The book is predicated in characterizing people based on their race, which is racism. The author is also a racist who says things like how she “tries to be a little less white every day.”
You are not using the same definition of "racism" that they are. "Prejudice + institutional power" is another framing where "racism against white people" is somewhat nonsensical. Why does that quote mean she's racist?
First, the book is a hilarious Kafka trap. It's explicit basis is this: All whites are racist, and any white that denies this is demonstrating "fragility", and therefore is even MORE racist than whites that admit they're racist.
See the trap? If you deny you're racist, it's proof that you're actually even more racist.
The second part I want to point out, as someone who actually read this absolute rubbish, is that D'Angelo is absolutely hardcore racist. She, for example, spends an intro to a chapter explaining how she was invited to some event at a public park, and upon arrival, she saw two large groups of people, one black, the other white. For a brief moment, she describes, she was stricken with anxiety, worried that the group she was meeting might be the black group.
She extrapolates her own internal racism to the default state of all white people.
Seriously, read the book. She's out of her tree. Anybody recommending this book either hasn't read it and is virtue signalling, or has read it and is so deep into the magisterium of the Church of Woke that they're not worth trying to save.
She’s taken negative characteristics, ascribed them to a group of people based on skin color, and implied that it’s a good thing to try and be “less white.” Its bigotry plain and simple and I’m actually taken aback that I have to explain it to you.
Well seems their working from a premise of ‘prejudice + institutional power’... so in that sense, ‘white’ could be seen as shorthand for that in some countries. So being less prejudice and more aware of institutional power is a virtue/good thing.
> I don’t think any one is harmed by that shorthand.
Of course they are. Why play this game of pretend?
And in what world is it "harmful" to "pretend" something true, namely that "white" is no shorthand (let alone an "effective" one) for "prejudice + institutional power"?
Some responses to the logic you followed in this thread.
1. There's no good reason to assign the sweeping and inherently-fuzzy category "white" to mean "prejudice + institutional power". Even given your (oversimplified) observation about colonialism, that's neither a necessary nor sufficient reason to apply a label that will be inherently over-generalized. It is simple historic fact that many "white" (per current definition) peoples had no role in colonialism and enjoyed no (local or global) institutional power. If this claim is mystifying to you, you may need to learn about white people outside of America or western Europe. So, the proposed semantic shortcut is inherently unjust to a portion of humanity.
To the degree that this (arbitrary aesthetic) choice does harm... it is, in itself, racist.
2. To make the argument above, does not require "pretending colonialism wasn't a thing." Those are separate debates.
3. But even setting aside #1 & #2, it is, of course, far more debatable how current elites got their status. What frame are you using? The US? "The west"? The world? I would say that even the presumption that "current elites" can reasonably be described as "white" would be quite wrong in all three cases (escalatingly so, in order). But the notion that dominance was wholly established by extractive colonialism is something that could only pass for true in a deeply incestuous echo chamber. By the time colonialism even started there were already wide gaps in technological and economic development of various societies, and given how development has unfolded, it's likely the gaps we see today would exist even without colonial interference. Differential development since colonialism ended also attests to the fact that colonialism and hard force are only factors in development, not determinants.
Finally, all this ignores the broad strokes of human history: across all geographies and times, human societies have discriminated against and dominated each other. Maybe occasionally, maybe perpetually, but it's basically always there. At a certain point, it became possible to do so at longer distances, at larger scale and across larger cultural experience gaps -- but human awfulness didn't start 15th century.
So again, making motivated aesthetic choices about naming descriptions of social systems and types of interpersonal behavior after an identity group that does not actually map to them is aptly described as racist. Not under the new, stipulative definition, which runs afoul of all these issues, but under the older and more useful definition that could be summarized as "harming or hating people on the basis of their race/skin color".
1. Which white people are you referring to that don’t have a hand in colonialism? You think it’s too fuzzy? Who specifically is unjustly included in that term?
2. How the current elites got there is very relevant for why institutions are the way they are.
3. Frame is: the world. More specifically the English, French, German, Dutch, Danish, Spanish, Italian, Belgium, Russian empires that colonised the world, and invented the idea of “white supremacy” (named by them!) and only recently (last 50-60 years) been removed as an “official hurdle” to non white races. Civil rights act (because people of colour were not considered “a man” under the constitution) in the US, the abolition of “White Australia Policy” (Of note given Australia was a black nation in near Asia), end of Apartheid in South Africa . But that was official definitions, not cultural which still linger today, as can be seen in the economic disparity between “whites” and everyone else in post colonial nations unless they’ve worked super hard to undo it...
