I read “White Fragility” so you don’t have to (but maybe you should)

(edited to tone down a little)

This was quite painful to read, and I see the dynamic of these ideas as problematic.

First, possibly the most painful idea for any human to entertain: "A large part of your core identity is inherently very bad in ways you can't see"

and then second: "The pain and fear you feel in response to this news is a sign of inherent weakness (fragility) and further proves your guilt"

and lastly: "I'm not *trying* to make you feel bad, suppress that pain and take off your silly sack cloth and ashes"

"You are inherently bad" -> "Your pain on hearing that is weakness and proof of guilt" -> "This dynamic is not problematic you're being weird for over-reacting"

That's very harsh thing to say to someone and then act like they are weird for having an adverse reaction.

I share your frustration at the book because I'm really sympathetic to the ideas that:

• systemic racism is an issue
• confusing racism_F  for racism_S is a problem worth exploring
• it's encumbant upon me to look for unjust ways society has been set up that benifit me [LW · GW]
• the inherent pain majority groups face in grappling with these complex issues is a blocker to progress.

But I feel such sorrow at the idea that the solution to this dynamic is to position that pain itself as an insidious and problematic weakness. And to try and crop dust a generation of young people with that memeplex? That will lead to trouble.

If you want people to hold a painful and nuanced set of complex ideas and grapple with them they need to be held, seen, and supported.

When you find out you’ve been doing something that perpetuates racismS, the best response is to say “of course I was; I’m glad I finally found out about it so I can change.”

It seems to me this book is largely a manual for obedience to a political faction; a long list of the details of how one ought to act in different scenarios in order to signal obeisance.

Edit: I previously started with the the line "To comply, I have no choice but to immediately agree on the object level and submit." But this is an exaggeration of what is written in the quote, so I'm removing it / adding this edit note.

I think it's important to keep in mind the reasons why Robin DiAngelo became a multimillionare. The value of her seminars is that they shift the burden of responsibility for "systemic" racism away from employers and onto employees as individuals. That is, diversity seminars are seen as an effective defense against discrimination lawsuits. But in exchange for protection against legal accountability for patterns of discrimination, an environment of paranoia and scapegoating is fostered, where individual employees are singled out for discipline or firing for perpetuating systemic racism through their personal interactions.

Racism, as DiAngelo uses the word, does not mean the explicit pro­fes­sion that there are es­sen­tial­ly dif­fer­ent human races and that some are better than others. That, she says, is an un­so­phis­ti­ca­ted folk de­fi­ni­tion of racism (I’ll call that “racism_F”).

The de­fi­ni­tion she prefers (what I’ll call “racism_S”) is that racism_S is a sys­tem­ic, usual­ly (now­a­days) non-ex­pli­cit or eu­phem­is­tic, often sub­con­scious, in­ter­lock­ing and per­va­sive set of social, cultural, and political devices that reinforce white supremacy. [...]

The folk definition, racism_F, is in fact one of the pillars of white fragility. Because, according to this definition, racism_F is the conscious, explicit endorsement of an unconscionable belief system — all we white people have to do to stop participating in racism_F is to disavow racial bigotry and then congratulate ourselves for our good sense.

I would maintain the opposite: that racism_F is the original definition of racism, which deservedly acquired its strong negative connotations (think of the image of a good, virtuous, even altruistic minority member, consistently better behaved than most white people, and a white person saying "Yeah, well, he's still bad and not to be trusted because he isn't white"); and that activists like DiAngelo are trying to push their own new definition of racism as racism_S, probably for political purposes.  (Ask yourself why they don't just use a different term to avoid confusion.  They could consistently say "structural racism", but do they?)  Specifically, it seems that they're trying to take advantage of the negative affect towards racism_F and everyone's intuitive reaction of "Well, of course racism is bad and no one should be racist", by claiming that being against racism means being on board with all of their increasingly extreme proposals, and threatening to tar any opposition as racist.  It seems to be a disappointingly effective tactic.

Some of the activists probably genuinely believe that racism_S is the correct definition.  Likely even the majority; it only takes a few at the top of their intellectual hierarchy to promulgate a new definition in academia, and then those who look up to the few might just assume they're justified and propagate it to the rest.  However, since DiAngelo is in the business of saying "just because you don't have any bad intentions doesn't excuse you from participating in a system that leads to the same result", I feel I should extend to her the same level of charity.

