8 ms·

On “White Fragility”

123 points by andrenth 6y ago

8bitsrule 6y ago
Many of us (I'm among them) who check far enough back into their ancestry will find that their 'race' is far from a given. Given our recent knowledge of genetic bottlenecks thousands of years ago, the whole notion dissolves into a mere question of self-serving bunkum.
antiquark 6y ago
Everyone is fragile. There is no "master race" which is immune to negative emotions.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  “White fragility” (the concept, not the book, which I have no opinion about and don't expect a piece leading with the false social generalizations that are straight out of right-wing propaganda that this does to provide any illumination that would help with that) isn't about special fragility in Whites, it's about the special consequences of normal human fragility has in a particular privileged elite when confronted with a challenge to that privilege, and moreover to the mythology that provides a veneer that allows them to see the world in which that privilege exists as just. In contexts other than the modern USA, there are other dominant elites which no doubt would exhibit the same effects when challenged; there's nothing innately White about White fragility, it's only circumstantially White.
  - pnako 6y ago
    In fact, her own definition is (from Wikipedia): >White Fragility is a state in which even a minimal challenge to the white position becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves including: argumentation, invalidation, silence, withdrawal and claims of being attacked and misunderstood. You could replace the world white by any other word. And you can replace the list of defensive moves by the equivalent statement : "refusal to unconditionally comply", since it's the only option left. I would venture a guess that this covers about 75% of human interactions, and 99% of interactions when the discussion is about challenging someone's interests or position.
  - rbecker 6y ago
    > In contexts other than the modern USA, there are other dominant elites which no doubt would exhibit the same effects when challenged; there's nothing innately White about White fragility, it's only circumstantially White. However, I hardly ever hear about other dominant elites being challenged this way (with the occasional exception when Palestine is brought up), so your hypothetical phrasing is largely accurate, as far as I'm aware.
hnisahokehoax 6y ago
So happy to see this on the front page while assange news gets flagged and vote brigaded. So stunning, so brave.
- dabbledash 6y ago
  This was immediately flagged too, so if you were hoping for consistency: good news! If you were hoping for open discussion: not so much.
- dang 6y ago
  HN has had plenty of major threads about Assange, including just a few days ago. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=assange%20comments%3E20&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- happytoexplain 6y ago
  >So stunning, so brave. This phrase is a meme that holds no value, and originates from an expression of spite and hatred. You should consider skipping things like that on HN, to keep your posts visible.
solzhenitsyn 6y ago
White Fragility is a Kafkatrap. Further, Robin DiAngelo is actively encouraging whites to view themselves as a unified collective without a moment's thought as to how reviving this scientifically asinine and historically disastrous idea could backfire.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't create accounts just to pick up where the last account left off when we banned you and explained why. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - ttonkytonk 6y ago
    What is wrong with the comment though?
    - dang 6y ago
      It's part of a pattern of using HN primarily for ideological battle, which is destructive of what this site is for.
- throw_this_one 6y ago
  Kafkatrap. Good to know this term. These people are insane. How is it that first gen Indian or Asian immigrants do so much better than blacks? Is it all explained by systemic racism? Lol. Ridiculous.
- TMWNN 6y ago
  "Part of left's problem is it expects/demands blacks/hispanics to vote on ethnic basis but is appalled when whites do" (https://twitter.com/JYDenham/status/796345533124186113 https://twitter.com/JYDenham/status/796345533124186113)
save_ferris 6y ago
> A bizarre echo of North Korea’s “three generations of punishment” doctrine could be seen in the boycotts of Holy Land grocery, a well-known hummus maker in Minneapolis. In recent weeks it’s been abandoned by clients and seen its lease pulled because of racist tweets made by the CEO’s 14 year-old daughter eight years ago. Seeing stuff like this makes me wonder why people keep using social media at all. It’s terrible that this guy’s daughter made racist posts 8 years ago, but we have no idea what kind of person she is today. She could be doing community organizing against police brutality and it wouldn’t matter at all. The posterity of childhood is one of the most dystopian aspects of our technology-driven society. It’s like a 2020 version of the Scarlet Letter.
- itsdrewmiller 6y ago
  Her most recent racist post was 2016, at age 18 or 19 and she held a senior position at the company. The author of this piece doesn’t seem to be super intellectually honest, in addition to his Godwin’s law-breaking.
  - gowld 6y ago
    A "senior position" at a family hummus shop? Really?
    - Ghjklov 6y ago
      CEO of Hummus
    - belltaco 6y ago
      Is Walmart a family store too? >Beginning as a small shop in 1986, Holy Land has expanded into a sprawling business that includes an eatery, grocery store, catering business, and commercial food business, with a large restaurant and production facility in Northeast Minneapolis and a stand at the Minneapolis/St. Paul Airport. Its hummus, sauces, and flatbreads are carried by several area grocery stores.
      - 6y ago
drdeadringer 6y ago
Since roughly late 2016 the UUA [Unitarian Universalist Association] has been ever trying to "get on top of" their self-described "white fragility issue". This has caused and been a source of contention amongst many within both the UUA itself and also with UUs and UU organizations at large over the years since. I have personal thoughts and feelings on the matter for several reasons but I won't get into them here in order to try to remain neutral in merely stating the fact that said contention exists. For those curious, I encourage research and if it's not too much trouble or against impartiality on my part I can try to point the way to some sources.
