Nice Racism, Part 3

[1]

Robin DiAngelo

3,695 words

Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here [2], Part 2 here [3])

We aren’t actually that nice

Up to this point, I’ve been reminded at times of Nietzsche’s classic definition of humble-bragging from Human, All Too Human: “He who humbles himself wants to be exalted.” This chapter is different. Snowflake takes a break from the Socratic humility about not having all the answers and her eternal quest for enlightenment. This time, she expects critics to defer to her immense authority.

Snowflake begins with an anecdote about a London cabbie who finds out that she is doing presentations of her book White Fragility. He doesn’t care for that, leading into an argument:

He then went on to express resentment about a group of Black [sic] men who stood on the corner near his home and made him afraid to walk by lest he be “knifed.” And there it was! White fragility erupting based on the title of my book, a long-winded rant of resentment and a closing shot of racist discourse. This is the all-too-familiar move of “How dare you suggest I am racist! In my defense, I am going to express racism to show that my racism is justified!”

Oh my, what nerve! How dare he find it objectionable that blacks let in by the treasonous British government might stab him to death [4]?

Also worthy of note was his typical white lack of racial curiosity or humility about the limits of his knowledge; he had the author of a New York Times best-selling book who was in town to do interviews for the BBC in his cab, and he did not ask a single question about my thoughts on the matter.

Such a dreadful affront to Her Ladyship that he didn’t defer to her authority! At least he was kind enough not to drop off Snowflake in one of London’s “no go” zones, where she might’ve learned her first real lesson about the wonders of diversity.

Then she reacts to an irate e-mail from a 75-year-old white guy who says he’s been fighting racism since he was 12 (the poor sap), but doesn’t like her style:

In addition, given that the writer is a white man chastising a white woman with more knowledge of the matter than he has, it also nicely illustrates the intersection of white and male arrogance: both whitesplaining and mansplaining.

With a mind thoroughly marinated in Leftist indoctrination, these boasts of greater knowledge bring to mind Ronald Reagan’s famous 1964 quip: “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant. It’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” The undercurrent of snippy feminism continues through the rest of the chapter, becoming an odd dick-measuring contest. All told, page after page of more femsplaining [5] follows rebutting the e-mail and touting her superior expertise.

Unfortunately for her, sociology [6] and related Leftist academic boondoggles are barely more scientific than reading tea leaves, and probably less accurate. Learning error is not wisdom. Now imagine a Moonie trying to win an argument by saying, “I’ve studied theology for years at the Sun Myung Moon Academy, and you didn’t; therefore, my religious beliefs are more valid.”

How white people who experience other oppressions can still be racist, or “but I’m a minority myself!”

This chapter is sort of a discussion of class and other intersectional factors. It serves as a reminder to keep race in first place (and not ours, of course!). For example:

In a book challenging white progressives, I would be remiss if I did not make a point of specifically challenging white feminists. So, white feminists: we have to stop the channel-changing from racism to sexism.

So if someone wants to be just a feminist, and let others concern themselves with race, then tough cookies! Where does she get off with this policing, telling others that they have to prioritize race over any other flavors of activism? Who made her the Pope of Progressivism?

Interestingly, Snowflake herself is well aware of matters relating to class. She grew up in grinding poverty. She describes how billionaires are riding high on the hog, how a select few of them made out like bandits during the Fauci Flu, and how banksters profiteered during that time. Still, she keeps harping on race:

From its inception, racism has been used as a class project to obscure the concentration of wealth into the hands of an elite few. Invoking racial resentment among the white masses is effective to this end.

That’s what the campus pinkos were telling me 30 years ago. They gave up class struggle and jumped on board the cultural Marxism bandwagon. These deviationists are way off track, and so is Snowflake. Money is the universal solvent. Putting it another way, life is a shit sandwich; the more bread you have, the less shit you have to eat. This is the case no matter how many intersectionality points someone has.

How do you make a white progressive a better racist?

This chapter covers some of the pitfalls and growing pains of “the surge of white interest in anti-racism following the lynching of George Floyd and the subsequent worldwide protests against racial injustice.” It’s true that after he fatally overdosed on fentanyl [7] while in police custody, Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE) departments began sprouting up like toadstools all across corporate America. That followed months of rioting, burning, and looting abetted by the Deep State — the “subsequent worldwide protests against racial injustice” thing. (Surely the Havel’s Greengrocer effect [8] had as much to do with it as anything else.) There’s not much that’s remarkable here, but Snowflake is up to her snippy usual:

One of the most predictable questions I get from white people following a presentation or workshop is “But what if a person of color is wrong and it isn’t really racism?” Let’s take a moment to notice the stunning self-centeredness and denial in this question.

[9]

You can buy Beau Albrecht’s Space Vixen Trek here [10].