1. The most direct answer is most of the people of Eastern, Central and Southern Europe. Draw a circle from Estonia, to Czechia, down the east Adriatic coast, around Greece and Georgia. That's a lot of people and a lot of peoples. Many have immigrated to the US or western Europe and have established lives in the multicultural societies where they (today but not always historically) get counted as "white".
The more complicated answer would also include some peoples from Central and South America. Many peoples there who consider themselves "white", through evolution of cultural identities after colonialism. It's not as simple as "Oh, well there were white colonizers and everyone else" -- the "mestizo" identity has grown and changed but it's very much it's own thing.
Finally, even among the obviously-colonist nations, there have always been underclasses who had no say in managing their societies or what those societies did overseas. This observation is anathema to those who want to draw neat circles around societies and label them colonizers, racists, etc... but as a simple matter of fact, there plenty of super "white" British/French/Dutch/etc people who lived at the height of colonialism and still had nothing to do with it, whether they would have wanted to or not.
2. Sure, it's relevant. But, again, the discussions of how accurate it is to make sweeping claims about "white" people or countries do not necessitate any kind of colonialism denial. This was in response to your comment upthread which implied that discussing the harms of "white = prejudice + institutional power" necessitates ignoring colonialism. It doesn't.
3. Helpful clarifications, but you didn't respond to the arguments.
A) "Current elites" are diverse, both within multicultural societies like the US and around the globe. Maybe that distribution isn't "perfect" (begging what that would mean...) but it's factually wrong to call those elites, as a category, white.
B) 15th-19th century colonialism was a continuation of the prior state of the world (across cultures, societies, geographies). The unusual thing was the technology that propelled it to a larger scale, as well as the subsequent phase change in civilization (caused by industrialization and globalization) which ended those norms of dominance and conquest.
C) It's an extraordinary claim (though extraordinarily popular in the canonical liberal-progressive worldview) that extractive colonialism was the sole (or even primary) driver of current inequalities. Those gaps were already huge when colonialism started (and hence why it worked so effectively). Culture (at various level of 'zoom' with respect to that concept), education, technology, social values... tons of things play a role in differential development. To group all current disparities and wave your hands while mumbling "something something colonialism" does not establish a rigorous model of what causes differential development.
To sum it all up:
It's a simple fact that lots of "white" people had nothing to do with colonialism, nor even had an opportunity to design or perpetrate any colonialism. That alone makes demonizing the category with moralizing labels a harmful decision.
Add the much more complicated subject of determining what drives or has driven disparities in various cases, and it becomes extremely questionable to claim that "white = prejudice+power" is a necessary or even useful tool for analyzing social relations and designing solutions.
Love your rhetoric! Move the meaning of the words White until it bares no resemblance to the original intention and then point out it has no resemblance.
Your imaginary line encompasses a tiny proportion of “white”.
So, please comment on what the civil rights act was doing, or the “White Australia Policy” without making any racial reference? What did Australia even mean by “White”!? Last I checked both those countries were democracies and those policies (or lack there of) were voted on... so which people couldn’t participate? Oh yeah the people of colour! Because they were excluded.
The elite in all of the colonialist countries are still White... in America, they are White, in Australia they are White, despite both countries having an exclusively non-White population before colonisation. Until recently it was the case in places like Hk and Singapore... White isn’t my term, it’s theirs. Go to China where there are signs like “whites only, no yellow!” On the old colonial buildings. Or South Africa or Australia with specific reference to whites and “non-whites”. Or Jim Crow in the US... like which make believe world are you talking about?
> There's no good reason to assign the sweeping and inherently-fuzzy category "white" to mean "prejudice + institutional power".
“White” is the name established by those with institutional power for the group their prejudice favored, other racial identifiers were ascribed to (and, through shared experience of racism from the White group, became identities for) various groups that their prejudice operated against, whereas White became an identity for those whose shared experience was being the beneficiaries of that institutionalized prejudice.
Yes for various periods of time there were various efforts to construct such an identity, to serve various ends of the people doing so. This kind of process has taken place all over the world, throughout history, in various societies as well.
In the case of "white", "black", "brown" and so on, those definitions also changed considerably over time. Then, at some point, the efforts to intentionally draw hard lines around petered off and lost support.
Those labels are still used because they do have some kind of descriptive capacity, even if solely because of momentum from old habits.
Crucially: none of this is responsive to my point. There's no good reason, today, to assign "white" to mean "prejudice + institutional power" in a general sense. It's not necessary to do so. Doing so is not sufficient to address and unpack all the dimensions of prejudice and institutional inequality as they take place today. But doing so does incur all the imprecision-based racist harms that I described in my post.