ajuc 6y ago
It's insane and it leads to conservative resurgence, not only in USA but all around the world. Which then returns to USA, and so on in a vicious circle.
- war1025 6y ago
  > It's insane and it leads to conservative resurgence Unclear what you mean exactly. The way I interpret it, please correct me if I'm wrong, is: The concept of "White Fragility" is so ridiculous and overbearing that it causes white people to retreat to a more conservative stance. In that case, I agree. But I guess you could also mean it as: White people are so fragile in their identities that being forced to be challenged about their beliefs and behaviors causes them to become defensive and retreat to a move conservative position. Which is I think exactly what the author claimed if I'm remembering the book correctly. Either way it's sort of a "heads I win tails you lose" situation she paints, which mostly makes me not interested in playing along.
  - ajuc 6y ago
    > The concept of "White Fragility" is so ridiculous and overbearing that it causes white people to retreat to a more conservative stance. Yup, that's basically it. It sounds especially insane to people from countries without colonial past or history of black slavery. You're stating big universal statements basing them on a specific characteristic of a few countries and if anybody disagree it proves your point :) How convenient.
    - dafoex 6y ago
      I personally hate this expression for the double standards it creates. If a minority fights against violence - e.g. police brutality - they are stunning and brave. If white people fight against violence - e.g. rioting and looting - they are fragile Can we not accept that both of these things are worthy things to fight against, or do I have to roll my eyes so hard that I sever my optic nerve at the constant oneupmanship of "who is the most operssed?"
gentleman11 6y ago
Everything I know about the book is from a Yaron Brooks podcast. He describes its worldview as one where all white people are inescapably racist by due being born white in this place and time, and that there is nothing we can do about it because it is part of our psyche. Additionally, it is not so much individual thoughts or intended actions that are to blame, but society and our institutions, that are also inherently racist whether or not there are any policies you can point to or not that indicate it. Apparently, white poeple are uncurable in this way. Yaron's issue is that it denies individual responsibility for their wrong-headed thinking utterly; denies free will and the ability for individuals to change their minds and be decent; and finally, that by characterizing people as inherently this or that on the basis of race is itself a deeply racist approach to the topic. Is this an accurate summary or is it mistaken?
- krapp 6y ago
  Maybe you should read the book yourself and form your own opinion.
  - gentleman11 6y ago
    I have a reading list with about 20 books in it, and this one isn't going to make to the top of that list because of the summaries I have read. If those summaries are wrong, I'll reconsider. I didn't present an opinion above, just notes from somebody's summary and then asked if it was accurate.
    - krapp 6y ago
      Fair enough, but read the rest of the thread - you're not likely to find many unbiased opinions on it around here. You'd probably be better off reading book reviews.
      - gentleman11 6y ago
        Skeptical of the book reviews I have seen so far > The book raises striking and specific points about how as whites we have biases toward race while pretending we are colorblind. She states specific examples, and outlays practical way forward. > Most of the lower star ratings of this book seem to be exhibiting the exact fragility she outlines, and really only prove to drive her point home further. - Goodreads
hprotagonist 6y ago
A rough heuristic I’ve found historically very useful to judge the relative sanity of a group or person on matters of race is the question “Do you want to ban Huck Finn?” If you do, then I shall waste no time shaking the dust off my feet when I leave, because two things are true as a result. First, you think it’s OK to ban books and are thus beyond the pale to start with; Second, either you understand the denouement of that book and don’t like it because you’re a racist, or you’ve probably internalized White Fragility a bit too thoroughly and dismiss Huck out of hand because it dares to have the n-word in it and have never read the denouement or realized what it means. It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up. It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.
throw_this_one 6y ago
These are people who say "you don't know what it's like to be black if you're not black" and then paint a brush over "white" and make a blanket statement about their "white" lives. Completely racist. They don't even use statistics when looking at the issue of differential treatment by police of blacks vs whites. They just see a single traumatic video and then jump to arms, it's ridiculous. My brother was walking with his GF one night near a protest. The guy on the loudspeaker literally called them out and called them disgusting in front of the crowd. These people are reprehensible.
martythemaniak 6y ago
> Democratic Party leaders, pioneers of the costless gesture, have already embraced this performative race politics as a useful tool for disciplining apostates like Bernie Sanders. Bernie took off in presidential politics as a hard-charging crusader against a Wall Street-fattened political establishment, and exited four years later a self-flagellating, defeated old white man who seemed to regret not apologizing more for his third house. Clad in kente cloth scarves, the Democrats who crushed him will burn up CSPAN with homilies on privilege even as they reassure donors they’ll stay away from Medicare for All or the carried interest tax break. It's useful to keep in mind what's actually happening to people like Taibbi, Greenwald etc. For years, they've been trying to lead the class-war faction of the left - for them race was irrelevant and distracted from the actual problems, for which they had a ready made solution. These solutions, M4A, etc, didn't have to deal with race. But, this faction lost. There's not conspiracy, people just didn't want what Bernie, Taibbi, et all were selling, that's all. The faction that did win does in fact talk about race and now Taibbi is out in the cold. But it's alright, this isn't the French Resolution, no one is coming for his head. He's just gonna have to take a back seat and wield less power. He'll be fine.