Maybe this is common knoweledge that I'm missing, but I find this review glossing over central points. How is "white supremacy" defined? How about "whiteness"? I cannot imagine the book didn't spend some chapters defining those phenomena and, more importantly, proving their existence and exemplifying them.

We must abandon our pretensions to “individualism” and “objectivity” (two other ostensible pillars of whiteness) and acknowledge instead that we are who we are because we are white, and that what we take to be objective knowledge is actually a peculiarly white perspective.

Pet theory demands we radically change the way we see the world. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where is it?

Power structures are important and not abusing power is ethically important. The central problem with approaches like the of DiAngelo is that they try to impose a general idea about which power structures exist and how power should be redistributed to every particular interaction instead of looking at the power structures of the particular interaction.

People who are socially powerless generally have little power to appeal to general ideas about how power should be redistributed. Those who do have a degree of social power can appeal to general ideas to get more power for themselves and use it to obscure their power in the interaction. 

Consultants like DiAngelo can use those ideas to have power to blackmail companies into paying them a lot to do corporate trainings. It allows upper-class black people to demand that lower class white people with less actual power bend towards their will. 

One of the things DiAngelo recommends is that white people shouldn't cry in front of black people because the act of crying has inherent power. The problem with such advice is that it prevents interracial relationships of vulnerability and encourages people to only share vulnerability within the same race. Sharing vulnerability is key for building up shared trust and loyality and this is going to generally make it harder for black people. 

The strong abstract ideas about how power should be distributed also make it a lot harder to have open conversations about how power should be distributed in particular social interactions. It makes people defensive and makes it easier for the people with the actual power to shut down those conversations whether those are white or black people. It forces people to think through the interpolitical consequences of everything they say instead of openly experessing themselves and becoming vulnerable.

While you might argue that vulnerability doesn't have a direct place in the workplace, it matters for building relationships. Men who drink beer together after work and are vulnerable with each other build bonds and then support each other in the workplace. 

One interesting aspect of your summary is you saying:

It felt useful to me to try on DiAngelo’s perspective about race and to interpret my outlook, experience, and actions through its framework.

On the other hand you don't say that it changed anything about how you actually interact with other people. This might mean that after reading the book you don't feel like those changes are worth mentioning. It might be that it feels vulnerable to talk about those changes and there too much pressure for you to be vulnerable about them. It might also mean that the book didn't get you to do any meaningful changes. 

To me you saying that it felt useful to you without pointing to any actual use is a huge warning sign here. It's also quite ironic that you read a book like that and the way you judge it is about whether it's useful to you to have read it and not useful to those black people with whom you interact that you have read it. The book got you to focus on yourself and not on other people when dealing with the subject matter. 

Started reading the book...

In the early days of my work as what was then termed a diversity trainer, I was taken aback by how angry and defensive so many white people became at the suggestion that they were connected to racism in any way. The very idea that they would be required to attend a workshop on racism outraged them. They entered the room angry and made that feeling clear to us throughout the day as they slammed their notebooks down on the table, refused to participate in exercises, and argued against any and all points. I couldn’t understand their resentment or disinterest in learning more about such a complex social dynamic as racism...

What a mystery, indeed. I don't have more context, but guessing by the described behavior, those people probably were not participating voluntarily. Is it possible that they were angry about being forced by their employers to attend a political training? How would DiAngelo feel about having to attend a political training organized by her outgroup?

I am a white American raised in the United States. I have a white frame of reference and a white worldview, and I move through the world with a white experience. My experience is not a universal human experience. [...]

For many white people, the mere title of this book will cause resistance because I am breaking a cardinal rule of individualism—I am generalizing. I am proceeding as if I could know anything about someone just because the person is white. Right now you may be thinking of all the ways that you are different from other white people and that if I just knew how you had come to this country, or were close to these people, grew up in this neighborhood, endured this struggle, or had this experience, then I would know that you were different—that you were not racist. [...] As a sociologist, I am quite comfortable generalizing; social life is patterned and predictable in measurable ways. But I understand that my generalizations may cause some defensiveness for the white people about whom I am generalizing, given how cherished the ideology of individualism is in our culture. [...] Setting aside your sense of uniqueness is a critical skill that will allow you to see the big picture of the society in which we live; individualism will not.

So, it is okay to generalize about all white people, but not okay to generalize about all people. Your experience is not a universal human experience. But it apparently does not differ meaningfully from a universal white experience.

