Magical Whiteness Triumphs Again
I will name no names, but they know who they are — the white people who took our classes, attended our “multicultural” or “unlearning racism” or “diversity” workshops and training decades ago, before all of this became the latest fad.
They asked us to explain racism. We did. They thanked us after the workshops for helping them recognize their own bias and prejudice, and we smiled feeling appreciated for shifting one more person to the side of being a white ally.
Then we began to notice that someone who was not us was speaking our words; using our ideas; taking concepts from the papers and books we had written but failing to cite us; and capitalizing off the hours of honest conversations we had shared with them— e.g., consider a black woman and a white man who carpooled together for years, and him converting those commuting conversations about race into political capital where he became the interpreter of Blackness. The knowledge he absorbed from her landed him a college presidency, because he understood Blacks. The Black colleague who schooled him received nothing.
This is what DiAngelo has done. She has appropriated common-sense and intellectual Black knowledge about “white folk” (see Du Bois, read Baldwin, listened to interviews with Toni Morrison and read her essays and those of Stuart Hall, or flipped through all of bell hooks’ books — and these are the most famous Black folk), and turned all that Black knowledge she absorbed into a money-making enterprise for her white self.
Before DiAngelo’s book, I was suggesting to people that we needed to stop encouraging what I called “vulnerable whiteness.” As the Chief Diversity Officer at a large national educational nonprofit, in 2014–2016, I observed a form of “me too ism” on display among the majority Millennial staff. Generic whites — men and women — were complaining that with all the activities and conferences focused on Black and other people of color, they felt left out — ”poor ting” (Belizean creole).
My recommendation to leadership was that we not give in to this “white vulnerability;” it was nothing more than a way to re-enshrine whiteness as the center, but in the guise of “victimhood.” My words were not heeded and I was critiqued for thE use of that framing. And now we are at a replay of white vulnerability at its best —the original was the historic assault on Affirmative Action — in the latest Supreme Court ruling. The Bakke case dismantled Affirmative Action and now its ghost has been resurrected in the U.S. Supreme Court decision that said Yale discriminated against Asians and whites (Really?), may eradicate legitimate institutional efforts to ensure access and diversity by enrolling BIPOC students — who still constitute only about 15% or less at these elite colleges and universities. Really?
What about all those decades since the founding of these #ohsowhite higher education institutions when non-whites, excepting Asians, constituted negligible percentages in student admissions and enrollment? Who was to blame then for all the white students who didn’t get accepted? Obviously, other white students. But no complaints. No hoopla. No accusations of discrimination.
Just like the book “Black Like Me” became a best seller and was made into a movie with a white actor in blackface — he took some drug that tinted his skin — DiAngelo is simply regurgitating what she has appropriated from Black writers and scholars, lifted from the descriptions of our Black experiences, and possibly gleaned from the stories shared and what she has observed of Black friends, colleagues, and students over the years since she became a “woke” white woman. Black people are everybody’s lab rats!
DiAngelo has packaged all of this cultural knowledge, data, and observations shared with her — or stolen from Langston Hughes’s character Jessie B. Semple who waxed eloquently on “the ways of white folk” — into a new term: “white fragility.” Now DiAngelo is unapologetically making millions as the definitive interpreter of white racism, which Black people have been doing since before and after slavery.
The problem is that in a peculiar way, DiAngelo is actually reproducing the very thing she claims to critique and disavow. Here is what she writes in her “Acknowledgements,” which by the way come at the end of the book, not the beginning:
Thank you to the many people of color whose brilliance and patience has mentored me over the last twenty-five years. You understand white fragility and its roots in white identity far more than I ever will. ~~Robin DiAngelo
True dat! Far, far, far, far more than she ever will. We have spent our current lives and past histories decoding and deciphering whiteness as a survival strategy and revolutionary act — know thy enemy!
Yet none of the unnamed “people of color” DiAngelo alludes to in the acknowledgement had their names mentioned nor did their books make the NY Times Bestsellers list, and they certainly do not get paid $40k every time they open their mouths. DiAngelo is simply repeating what she heard or is regurgitating what these unnamed BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) patiently told her or even unknowingly disclosed over coffee, wine, dinner, in the classroom when she taught, at the unlearning “isms” workshops she attended to be “trained” as an ally, etc.
DiAngelo is now profiting off her friendships and relationships with BIPOC people, making notes of their observations and answers to her white questions rooted in their personal and professional experiences of oppression. She has become the “cultural translator” of BIPOC feelings and established herself as the key (but very white)interlocutor. If this not a clear example of cultural knowledge appropriation, I don’t know what is.