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > The faction that did win does in fact talk about race and now Taibbi is out in the cold. But it's alright, this isn't the French Resolution, no one is coming for his head. He's just gonna have to take a back seat and wield less power. He'll be fine. If the dynamic you're describing is correct (not saying it is) then this conclusion is wrong. When insecure people gain power they try to disenfranchise their enemies. But they have no real power over the far-enemies. Some conservative in a conservative stronghold with conservative employees and customers can't get canceled because nobody who could cancel them is inclined to do it. The people who get their heads chopped off (or get fired or harassed etc.) are the near-enemies, who are the easiest to sacrifice when the new regime wants to prove it can put heads on spikes, because they're at the same time close enough to be vulnerable but far enough to be targets.
- frabbit 6y ago
  I agree with most of what you write except this part: But, this faction lost. There's not conspiracy, people just didn't want what Bernie, Taibbi, et all were selling, that's all. There was and is a conspiracy in plain sight, that is the control of media to present only two options: capitalist racists versus neoliberal thugs. All polling suggests (and has done for a long time) that the US public is far to the left of either the Dems or Republicans on a bunch of issues to do with foreign relations and domestic policy. This is not reflected in the media.
zdragnar 6y ago
I am amazed that I work at a company full of extremely intelligent individuals, some of whom are truly cream of the crop types given the work we do. Yet, during the Floyd protests, our equity committee sent out an email with a recommended reading list including white fragility and other similar books. Only books that had a similar premise were included, no smart, critical books (including some I can think of written by POC) with any other conclusions or arguments were included. Everything in the company, from the big picture down to the smallest details, received critical scrutiny and thoughtful didcussion- from architecture to code style to customer experience to market position. And yet, any topic that can end with -ism (racism, genderism, etc) can not ever be scrutinized. Words like "blacklist" are abolished, in spite of both prior art and POC employees being (privately) offended that they are thought of as being so fragile. The atmosphere is so thick on such topics that no-one speaks up for fear of being fired.
- gowld 6y ago
  "blacklist" isn't banned because it is thought to hurt black people's feelings. It's banned because it promotes a psycholiguistic effect tending to disrespect black people.
  - gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
    “psycholinguistic effect”: that’s so ethereal as to be meaningless and unfalsifiable. That’s the insidious part too with a lot of anti-racism. You can scarcely disprove or prove any of it.
    - Zanni 6y ago
      I think it's pretty clear what gowid is saying here. The "psycholingustic effect" is the psychological effect on people of color of a language tradition that enforces the idea that light = good and dark = bad. Reasonable people can disagree on how pronounced the effect is and where to draw the line, but it's not meaningless. I've seen posts elsewhere that claim the etymology of blacklist, specifically, isn't based on this metaphor, but this metaphor exists throughout English. Consider this line from A Midsummer Night's Dream, "Not Hermia but Helena I love. Who will not change a raven for a dove?" where light > dark is so obvious that all you have to do is compare one girl to a dark bird and one to a light bird to make your point. Again, it's possible to go to far with this (e.g. whitespace), but that's a question of where to draw the line, not if.
xg15 6y ago
What I never understood with those concepts is what kind of society they are envisioning. Like, if color-blindness is not even a goal anymore, how would a post-racist world look? What would be the role of whites in this world? If "whites" don't exist anymore (not because anyone was killed but because "whiteness" is a particular socialisation and a system of privilege which will have been abandoned), what is the role of descendants of European settlers? (I haven't read the book yet, so it may be I've fallen for right-wing strawmen in those discussions.)
- hirundo 6y ago
  > Like, if color-blindness is not even a goal anymore, how would a post-racist world look? What would be the role of whites in this world? I think the claim is that a post-racist world is a racist construct because white racism is indelible, and the role of whites is to subordinate themselves to the oppressed and support their goals, indefinitely, as reparation.
blueadept111 6y ago
There's a word for people who obsess about race: Racists.
alphabettsy 6y ago
Maybe the writer suffers from exactly what the book describes. The primary argument seems to be that we should stop discussing the lived experiences of black people and the issues they keep trying to bring up because talking about things is the real issue. It also strips away any agency from black people by suggesting any coverage of these issues is because of the media and white liberals instead of what black people want.
vandalatyou 6y ago
This is over-delicate introspection given reality that does not exist. Cultures differ, wars have been fought. This is something that either becomes overt or is sublimated successfully. Children think that understanding the underlying issue makes the problem go away.
andreskytt 6y ago
Writing as a non-American. All if this is horrible, but it is not just the horror of US. In my former Eastern European country, that has never ever had a sizable non-white community, people are reading these books, picking up on Twitter fights and apologizing for jokes they told on tv ten years ago. Writing a book with no mention of it being based on a particular society thus assuming the situation to be the same in Helsinki, Rome and Minneapolis, now _that’s_ racist.