> Yes for various periods of time there were various efforts to construct such an identity, to serve various ends of the people doing so.
No, I'm not talking about some vague various-periods-of-time generality.
Every concrete identity current in American society, including “White”, is a product of White supremacy, and currently reflects identification with shared experience under White supremacy, which, for those the White, is being on the side of prejudiced institutional power.
Whiteness as a racial identity (not as an ancestry, not as description of skin color, but as a racial identity) is, entirely, about prej5 plus institutional power.
You're repeating yourself and ignoring arguments already made.
"White" has changed in definition over time. English expanded to include French, expanded to include Irish/Scottish, expanded to include Germanic/Nordic, expanded to include Slavic, expanded to include (some) Hispanics... it's pretty much always been changing.
And for a good 50 years, it's just devolved into a term of convenience. We haven't had concerted "racial construction" for decades.
You paint a totalizing picture that's dusty, faded and old. It's not a relevant stance in today's America, except insofar as it enables these totalizing activist narratives (for political and economic purposes, every time).
You answered your own question. There’s been a stipulative, activist semantic expansion (or outright replacement) of the word “racism”. It really blew up fast but most prople haven’t consciously learned and internalized this, so a lot of (un)intentional equivocation takes place. Lots of miscommunication, misunderstanding and talking past each other. Classic human stuff.
My opinion: putting aside the discussion of the new definitions merits and shortcomings, we can still easily call DiAngelo presumptuous, essentialist and nontrivially bigoted.
> "Prejudice + institutional power" is another framing where "racism against white people" is somewhat nonsensical.
Nonsense.
A white student is four times less likely to be admitted to a top university than a black student with the same grades and test scores.
A white student is significantly less likely to be admitted to medical school than a comparable black student.
There are literally hundreds of race-based scholarships exclusively for nonwhite students, and none exclusively for white students.
That's to say nothing of the thousands of special programs, events, job fairs, awards, and career opportunities that exist exclusively for nonwhite students and workers.
Note that the handful of scholarships listed under "Caucasian" do not appear to be actually exclusive. For example, for Journalism Institute for Media Diversity Scholarships:
> Members of racial, ethnic and other underrepresented groups are particularly urged to apply as are those interested in studying the importance of diversity in the nation's media to this country's future well being.
From No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life by Espenshade and Radford:
> The black preference at public schools is equivalent on average to 3.8 ACT points. In other words, a black applicant who receives a score of 27 on the ACT test would have the same chance of admission to a public NSCE institution as a white candidate with an ACT score of 30.8, other things in model 2 the same... The second column of Table 3.5 indicates the size of admission preferences at private NSCE institutions. Once again, black applicants receive the largest admission bonus—equivalent to 310 SAT points. A black candidate with an SAT score of 1250 could be expected to have the same chance of being admitted as a white student whose SAT score is 1560, all other things equal in model 5.
A theme in the book is that you're a racist if you're born white. If you deny that you're racist, then you just prove that you're indeed a racist -- hence the white fragility.
Let's look at China between 1949 and 1978. You would be Chinese version of Dalits if your parents or grandparents were landlords, farmers who owned property, counter-revolutionaries (whatever that is), bad influencers, rightist, or an intellectual. You would need to accept that you were born evil. If you denied that you were a bad guy, well, then you just proved that you were a worse person as you wouldn't even accept that you needed "transformation". Tens of thousands of people were exile to Gulag-like places and died there. Students in elementary schools could beat their principals to death for they were counter revolutionary. Millions people were striped their properties and basic rights. It was a scar cutting deep into generations of Chinese people. Oh by the way, you can attack anyone for being a "rightist", and you automatically became morally superior.
Now, how is bullshit like white fragility different China's Five Black Categories in those dark years? Just replace "rightist" with "racist", and I can't tell the difference.
It's the best review of the book I've read. It's not conspiratorial to acknowledge the over-representation of Jewish authors listed in the bibliography.
Maybe not in a vacuum but when the author is giddy with excitement at confirming what he "already knew going into this"... it raises questions and detracts from the subject.
I'm far from woke but this is pretty littered with dog whistles and paranoid exaggerations. And, more to the point, it's no more rigorous than DiAngelo's work.
The entire idea that you must be anti-racist is borrowed from Marxism- a totalizing ethos that sees everything through the lense of race (instead of class). Its not enough to say I am a neutral person who treats individuals the same regardless of the color of their skin- if you are white that is seen as a subtle way of preserving your race (class) interest. Only by actively joining in the struggle can you convince the successor class that you are sufficiently anti racist (formerly anti bourgeois).
