Let’s get something straight before we go any further; Robin DiAngelo is a racist.
I don’t mean that in some abstract “racism is the water we’re swimming in" way. Or even in an “all white people are racist" way. I mean it in the good old-fashioned “she believes deep-down that black people are inferior” way.
I’m confident that I won’t be hearing from her lawyers for saying this because she confirms it with almost every word that comes out of her mouth.
This is a woman who was “unable to hide [her] surprise” when she discovered that a black man was the school principal. The same woman who felt the need to “ask a Latin woman kneeling in her garden if this is her home”. This is a woman whose “road to Damascus” moment was cracking a joke about a black woman’s braids during (I sh** you not) a meeting about racism in the workplace.
This woman, this woman, has become an international authority on how to be less racist
White Fragility is an entire book — an entire philosophy — dedicated to the idea that being racist is a benign, inevitable consequence of having white skin. That making amends requires a lifetime of self-indulgent soul searching and vapid social media activism. That any white person who claims they aren’t racist must be lying. It’s the clearest example of projecting one’s flaws onto other people that the literary world has ever seen.