123 points by andrenth 6y ago

Many of us (I'm among them) who check far enough back into their ancestry will find that their 'race' is far from a given. Given our recent knowledge of genetic bottlenecks thousands of years ago, the whole notion dissolves into a mere question of self-serving bunkum.

antiquark 6y ago

Everyone is fragile. There is no "master race" which is immune to negative emotions.

dragonwriter 6y ago
“White fragility” (the concept, not the book, which I have no opinion about and don't expect a piece leading with the false social generalizations that are straight out of right-wing propaganda that this does to provide any illumination that would help with that) isn't about special fragility in Whites, it's about the special consequences of normal human fragility has in a particular privileged elite when confronted with a challenge to that privilege, and moreover to the mythology that provides a veneer that allows them to see the world in which that privilege exists as just. In contexts other than the modern USA, there are other dominant elites which no doubt would exhibit the same effects when challenged; there's nothing innately White about White fragility, it's only circumstantially White.
- pnako 6y ago
  In fact, her own definition is (from Wikipedia): >White Fragility is a state in which even a minimal challenge to the white position becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves including: argumentation, invalidation, silence, withdrawal and claims of being attacked and misunderstood. You could replace the world white by any other word. And you can replace the list of defensive moves by the equivalent statement : "refusal to unconditionally comply", since it's the only option left. I would venture a guess that this covers about 75% of human interactions, and 99% of interactions when the discussion is about challenging someone's interests or position.
- rbecker 6y ago
  > In contexts other than the modern USA, there are other dominant elites which no doubt would exhibit the same effects when challenged; there's nothing innately White about White fragility, it's only circumstantially White. However, I hardly ever hear about other dominant elites being challenged this way (with the occasional exception when Palestine is brought up), so your hypothetical phrasing is largely accurate, as far as I'm aware.