To use an example from school, consider the writers we are all expected to read; the list usually includes Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, and William Shakespeare.

You notice whiteness. I notice that with the exception of Dostoyevski they are all English or American.

OK, finished the book. Having already heard its main idea, most of it was predictable, and it was actually not as bad as I feared. Chapter "white women's tears" was borderline politically incorrect.

First let me hedge that I have not read this book, White Fragility.  The exposures I've had to this kind of literature drove me to stay far away.  The following critiques may not be about this specific book nor author, DiAngelo.  Perhaps DiAngelo-adjacent, though I suspect also directly DiAngelo for some points.

1) This kind of literature has serious problems with semantic ambiguity.  You can make anything meaningless by saying it's everything, and "racism" is no exception.  I imagine myself trying to predict the degree of "fragility" or "racism" in members of the population, or changes in "fragility" or "racism" over time, as the author uses these terms.  It seems thoroughly unresolvable and nebulous.  I don't know how you would make these forecasting questions without them resolving ambiguously all the time.  That is a very negative fact about how informative the content is.

2) What appears to be an abysmal performance at predicting changes in actual harm or wellbeing, in blacks or other groups.  I don't know of explicit proper predictions, so this is hard to grade.  But what I remember seeing doesn't look good.  Again I don't know what DiAngelo in particular has predicted before, but I'll go through some related examples from people who seem to hold similar attitudes.

One is the prediction that diversity training would causally increase the relative workplace status of blacks.  This prediction seems false.

Another is the rampant idea that intelligence test screening causally reduces the number of gifted blacks in gifted programs, thinking the tests are unfairly biased against blacks.  This prediction is false, and using intelligence screening actually makes it easier to put gifted blacks where they belong.

Another is the prediction that reducing police presence would reduce harm for blacks.  This seems highly unlikely to me, and I would predict harm toward blacks goes up in areas that get rid of the cops.  Not down.

Or the idea that you can reduce harm by training cops to not be differentially-trigger-happy towards blacks.  This can't be correct because they're not actually more trigger-happy against blacks.  At least, not in the U.S.

Or the prediction that training cops to avoid shooting blacks could make a difference to the average lifespan of blacks.  This is impossible -- out of 42 million blacks in the U.S., a little over 200 per year are shot to death by cops.  For context that's more than the number that die from lightning strikes, but less than the number that die from drowning.

Or that rent control reduces harm for minorities.  It doesn't, actually it makes things worse.

In a futarchy where there is an incentive to predict the effects of policies, I expect a poor performance from the kinds of policies these people propose.  This despite the loud advertisements that they know how to improve wellbeing for blacks.  And with such confidence that they should be given government subsidy, and ostracizing power over those who disagree.  These people expect me to think they know how to reduce harm for blacks. They think their ideas are slam-dunks, and it's absurd.  I can't even tell if they outperform random chance at predicting changes in harm in blacks.  That is severely damning of their judgment.

3) The framing tends to be manipulative.  Whether a white person condemns racism or doesn't condemn racism, both are described as instigating racism.  And of course, any disagreement is evidence that you're a bigot.  But so is agreement -- must be some treachery by defusing the conflict today, so you can keep oppressing blacks tomorrow.  It's a bizarre mixture of voodoo-cursed-thoughts and original sin, and it's unacceptable to me.

In summary, this kind of literature isn't remotely compatible with my epistemology.  Nor how I think discourse about harm and wellbeing should be conducted.  In fact it is bitterly exemplary of how I would not want it, and the pressure to conform is not okay with me.

I have lived in dominantly non-white neighborhoods for the last 7 years. I pay attention to the nationalities of the people around me. Lumping the African Americans whose families have lived here for centuries in the same bucket as the Somali refugees would be absurd. Not for genetic reasons (though there could be greater genetic variance between east and west Africans than between Europeans and Asians) but because they have different cultures.

But, while nationality matters, it would be impractical to ignore skin color entirely. When I moved into my current home, a neighbor asked me what my favorite Black jokes are. It matters whether he is Black. It matters whether I am Black.

I think race should be viewed as one dimension of ethnicity. It is perfectly acceptable to speak Vietnamese to someone who understands Vietnamese. It is rude (if you are not in Vietnam) to speak Vietnamese to someone who doesn't understand Vietnamese. In theory one could ask but that is even ruder. (It's impractically time-consuming too.) If you don't want to whitewash everyone then you have to guess. The color of one's skin contains information about whether someone speaks Vietnamese. Thus, skin color is a useful signal.

