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White Fragility

Craig4 said:
I've read the book and was not impressed. For one thing, she writes herself a get out of criticism free card by saying if you disagree with her methodology you're being a racist. That said, her methodology is fundamentally flawed. She appeals to her own authority and expertise and relies heavily on anecdotes of incidents that happened during her workshops to make points. There is plenty of solid, scientific data out there on the impacts of systemic racism but you won't find it in her book. The "Feedback" methods she suggests are at best impractical and at worst condescending to the people of color she is trying to champion.
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The idea that a white person could escape any responsibility to address the problems of Systemic Racism by reading a book and engaging in a ritual of self flagellation is apealing enough to get her book on the best seller list, but has little to do with actual realistic change.

All of my friends of color have just wanted to be treated like normal human beings.


At worst, the massive money campaign that DiAngelo has engaged in is not just insulting to people of color, it is prohibitive to the actual steps needed to bring about racial justice.

It certainly has brought about unfortunate situations where people have tried to address issues of racism with more racism

https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-interrupting-whiteness-training

The City of Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights sent an email inviting “white City employees” to attend a training session on “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness,”

The trainers explain that white people have internalized a sense of racial superiority, which has made them unable to access their “humanity” and caused “harm and violence” to people of color. The trainers claim that “individualism,” “perfectionism,” “intellectualization,” and “objectivity” are all vestiges of this internalized racial oppression and must be abandoned in favor of social-justice principles.

As part of this process, white employees must abandon their “white normative behavior” and learn to let go of their “comfort,” “physical safety,” “social status,” and “relationships with some other white people.”
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Segregating workers by race, and having Black people being told that they need to give up their physical safety, relationships with other black people, and told that they need to 'stop being so black" is the exact kind of thing that civil rights leaders have been trying to end for over 60 years.

Now you have people who have decided that they have developed methods far superior to people like MLK, and have decided that the BEST way to fight issues of racism is with more racism.
 
Craig4 said:
I've read the book and was not impressed. For one thing, she writes herself a get out of criticism free card by saying if you disagree with her methodology you're being a racist. That said, her methodology is fundamentally flawed. She appeals to her own authority and expertise and relies heavily on anecdotes of incidents that happened during her workshops to make points. There is plenty of solid, scientific data out there on the impacts of systemic racism but you won't find it in her book. The "Feedback" methods she suggests are at best impractical and at worst condescending to the people of color she is trying to champion.
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Well, McWhorter says her book is racist. This is why I would like to see her in a debate with him to she can whitesplain why she knows more about racism than he does.
 
HoverBoarder said:
The idea that a white person could escape any responsibility to address the problems of Systemic Racism by reading a book and engaging in a ritual of self flagellation is apealing enough to get her book on the best seller list, but has little to do with actual realistic change.

All of my friends of color have just wanted to be treated like normal human beings.


At worst, the massive money campaign that DiAngelo has engaged in is not just insulting to people of color, it is prohibitive to the actual steps needed to bring about racial justice.

It certainly has brought about unfortunate situations where people have tried to address issues of racism with more racism

https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-interrupting-whiteness-training



Segregating workers by race, and having Black people being told that they need to give up their physical safety, relationships with other black people, and told that they need to 'stop being so black" is the exact kind of thing that civil rights leaders have been trying to end for over 60 years.

Now you have people who have decided that they have developed methods far superior to people like MLK, and have decided that the BEST way to fight issues of racism is with more racism.
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It's like all these TV shows going back and yanking episodes that they deem insensitive.

Nobody is asking for this, or this white guilt training, or any other self-flagellation. It's empty tokenism that just pisses everyone off and accomplishes nothing.

I can see why the City of Seattle might be trying to assuage the angry public, but nobody wants this performative crap. They want meaningful reform.

People in the street making specific demands about defunding the cops, investing in disadvantaged communities, etc, and the response they get is "maybe we should hold a fragility seminar for city employess". It's funny, in an absurd kind of way.
 
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HoverBoarder said:
The idea that a white person could escape any responsibility to address the problems of Systemic Racism by reading a book and engaging in a ritual of self flagellation is apealing enough to get her book on the best seller list, but has little to do with actual realistic change.

All of my friends of color have just wanted to be treated like normal human beings.


At worst, the massive money campaign that DiAngelo has engaged in is not just insulting to people of color, it is prohibitive to the actual steps needed to bring about racial justice.

It certainly has brought about unfortunate situations where people have tried to address issues of racism with more racism

https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-interrupting-whiteness-training



Segregating workers by race, and having Black people being told that they need to give up their physical safety, relationships with other black people, and told that they need to 'stop being so black" is the exact kind of thing that civil rights leaders have been trying to end for over 60 years.

Now you have people who have decided that they have developed methods far superior to people like MLK, and have decided that the BEST way to fight issues of racism is with more racism.
Click to expand...
The author of the linked article claims to have accessed much of the work materials for the workshop through the FIA.
I wish he had shared that, because it is unbelievably chilling to think that the coursework is asserting (as quoted from the article) that "objectivity" is a vestige of anything.So much so that I tend to think it must be misrepresented somehow.
 