hnisahokehoax 6y ago

So happy to see this on the front page while assange news gets flagged and vote brigaded. So stunning, so brave.

dabbledash 6y ago
This was immediately flagged too, so if you were hoping for consistency: good news! If you were hoping for open discussion: not so much.
dang 6y ago
HN has had plenty of major threads about Assange, including just a few days ago. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=assange%20comments%3E20&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
happytoexplain 6y ago
>So stunning, so brave. This phrase is a meme that holds no value, and originates from an expression of spite and hatred. You should consider skipping things like that on HN, to keep your posts visible.

solzhenitsyn 6y ago

White Fragility is a Kafkatrap. Further, Robin DiAngelo is actively encouraging whites to view themselves as a unified collective without a moment's thought as to how reviving this scientifically asinine and historically disastrous idea could backfire.

dang 6y ago
Please don't create accounts just to pick up where the last account left off when we banned you and explained why. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ttonkytonk 6y ago
  What is wrong with the comment though?
  - dang 6y ago
    It's part of a pattern of using HN primarily for ideological battle, which is destructive of what this site is for.
throw_this_one 6y ago
Kafkatrap. Good to know this term. These people are insane. How is it that first gen Indian or Asian immigrants do so much better than blacks? Is it all explained by systemic racism? Lol. Ridiculous.
TMWNN 6y ago
"Part of left's problem is it expects/demands blacks/hispanics to vote on ethnic basis but is appalled when whites do" (https://twitter.com/JYDenham/status/796345533124186113 https://twitter.com/JYDenham/status/796345533124186113)

save_ferris 6y ago

> A bizarre echo of North Korea’s “three generations of punishment” doctrine could be seen in the boycotts of Holy Land grocery, a well-known hummus maker in Minneapolis. In recent weeks it’s been abandoned by clients and seen its lease pulled because of racist tweets made by the CEO’s 14 year-old daughter eight years ago. Seeing stuff like this makes me wonder why people keep using social media at all. It’s terrible that this guy’s daughter made racist posts 8 years ago, but we have no idea what kind of person she is today. She could be doing community organizing against police brutality and it wouldn’t matter at all. The posterity of childhood is one of the most dystopian aspects of our technology-driven society. It’s like a 2020 version of the Scarlet Letter.

itsdrewmiller 6y ago
Her most recent racist post was 2016, at age 18 or 19 and she held a senior position at the company. The author of this piece doesn’t seem to be super intellectually honest, in addition to his Godwin’s law-breaking.
- gowld 6y ago
  A "senior position" at a family hummus shop? Really?
  - Ghjklov 6y ago
    CEO of Hummus
  - belltaco 6y ago
    Is Walmart a family store too? >Beginning as a small shop in 1986, Holy Land has expanded into a sprawling business that includes an eatery, grocery store, catering business, and commercial food business, with a large restaurant and production facility in Northeast Minneapolis and a stand at the Minneapolis/St. Paul Airport. Its hummus, sauces, and flatbreads are carried by several area grocery stores.
    - 6y ago

drdeadringer 6y ago

Since roughly late 2016 the UUA [Unitarian Universalist Association] has been ever trying to "get on top of" their self-described "white fragility issue". This has caused and been a source of contention amongst many within both the UUA itself and also with UUs and UU organizations at large over the years since. I have personal thoughts and feelings on the matter for several reasons but I won't get into them here in order to try to remain neutral in merely stating the fact that said contention exists. For those curious, I encourage research and if it's not too much trouble or against impartiality on my part I can try to point the way to some sources.

ajuc 6y ago

It's insane and it leads to conservative resurgence, not only in USA but all around the world. Which then returns to USA, and so on in a vicious circle.