A white anthropology colleague told me that DiAngelo was invited to her university, and paid a pretty penny. The “white fragility” workshop consisted of the above-mentioned culturally translation exercise. According to this person, DiAngelo told them, “when you say X as a white person, BIPOC hear Y.” And in this process of “whitesplaining” what she named “white fragility,” DiAngelo set herself up as the only authentic white progressive person to translate the BIPOC experience of oppression to white people, thereby becoming the very thing she critiques.
White people can be the most difficult for people of color because, to the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived. ~~DiAngelo (p.5)
And the book, White Fragility, is DiAngelo’s white progressive arrival story that a white publisher promoted in ways that they never promote books on race and racism by Black and other non-white scholars who have critiqued vulnerable whiteness for decades, before DiAngelo went back to school and certainly before she wrote her book.
With the popular celebration of white cultural translators and others whose experiences are not connected to the Black American experience, authentic Black American scholars who are experts on race, racism, and anti-Blackness in America — by virtue of personal experience, scholarly research, and social activism — have become dispensable.
We are being replaced by non-Native Black voices and dubious “scholars of color.” This sector of non U.S. Blacks, and others with melanin in their skin, have studied and researched the Black Experience in America, but they have not lived it. And what about their own histories? Why are they not elevating those, digging them up, and making movies and writing books about their own unique history of oppression or privilege?
It is easier to take and exploit ours. Black American lives and experiences are once again on the auction block! Like DiAngelo, these non-Native Blacks and other non-whites don’t bear the consequences of living daily while being Black in America — they have experienced none of the historic racial trauma, none of the humiliation of being challenged if you excel because there is no expectation of your success, and none of the anger at witnessing whites and non-Black American people of color benefit from our struggles, protests, and deaths over the decades, without having lifted a finger to protest.
Today’s Black Studies programs are led by Africans, Southeast Asians, and whites who studied under Black Americans professors, read our books, took our courses and workshops, possibly commuted with us, had interrogation lunches with us multiple times, and became experts on us. Now, as “authentic” Black Americans, with roots in America’s southern Black Belt, in America’s history of lynching, in America’s system of unequal education, in America’s reluctant and minor concessions to Affirmative Action, multiculturalism and now diversity that are the result of generations of Black Americans’ struggles and deaths, we are being overlooked and discarded for more exotic Blackness or “woke” white people like DiAngelo.
For example, over the last decade, ever major motion picture about the Black American experience has starred a non-Black American — from the biop about Nina Simone starring Zoe Saldana (with a prosthetic nose and skin darkening make-up) to the most recent film on Harriet Tubman starring Black British actress, Cynthis Erivo. This critique has nothing to do with their acting abilities, but it has everything to do with asking why Black American actors — in this and other films — are being denied the opportunity to make films about their own histories? Would audiences accept a non-Jewish actor playing significant roles about the Holocaust? I think not!
In the current magical whiteness moment, white people just want us Native Black Americans to disappear as they profit from exploiting our experiences, our analysis, and treating us like intellectual slave laborers.
Now all the #BlackLivesMatter money that is being committed by major corporations may magically be paid out to white progressives like DiAngelo.
What’s a BIPOC expert to do? How do we get access to these big bucks, to the publishing support, to the speaking circuit? In all honesty, we can’t! America is still obessed with the anointed “just one” mindset.
Whites identify “one” Black person as “the spokesman” and that person becomes an industry — Henry Louis Gates is a great example. He is a one-man enterprise now. Does that mean that no other Black person, especially Black women scholars, could not do the same if they had his access?
If DiAngelo, and others like her, have any shame, they will excuse themselves from the money frenzy around BlackLivesMatter, and push forward the Black activists and scholars they stole from — let us share in some of the green milk and honey profits being made off of our lives and the Black American Experience in general, which is simultaneously painful & wonderful. But let us tell our own stories. We do not need white people to interpret our anger, rage, fears, and hope.
When I used to marvel at the insane behaviors of white folk and ask why they acted in a certain way, a former colleague, James Haskins (now deceased), author of over 145 books, but never made the NYT Bestseller’s list, would look at me and say “that’s what they do.”
In other words, part of embracing a white identity and believing in the power of your own whiteness is a penultimate sense of entitlement, even if you consider yourself progressive, an anti-racist, a white ally, or a wimpy. “good” white person, you still participate in, benefit from, and perpetuate racial hierarchies and the mindset of white superiority.
The fame, profits, and fortune DiAngelo has made deconstructing whiteness, something Black people, from scholars to everyday folk, have been doing since the end of slavery and before, just goes to show that more things seem to change, the more they stay the same.