HoverBoarder said:
The idea that a white person could escape any responsibility to address the problems of Systemic Racism by reading a book and engaging in a ritual of self flagellation is apealing enough to get her book on the best seller list, but has little to do with actual realistic change.

All of my friends of color have just wanted to be treated like normal human beings.


At worst, the massive money campaign that DiAngelo has engaged in is not just insulting to people of color, it is prohibitive to the actual steps needed to bring about racial justice.

It certainly has brought about unfortunate situations where people have tried to address issues of racism with more racism

https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-interrupting-whiteness-training



Segregating workers by race, and having Black people being told that they need to give up their physical safety, relationships with other black people, and told that they need to 'stop being so black" is the exact kind of thing that civil rights leaders have been trying to end for over 60 years.

Now you have people who have decided that they have developed methods far superior to people like MLK, and have decided that the BEST way to fight issues of racism is with more racism.
Click to expand...

I fail to see what these things are going to accomplish. If the racism is systemic, look at and change the systems. Simply having white government employees sit through that sort of session and then going back to their desks and still working in that system seems counterproductive.
 
Craig4 said:
I fail to see what these things are going to accomplish. If the racism is systemic, look at and change the systems. Simply having white government employees sit through that sort of session and then going back to their desks and still working in that system seems counterproductive.
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They seem to be pretty successful at taking over bureaucracies though.
 
Craig4 said:
I fail to see what these things are going to accomplish. If the racism is systemic, look at and change the systems. Simply having white government employees sit through that sort of session and then going back to their desks and still working in that system seems counterproductive.
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Yeah, but they don't want to do that, so they're sliding on the hair shirts and calling it job well done.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
It's like all these TV shows going back and yanking episodes that they deem insensitive.

Nobody is asking for this, or this white guilt training, or any other self-flagellation. It's empty tokenism that just pisses everyone off and accomplishes nothing.

I can see why the City of Seattle might be trying to assuage the angry public, but nobody wants this performative crap. They want meaningful reform.

People in the street making specific demands about defunding the cops, investing in disadvantaged communities, etc, and the response they get is "maybe we should hold a fragility seminar for city employess". It's funny, in an absurd kind of way.
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"Police reform"? Sorry, best I can do is change Aunt Jemima. Hope that's sufficient
 
Distracted1 said:
The author of the linked article claims to have accessed much of the work materials for the workshop through the FIA.
I wish he had shared that, because it is unbelievably chilling to think that the coursework is asserting (as quoted from the article) that "objectivity" is a vestige of anything.So much so that I tend to think it must be misrepresented somehow.
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It sounds insane but you can find all kinds of nonsense like this in academia, so I wouldn't be TOO surprised. Just takes one whacko from one of these fields or activism areas to have influence over the training, imo

You're probably familiar already but just in case, you can find some of this stuff discussed on the Real Peer Review twitter account.

https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview
 
Craig4 said:
I fail to see what these things are going to accomplish. If the racism is systemic, look at and change the systems. Simply having white government employees sit through that sort of session and then going back to their desks and still working in that system seems counterproductive.
Click to expand...

Personally I think systemic racism is not as prevalent as many people think. It certainly exists but finding specific examples that can be fixed is a harder than people think, and the result is that you end up with a lot of arm waving and very little meaningful action. This lack of meaningful action is then cited as then blamed on systematic racism and the circle of inaction continues.

Eg wrt policing, in most cases the primary systemic problem isn’t racism, it’s authoritarianism. This, in combination with occasional examples of individual examples of racism and generally lower socioeconomic status of African Americans IMO is sufficient to explain most of the issues involving African Americans and policing.

If you set out to fix systemic authoritarianism, you could get someplace but if you try and fix systemic racism you will IMO get ineffective measures like the one you discuss. Naturally fixing the authoritarianism issue won't solve everything on it's own but it will allow society to make headway to the next issue can be isolated and addressed.
 
lomiller said:
Personally I think systemic racism is not as prevalent as many people think. It certainly exists but finding specific examples that can be fixed is a harder than people think, and the result is that you end up with a lot of arm waving and very little meaningful action. This lack of meaningful action is then cited as then blamed on systematic racism and the circle of inaction continues.
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The problem is that systemic racism is systemic, it can be hard to identify specific cases of it. Take driving while black individual traffic stops are hard to show racism in, but statistically the bias is clear. Is that systemic racism or not?
 
ponderingturtle said:
The problem is that systemic racism is systemic, it can be hard to identify specific cases of it. Take driving while black individual traffic stops are hard to show racism in, but statistically the bias is clear. Is that systemic racism or not?
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DWB stops might be racist, but are they "systemic"? Or largely the result of a group who are overtly racist? Given that there are a lot of DWB stops in Washington, DC even though the police force is majority POC and almost all of the senior operational commanders are Afro-American (and the mayor is Afro-American, as is the majority of the city council), that might add evidence that it is "systemic".
 
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