war1025 6y ago
> It's insane and it leads to conservative resurgence Unclear what you mean exactly. The way I interpret it, please correct me if I'm wrong, is: The concept of "White Fragility" is so ridiculous and overbearing that it causes white people to retreat to a more conservative stance. In that case, I agree. But I guess you could also mean it as: White people are so fragile in their identities that being forced to be challenged about their beliefs and behaviors causes them to become defensive and retreat to a move conservative position. Which is I think exactly what the author claimed if I'm remembering the book correctly. Either way it's sort of a "heads I win tails you lose" situation she paints, which mostly makes me not interested in playing along.
- ajuc 6y ago
  > The concept of "White Fragility" is so ridiculous and overbearing that it causes white people to retreat to a more conservative stance. Yup, that's basically it. It sounds especially insane to people from countries without colonial past or history of black slavery. You're stating big universal statements basing them on a specific characteristic of a few countries and if anybody disagree it proves your point :) How convenient.
  - dafoex 6y ago
    I personally hate this expression for the double standards it creates. If a minority fights against violence - e.g. police brutality - they are stunning and brave. If white people fight against violence - e.g. rioting and looting - they are fragile Can we not accept that both of these things are worthy things to fight against, or do I have to roll my eyes so hard that I sever my optic nerve at the constant oneupmanship of "who is the most operssed?"

gentleman11 6y ago

Everything I know about the book is from a Yaron Brooks podcast. He describes its worldview as one where all white people are inescapably racist by due being born white in this place and time, and that there is nothing we can do about it because it is part of our psyche. Additionally, it is not so much individual thoughts or intended actions that are to blame, but society and our institutions, that are also inherently racist whether or not there are any policies you can point to or not that indicate it. Apparently, white poeple are uncurable in this way. Yaron's issue is that it denies individual responsibility for their wrong-headed thinking utterly; denies free will and the ability for individuals to change their minds and be decent; and finally, that by characterizing people as inherently this or that on the basis of race is itself a deeply racist approach to the topic. Is this an accurate summary or is it mistaken?

krapp 6y ago
Maybe you should read the book yourself and form your own opinion.
- gentleman11 6y ago
  I have a reading list with about 20 books in it, and this one isn't going to make to the top of that list because of the summaries I have read. If those summaries are wrong, I'll reconsider. I didn't present an opinion above, just notes from somebody's summary and then asked if it was accurate.
  - krapp 6y ago
    Fair enough, but read the rest of the thread - you're not likely to find many unbiased opinions on it around here. You'd probably be better off reading book reviews.
    - gentleman11 6y ago
      Skeptical of the book reviews I have seen so far > The book raises striking and specific points about how as whites we have biases toward race while pretending we are colorblind. She states specific examples, and outlays practical way forward. > Most of the lower star ratings of this book seem to be exhibiting the exact fragility she outlines, and really only prove to drive her point home further. - Goodreads

hprotagonist 6y ago

A rough heuristic I’ve found historically very useful to judge the relative sanity of a group or person on matters of race is the question “Do you want to ban Huck Finn?” If you do, then I shall waste no time shaking the dust off my feet when I leave, because two things are true as a result. First, you think it’s OK to ban books and are thus beyond the pale to start with; Second, either you understand the denouement of that book and don’t like it because you’re a racist, or you’ve probably internalized White Fragility a bit too thoroughly and dismiss Huck out of hand because it dares to have the n-word in it and have never read the denouement or realized what it means. It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up. It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.

throw_this_one 6y ago

These are people who say "you don't know what it's like to be black if you're not black" and then paint a brush over "white" and make a blanket statement about their "white" lives. Completely racist. They don't even use statistics when looking at the issue of differential treatment by police of blacks vs whites. They just see a single traumatic video and then jump to arms, it's ridiculous. My brother was walking with his GF one night near a protest. The guy on the loudspeaker literally called them out and called them disgusting in front of the crowd. These people are reprehensible.