When I hear "I don't see people in terms of race", I translate it into "I am willfully ignorant of the ethnic dynamics (including power dynamics) around me". Your description of the racial bias seminar describes someone doing the exact same thing.

The "racism_S" is a useful concept, but should use a new word instead of hijacking an existing one, because "racism_F" is a useful concept, too.

The obvious reason why people are sensitive about being accused of "racism_S" and refuse to admit it publicly, is that they know someone else will interpret their words as a public admission of "racism_F". (Especially when both words are pronounced the same.)

If "racism_S" is de facto a synonym for "being white", why is it not enough if white people simply confess to being white? What additional information is provided by confessing to also being "racist_S"?

It's somewhat ironic how she defends her actions as not racist because her definition of racism requires institutional power, yet the actual power dynamics of her position as an outside consultant often grant her massive institutional power. She of course goes on to abuse her institutional power. Folks deride DiAngelo's arguments on white fragility and racism rightfully so because she takes every attempt to force her opinion upon others using her role as "racial equity consultant" rather than actually debate the issue. Her modus operandi is: get white people working at this company to understand and agree with my position by force and the implicit threat that they will be fired, transferred, or reprimanded if they don't comply. Yet somehow she gets away with the lie that she's not racist because she's not abusing institutional power.

Additionally, systemic racism as you call it is still factually invalid. Hiring trends show that white people have the least in group bias out of all hiring groups. The assumption is that systemic racism exists and that it's perpetuated by white people and that it benefits white people but that assumption is just the map and you should have a good reason to believe that the map is accurate before acting on it. The majority of race-based academic literature puts the cart before the horse. It's focused entirely on how to solve structural racism, with little to no research demonstrating that structural racism actually exists in the first place.

Thanks for writing this up. I was a bit nervous when reading the title because I was expecting that this would have been an "edgy takedown", but it wasn't.

I haven't read the book, but I seen a few talks by Robin DiAngelo, and found them generally reasonable. They at least brought up several points I thought were interesting and provocative, which is a high bar for public presentations.

I then saw numerous reviews from sources I previously deemed decent that treated the book with extreme vitriol. 

I found the hate leveled at this book to be frightening. There are a lot of "mediocre popular science books", but this one was truly disdained by large communities. (Right wing ones, of course, but also some somewhat politically neutral or left crowds). 

The basic ideas of "racism" being systemic in our culture, but occasionally very difficult to directly notice (especially for those in power), strike me as very similar to ones of implicit biases and similar. The Elephant in the Brain comes to mind. I think the Rationality community and similar should be well equipped to be able to discuss some of these issues.

My impression is that this book isn't rigorous in the ways that most of us here would hope for. It doesn't seem to have nearly as much nuance as I'd probably want, but books with nuance typically don't become popular. It's a bit of a pity, it is an important topic, so it would be great to work here we could trust to be fairly non-biased (either way) and thoughtful. However, I think I'm still happy that this book was written. I'm sure that Robin DiAngelo has probably faced gigantic amounts of harassment for writing it; perhaps this will lessen the burden for other people doing work in the area.
 

It seems like there are two big issues here:

1. Racism and power structures are systemic and deeply ingrained into our culture

2. This book presents a scientifically rigorous account of many details around the situation.

My impression is that #1 has a lot of truth to it, but #2 is lacking. In fairness, lots of books are terrible at #2, but this one might be particularly bad (given the broad claims). Unfortunately, I get the impression that a lot of reviews argue that because #2 is poor, #1 is wrong, and that seems cheap to me.
 

I considered writing my own review on the book on LessWrong to generate discussion, but myself was too wimpy to do so. I was very nervous about possible flame wars from doing so. (This makes me more thankful you've done it.) 

For examples of the vitriol I'm talking about, see the Goodreads reviews:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43708708-white-fragility?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=sSB9PhQyYt&rank=1

This tactic is called Kafkatrapping:

"A sophistical rhetorical device in which any denial by an accused person serves as evidence of guilt."

Its also an idea I consider far more absurd than creationism, and to be frank I am shocked to see it taken seriously here. 

