”
Our position on racism is that there is absolutely no evidence that it is biologically ordained. We are living in a time when our society is ethically and spiritually bankrupt; in such a decayed social environment the popularity of fanatical extremist views is expected. However, we mustn’t undermine the elasticity behind our rational conceptions, biases and prejudices, attractions and fears thereby making them susceptible for radical change. These are nothing other than mental and emotional afflictions within everyone’s means to subdue and even eradicate. Are there cases of individuals who display the ability to transcend racial differences and view others equally and indiscriminately with the clarity of untainted loving kindness, compassion and equanimity?
One immediate example is Garchen Rinpoche, the subject of the inspiring documentary For the Benefit of All Beings about a highly accomplished Tibetan yogi’s life before and after serving 20 years in a Chinese prison and labor camps in Tibet. Garchen Rinpoche shares his tortuous experiences at the hands of his Chinese guards and how this gave birth to a deep compassion for the suffering and delusions of all peoples, including his captors. Today he is widely recognized across the world, even within many Chinese communities, as a living embodiment of compassion and kindness, an example of our human capacity to transcend racial and ethnic differences.
Examples like Garchen Rinpoche and many of the world’s greatest peacemakers convince us that anyone of sound mind is capable of achieving an awareness far above unconscious biases. However, it requires a deep commitment to investigate the nature of our thoughts, feelings and memories without consciously identifying or cognitively fusing with them. We mustn’t expect government or even educational institutions on their own to undertake proper ethical actions to reduce racial strife and discrimination. It requires our individual and collective participation. There isn’t a US Department of Ethics and Kindness in Washington to guide policies to lessen racism in the nation; if there were, the Department would certainly be susceptible to being captured and perverted by Congress’ corporate masters for some kind of politicized social gain.
Racism must be confronted individually at a deeper cognitive level through deep introspection if there is to be any hope for gradually succeeding in lessening racism altogether. We need to each discover for ourselves that racial biases in and of themselves are based upon prior causal conditions. They are not hardwired into the psyche’s unconscious as DiAngelo and implicit bias theory suggest or genetically determined. To believe otherwise is a conceptual apparition, but nevertheless a ghostly specter that can be easily uprooted and purged if we make an effort to observe directly our own thoughts, emotions and afflictions. That can begin by acting contrary to what DiAngelo suggests: cease reifying our baseless and biased assumptions onto others and the world around us. It has been our failure to undertake this personal challenge in the privacy of our own mind that continues to erode civility and is turning the nation into spiritually barren wasteland.