How dare anyone imagine that a Person Of Capitalization might perceive “racism” where none was intended, or that a white guy ever would have a legitimate point? Much more snippiness follows, but I don’t feel like quoting it.

After that, Snowflake goes into an anecdote about a lecture before a mostly non-white audience. It ends with much self-flagellating samokritika. When someone tells Snowflake that it sucked, saying so constituted a brutal psychic burden on this woebegone Person Of Capitalization:

She had to push through her own history of punishments — both large and small — from white people for daring to speak her truth. In this way, the repercussions continued long after the workshop was over. Each follow-up conversation seeking repair came at the continual price of her emotional, intellectual, and psychic labor.

Oh, for Kek’s sake; just put down the flogger . . .

. . . I definitely needed to respect my audience and engage with a sense of mutuality and racial humility. I am a nice white progressive with years of experience who knows better, and I caused this harm in two short hours. Imagine what we do every day in our workplaces and committees. Such is the power of whiteness and the vigilance required to keep it in check.

Where are all these fine scruples when she snippily lectures white audiences?

Niceness is not courageous

This mercifully final chapter begins with yet another huffy Anika Nailah quote. (Can’t we get Ijeoma Oluo again? She seems like she might actually be a nice lady.) The core of this chapter is in this statement:

Anti-racism takes courage, commitment, and accountability; niceness does not.

That’s going to be a lifelong commitment, by the way. Sorry, Snowflake; I don’t feel like being a social justice slave — and no more Mr. Nice Guy! If that weren’t enough, the “accountability” section is just as obsequious to the precious People Of Capitalization:

Accountability within anti-racist work is the understanding that what I profess to value must be demonstrated in action, and that action must be answerable to BIPOC people. I cannot make a determination of how well I am doing in isolation. This is why I don’t call myself an ally; it is for racialized people to decide if — in any given moment — I am behaving as an ally.

The slobbering subservience only gets worse from there. She recommends to “[d]onate a percentage of your income to racial justice organizations led by BIPOC people.” Tithing to these darlings isn’t enough, since that merely heads a list of 14 commandments. But wait! There’s more! Then Snowflake advises:

In particular, we need to start seeing the intellectual and emotional labor that racialized people do to navigate and survive in white supremacist societies as labor that needs to be compensated. When we ask racialized people to join our committees, boards, advisory councils, organizations, and other groups in order to have “diversity,” we should actually pay them for their time and labor. If these positions are already paid positions, we should pay racialized people more for them.

To hell with this crap — literally! At the end of this wretched rubbish regarding race relations, I can do no better than quote that jolly old fellow Tony Levey, better known as Anton Szandor LaVey: “Satan represents kindness to those who deserve it, not love wasted on ingrates!”

The book wraps up with a study guide. The chapter-oriented questions aren’t so remarkable. On the other hand, the snippy introduction — oh, the transcendental snippiness! The horror, the horror . . .

This is your brain on social justice. Any questions?

[11]

Liberals, free your minds! This is no way to live!

Whew! As a White Nationalist, Nice Racism really taught me something. Try as I might, I still haven’t figured out what it is.

Robin DiAngelo did occasionally seem a tiny bit relatable in her first book. Despite being thoroughly indoctrinated and misguided, one could detect a little glimmer of humanity somewhere deep down. Now, she comes across like a Chatty Cathy wind-up doll programmed with Leftist talking points, with the snippiness setting dialed up to 11. Did all the money, fame, and adulation take their toll?

How can someone be rewarded handsomely for being against her own people? (Do other races tolerate anything so absurd?) I can’t even imagine how many diversity conferences and corporate struggle sessions DiAngelo has headed. Oh, and let’s not forget about junkets like the “white fragility” lectures in South Africa, Canada, Germany, France, Portugal, Australia, Brazil, England, and New Zealand. It was a drag reading page after page about what happened at some propaganda-peddling event or another, surely many of them with captive audiences. This stuff is Snowflake’s bread and butter. Meanwhile, a few recessions ago I had to do day labor, very often changing out equipment in 140-degree heat, just to rent a dinky room and barely stay solvent. It really grinds my gears that so many people with productive jobs struggle to get by, while a clown with a “social justice” sinecure gets a free ride on Easy Street. Sir John Harrington had a point!

Snowflake really does want to be a nice person, or at least started that way. (All told, her many critics — such as those who’ve been bold enough to raise objections during mandatory corporate diversity sermons — might have a different opinion.) The problem is that she’s been inside the echo chamber of Leftist academia and activism circles for most of her adult life. For those who’ve been conditioned like that, their perceptions are run through the Narrative Filter. It’s like seeing everything through a Clown World funhouse mirror. The desire to be nice can get warped into ideological conformity and pathological altruism. Reading the book, of course, will help her fellow wokesters complete the same transition.