1) If race is a social construct, then if we abandon this social construct, will a person who previously would have been conceptualised as Asian suddenly grow a few inches? If not, then this is an example of race having a physical meaning independent of mental states.

2) If differing outcomes are a matter of oppression, then shouldn't Holocaust survivors, the city of Hiroshima, the whole of China etc all be doing really badly? Shouldn't African Americans be doing worse than African Africans, as African Africans are distanced from White oppression? 

3) Since Jewish people have more power than non-Jews on average, any logically consistent claim of the need to fight Whiteness also justifies anti-Semitism (to make it abundantly clear, I am attempting a reducto ad Hiterium argument, I am not trying to justify anti-Semitism)

I am quite curious as to whether anything like this (a group of people deciding to hate themselves) has ever happened before in recorded history. Does anybody know?

Thank you for the write-up. However, I profoundly disagree with the premises of White Fragility. Why? Because DiAngelo's starting premise is that race is and always must be really important. And I object to that. In fact, I think that 'believing race is something real and important' is a necessary precursor to racism. 

(And yes, I believe her book to be racist against white people and yes, anti-white racism is a thing. It's true that in the US context white racism against non-white people is more frequent and often more harmful, but that doesn't make anti-white racism OK. It's like saying that men often sexually assault women, so if a woman sexually assaults a man that's totally fine because women are an oppressed demographic. Nope, that is not how ethics works.)

So what do I believe? I think that a person's skin colour should be seen as a minor physical detail of no importance. I believe in Martin Luther King's dream: 

"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.

I have a dream that one day out in the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

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 their character."

A world where people are judged not by the colour of their skin but by their character. Imagine that. I know that we are far from that world today, but it seems to me that our efforts should be directed at getting closer to MLK's dream world. And that books like DiAngelo's, however well-intentioned, which demand that we see skin colour as really important, are in fact taking us further away from the ideal. 

Thanks for the review - I appreciate that you spent the time to sift through these ideas.

When you say that we need to "be willing to make uncomfortable, difficult changes," do you have some specific changes in mind?

I would argue that DiAngelo's and the progressive left definition of racism is not congruent and contradictory. On the one hand, it is defined by consequences alone : "Beliefs and actions are racist if they lead to minorities continued  disadvantage compared to Whites." Regardless of the connotation and baggage of the word, this is a useful concept.

 However, this also means that pretty much everything you do is racist if you actually follow the definition: You do not want to attend a diversity seminar, forget about race and just do your work? By not addressing racist structures, you are enforcing them, and that is therefore racist. You merely want to read a fantasy novel before going to bed? Well, that keeps society the way it is, and therefore contributes to racism. Sounds extreme, but I contend that this is the logical consequence of that definition. And as an aside, a white CEO publicly using the n-word, and thereby being fired and replaced by a person of color, would not be racist by that definition.  

I think most people, including people in this thread are vicious racists and do not know it, and that their vicious racism stems from their rationalism.

Here is a simple question to determine whether you practice racism:

"Do you believe that test scores and academic achievements prior to academic or professional training are indicative of increased competence, or are all graduates of a professional program identically competent on graduation day?"

If you believe the latter (all graduates of medical school X are uniformly competent doctors), you are not a folk racist.

If you believe that SAT/GRE/GPA/other factors considered in medical school admission predict greater competence of medical school graduates (a higher score going in makes for a better doctor coming out), then when confronted with a choice between two doctors who on paper are graduates of the same program in the USA, but one is African American, and one is Asian Pacific Islander, you should always judge the AAPI as probably more competent, because the standards for admission that they were held to were higher (most programs practice some form of affirmative action, there may be examples of programs where this is not true, but at many prestigious institutions, it absolutely is).

I assert that the latter is perfectly rational, and would be considered by most Americans as 'folk racist', I don't think Robin would approve either.

The antiracist position appears to be that the ritual of education that empowers one to 'doctor people' is expensive, and can only be performed for a limited number of people, so racial balance in provision of access to the ritual is critical. There are no intrinsic attributes which impact one's ability to doctor people, it all stems from the power invested in them by the performer of the ritual of education (a prestigious ritual in a place of power like Harvard imparts greater doctoring acumen than one performed somewhere less prestigious).

DiAngelo grew up Catholic and poor. It's like she's a saint of antiracism - she didn't have the luxury of coming from a comfortable economic class, but still learned to do penitence for her original sin of white privilege.