White Power, But Good Actually
I'm legitimately horrified that Robin DiAngelo is becoming the pied piper on conversations about race for so many people right now. On her website she describes "affinity groups" and it's a breathtaking passage:
Affinity Groups In an affinity group, people who share the same racial identity meet on a regular basis to address the challenges specific to their group. White affinity groups are an important way for white people to keep racism on our radar and continue to challenge our racist socialization. It is crucial for white people to acknowledge and recognize our collective racial experience, which interrupts the tendency to see ourselves as unique individuals (or “just human”) and thus outside of the forces of race. Intentionally meeting specifically as white people to practice collectively interrupting our patterns of internalized white superiority is a powerful contradiction to the ideologies of individualism and white objectivity.
In what world does it make sense to encourage white people to get together in "white affinity groups" to specifically devalue their individual experience and instead focus on their collective *racial* experience? The fact that the bolded sentence is also exactly 14 words long would be too blatant as parody.
DiAngelo also does not seem to understand how to interact with black people like a normal person:
Even so, her conversations with actual black people have a stilted awkwardness to them. After DiAngelo makes an inappropriate joke in a work meeting — suggesting that a company’s white employees might be afraid of a black woman’s braided hair — she hears that another black woman present had been offended. DiAngelo reconsiders her behavior in consultation with a white friend who has “a solid understanding of cross-racial dynamics,” and then approaches the offended woman. “Would you be willing to grant me the opportunity to repair the racism I perpetrated toward you in that meeting?” DiAngelo asks. She urges white readers not to burden people of color with the sole responsibility to speak to racial issues, yet she concludes that only a person of color can tell DiAngelo whether she “doing well” in addressing racial transgressions. People of color are always vulnerable and always wise, even if never entirely real.
DiAngelo highlights this painfully awkward interaction as a template to follow because it hits all the hallmarks. You can't burden black people with "emotional labor", so you have to seek out other white people to discuss your racism. Then you need to engage in an affirmative consent dance with the supposed victim by asking for permission to even address the issue. DiAngelo has been a diversity trainer and consultant for decades now, and it's a bit depressing to think that despite those years of immersion, she's still susceptible to making off-color jokes about a black coworker's hair. It's a very grim outlook for everyone else.
When Saira Rao1 and Regina Jackson (the two women behind Race2Dinner where they charge white women $2,500 to come to their dinner and, it's hard to describe it as anything else but berate their hosts for being racist) were on the Femsplainer podcast, it didn't go well. Saira started off with some sweeping generalizations, and when she received the slightest pushback from the Femsplainers, she got very upset and said this is precisely what "white fragility" is.
I find something very distasteful about the entire concept of "fragility". It seems only intended to mock white people. What would non-white fragility look like, if that's even a thing? I can't imagine accusing a black person of "fragility" for being upset about a discussion on slavery or something. It doesn't seem to carry any utility besides dismissing or belittling someone's objection.
Saira is widely (and genuinely) speculated to be a parody persona. I'm not saying this to make fun of her, but this is reflected genuinely by many people who come across her Twitter account because it's often compared as on par with actual parody like Titania McGrath.