What else can be said about this deep dive into the toilet of anti-white sophistry? My best summary is that the book is a lengthy purity-spiraling ethnomasochism sermon, and Snowflake is really laying it on thick with the hellfire and brimstone. Liberals are told that their efforts have been horribly inadequate and counterproductive, that they must do ever more, and yet nothing they do will ever be good enough. (Of course, she never explains why white knights have a unique duty to fix race relations. Neither does Snowflake explain why the glorious BIPOX need help from Leftist saviors to get ahead in life.) Although I seldom have occasion to sympathize with liberals, the self-denunciation expected of these poor saps during struggle sessions, along with the no-win kafkatraps imposed on them, seem like bullying.

As usual, white villainy and non-white victimhood are unspoken axioms. Snowflake doesn’t come right out and say so, but it’s glaringly transparent. These preconceptions underlie the book from the beginning to the end. Whites are constantly harangued, usually about “racism.” And on the very rare occasions when wrongdoing by the precious minorities is mentioned in passing, it’s always insignificant because reasons. It’s as if they couldn’t possibly have any role whatsoever in the considerable friction [12] that inevitably occurs in multiracial societies. Only whites cause any problems, and we’re basically incorrigible.

Nice Racism is full of special pleading and double standards, all the way down to the annoyingly inconsistent capitalization noted earlier. Whenever needed, Snowflake trots out a pat answer with the predetermined anti-white conclusion. (Do Leftist academics have a notebook of boilerplate word games and disingenuous arguments for every possible objection to their double standards?) If not that, there’ll be practically a Gish gallop of one-sided factoids and anecdotes about white villainy. But whites don’t even get a pat on the back for the trillions of our taxpayer dollars wasted on social-levelling schemes that disproportionately benefit the precious minorities.

[13]

You can buy Tito Perdue’s The Philatelist here [14].

Again, the sophistry behind this gooey web of critical theory jive comes down to a poisonous premise. That is, whites are uniquely and irredeemably evil, and non-whites are eternal victims. It’s never stated in exactly those words, but it represents an unfalsifiable tautology. Moreover, it flies in the face of all the wonderful talk about equality and brotherhood that got the nice liberals roped into the movement in the first place.

Consequentially, there’s always an unstated assumption that any way in which BIPOX lag behind in any socioeconomic metric, it has nothing to do with dysfunctions in their culture, rebellion for its own sake, or other maladaptive behaviors, and certainly not their own innate abilities — or lack thereof. Instead, it’s entirely the result of white malevolence of some sort; no actual evidence is required. Non-whites are childlike innocents lacking moral agency, absolved of any responsibility for their actions or outcomes. Even some Leftists have criticized Nice Racism for infantilizing blacks.

The book is ultimately about the precious minorities and their precious feelings and how we rub them the wrong way merely by existing — even those liberals who are only trying to be their allies. For whites, treating everyone fairly and equally, regardless of their ancestry, is no longer good enough. Neither is disregarding any negative lived experiences or unflattering data about a particular group’s identity — the sort of willful obliviousness that liberals call overcoming prejudices. Even when they put on the blinders about all that — which sometimes leads them into personal danger — they’re still beneficiaries of “systemic racism.” Walking on eggshells doesn’t make the grade. Walking on razor blades is the new order of the day. Whites who wish to comply must abase themselves and police their thoughts constantly. Even then, they haven’t done enough to purge themselves, and probably never will.

Moreover, only whites are expected to make any accommodations to help coexist with other races — in our own homelands, at that. For non-whites, there’s nary a hint that they should modify their own behavior, much less purify their thoughts in perpetuity. Tone it down with the truculence? Act civilized around white people? Try to show even a scintilla of gratitude for the good things whites have done for them? (If they need inspiration, they can start with Sir Harrington’s flush toilet and work their way up to electricity. That should keep them busy for a good while.) No, perish the thought! Asking anything of the holy BIPOX would be an unconscionable restraint on the volcanic rage resulting from the brutalization of their delicate psyches that whites — even milquetoast, lickspittle liberal weenies — do practically by breathing.

Other than that, whites aren’t supposed to draw their own conclusions. Non-whites can have lived experiences, but ours aren’t valid. We must always defer to the sacred BIPOX in any matters related to race, and we’re also supposed to pay for their opinions now. White solidarity is bad. Non-white solidarity goes unquestioned. Whites are always the aggressors; non-whites are never at fault. (Notice a pattern yet?) All this is from a clown who profits from the flourishing economic niche of being anti-white.

All told, whites are held up to impossible standards, while non-whites are exempt from any sort of standards. We also must constantly contemplate our sins (“ongoing self-examination”). Moreover, we owe perpetual atonement (“anti-racist practice”), because The System loves us [15] and disadvantages the precious minorities. Adverse personal circumstances such as poverty won’t let you off the hook –Snowflake’s got that covered — and you still have an unearned treasure chest of “white privilege.” As to why collective guilt is a valid concept, or why we owe the rest of the world in perpetuity for an alleged (and conveniently unquantifiable) “privilege” that we never signed up for, I have yet to see a satisfactory explanation.

In summary, the absurdity is unreal. The distortions in Nice Racism add up to industrial-scale gaslighting. The style alternates between hand-wringing concern for the holy BIPOX and sanctimonious preachiness. Snowflake occasionally has a close brush with the truth, but usually interprets the data the wrong way.

It’s time to get off the Leftist crazy train, and walk away from the manipulation [16]

How Willy Wonka Should have EndedHow Willy Wonka Should have Ended

Snowflake has been at this diversity racket for decades. In fact, I can’t think of a more self-effacing, self-abnegating, self-flagellating, cringing, lickspittle, obsequious, dreckfressende specimen of an NPC. I doubt that Robin DiAngelo can eat a salad without agonizing over the racial disparities inherent in lettuce. Oh, and besides that, isn’t it terrible that ranch dressing is all white? So is blue cheese dressing, even though it should be blue! So problematic, zOMG!

[17]

You Can buy F. Roger Devlin’s Sexual Utopia in Power here. [18]

Even so, not even Snowflake feels that she’s finished the endless burden of purging herself. Try as she might, she’s guilty, guilty, GUILTY. She is more penitent than a medieval monk in a hair shirt, and I have no reason to doubt that she really believes her own nonsense. Since all her considerable mental gymnastics haven’t brought her to the Leftist version of grace (since there’s no such thing), or apparently given her much peace of mind, then why bother with this crappy ersatz religion? Cultural Marxism is the Church of No Salvation. What’s the point, then?

I happen to be in a cult, at least nominally, but even those of us who take our mummery [19] seriously aren’t expected to endure this much spiritual sadomasochism. Scientology is considerably weirder, but even it has an endpoint. After playing with the e-meter enough, you’ve evicted all the excess body thetans and become “clear.” Then you can rest on your laurels, unless you want to do the bonus levels [20] and learn about Galactic Overlord Xenu [21]. The way religions usually work, if you perform the contrition rite with sincerity, you can quit beating yourself up about your transgressions. The endpoint of repentance is salvation, and life goes on. Moreover, disproportionate excesses of guilt, or culpability for things you didn’t do, or despairing that redemption is impossible, or believing that you must take on the burden of the entire world, are all contrary to Scripture.

On the other hand, cultural Marxism has no absolution. Since whites are incorrigible, there is no grace; only endless wallowing in white guilt. What would Heaven on Earth look like for a garden-variety liberal, anyway? I suppose it might be a gigantic city featuring countless permutations of races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, gender identities, religions, and other essential characteristics, with everyone cheerfully coexisting. Well, if they really treasure harmony among disparate populations, then it’s quite odd that cultural Marxism generates so much strife.

I have bad news for all the nice liberals trapped in the “anti-racism” cult: No matter what they do, they’ll never level up to Perfecti. After decades of effort, if even Snowflake can’t purge herself of thoughtcrime enough to conform to the obedience standards expected of a “good white person,” then it’s impossible. It won’t work no matter how diligently a prog-zombie kisses melanin-enhanced ass; ethnic solidarity is hard-wired into everyone by nature. This is why there aren’t any Perfecti — being conditioned that far beyond one’s instincts would be unnatural! Since it’s never going to work, the wokesters might as well just give up their destructive monomania.

What makes ethnic solidarity innate? It’s a protective instinct. This is supposed to be anathema for whites, while encouraged in everyone else. (Obviously, this pervasive double standard is pushed by books like Nice Racism.) This should tell you everything you need to know about the propaganda peddlers.

Stop the hate! Separate!

[22]

On the other hand, the good news is that there’s a very simple way to prevent racial conflict once and for all: Let incompatible populations go their own way. Don’t force them to associate. The odd thing is, Snowflake might actually be getting the point [23]. Apparently, some new remarks of hers bear some resemblance to what Scott Adams [24] said, except that he got tarred and feathered while she can get away with it, since she’s a professional diversity mystagogue.

I haven’t read her specific remarks, so I can’t help but wonder if she was saying that her precious BIPOX deserve their own spaces — but not whites, of course, because reasons. Still, even if it’s the usual smelly Leftist double standard, at least it’s an admission that people tend to prefer the company of their own kind, as opposed to being forced together haphazardly in a multiracial pressure cooker. I’m not a great believer in horseshoe theory. But on the other hand, the possibility exists that after fathoming the Stygian depths of ethnomasochism, she’s beginning to grasp the futility of it all. One only can hope. Get a real job, Snowflake!

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