martythemaniak 6y ago

> Democratic Party leaders, pioneers of the costless gesture, have already embraced this performative race politics as a useful tool for disciplining apostates like Bernie Sanders. Bernie took off in presidential politics as a hard-charging crusader against a Wall Street-fattened political establishment, and exited four years later a self-flagellating, defeated old white man who seemed to regret not apologizing more for his third house. Clad in kente cloth scarves, the Democrats who crushed him will burn up CSPAN with homilies on privilege even as they reassure donors they’ll stay away from Medicare for All or the carried interest tax break. It's useful to keep in mind what's actually happening to people like Taibbi, Greenwald etc. For years, they've been trying to lead the class-war faction of the left - for them race was irrelevant and distracted from the actual problems, for which they had a ready made solution. These solutions, M4A, etc, didn't have to deal with race. But, this faction lost. There's not conspiracy, people just didn't want what Bernie, Taibbi, et all were selling, that's all. The faction that did win does in fact talk about race and now Taibbi is out in the cold. But it's alright, this isn't the French Resolution, no one is coming for his head. He's just gonna have to take a back seat and wield less power. He'll be fine.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> The faction that did win does in fact talk about race and now Taibbi is out in the cold. But it's alright, this isn't the French Resolution, no one is coming for his head. He's just gonna have to take a back seat and wield less power. He'll be fine. If the dynamic you're describing is correct (not saying it is) then this conclusion is wrong. When insecure people gain power they try to disenfranchise their enemies. But they have no real power over the far-enemies. Some conservative in a conservative stronghold with conservative employees and customers can't get canceled because nobody who could cancel them is inclined to do it. The people who get their heads chopped off (or get fired or harassed etc.) are the near-enemies, who are the easiest to sacrifice when the new regime wants to prove it can put heads on spikes, because they're at the same time close enough to be vulnerable but far enough to be targets.
frabbit 6y ago
I agree with most of what you write except this part: But, this faction lost. There's not conspiracy, people just didn't want what Bernie, Taibbi, et all were selling, that's all. There was and is a conspiracy in plain sight, that is the control of media to present only two options: capitalist racists versus neoliberal thugs. All polling suggests (and has done for a long time) that the US public is far to the left of either the Dems or Republicans on a bunch of issues to do with foreign relations and domestic policy. This is not reflected in the media.

zdragnar 6y ago

I am amazed that I work at a company full of extremely intelligent individuals, some of whom are truly cream of the crop types given the work we do. Yet, during the Floyd protests, our equity committee sent out an email with a recommended reading list including white fragility and other similar books. Only books that had a similar premise were included, no smart, critical books (including some I can think of written by POC) with any other conclusions or arguments were included. Everything in the company, from the big picture down to the smallest details, received critical scrutiny and thoughtful didcussion- from architecture to code style to customer experience to market position. And yet, any topic that can end with -ism (racism, genderism, etc) can not ever be scrutinized. Words like "blacklist" are abolished, in spite of both prior art and POC employees being (privately) offended that they are thought of as being so fragile. The atmosphere is so thick on such topics that no-one speaks up for fear of being fired.

gowld 6y ago
"blacklist" isn't banned because it is thought to hurt black people's feelings. It's banned because it promotes a psycholiguistic effect tending to disrespect black people.
- gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
  “psycholinguistic effect”: that’s so ethereal as to be meaningless and unfalsifiable. That’s the insidious part too with a lot of anti-racism. You can scarcely disprove or prove any of it.
  - Zanni 6y ago
    I think it's pretty clear what gowid is saying here. The "psycholingustic effect" is the psychological effect on people of color of a language tradition that enforces the idea that light = good and dark = bad. Reasonable people can disagree on how pronounced the effect is and where to draw the line, but it's not meaningless. I've seen posts elsewhere that claim the etymology of blacklist, specifically, isn't based on this metaphor, but this metaphor exists throughout English. Consider this line from A Midsummer Night's Dream, "Not Hermia but Helena I love. Who will not change a raven for a dove?" where light > dark is so obvious that all you have to do is compare one girl to a dark bird and one to a light bird to make your point. Again, it's possible to go to far with this (e.g. whitespace), but that's a question of where to draw the line, not if.

xg15 6y ago

What I never understood with those concepts is what kind of society they are envisioning. Like, if color-blindness is not even a goal anymore, how would a post-racist world look? What would be the role of whites in this world? If "whites" don't exist anymore (not because anyone was killed but because "whiteness" is a particular socialisation and a system of privilege which will have been abandoned), what is the role of descendants of European settlers? (I haven't read the book yet, so it may be I've fallen for right-wing strawmen in those discussions.)

hirundo 6y ago
> Like, if color-blindness is not even a goal anymore, how would a post-racist world look? What would be the role of whites in this world? I think the claim is that a post-racist world is a racist construct because white racism is indelible, and the role of whites is to subordinate themselves to the oppressed and support their goals, indefinitely, as reparation.

blueadept111 6y ago

There's a word for people who obsess about race: Racists.

alphabettsy 6y ago

Maybe the writer suffers from exactly what the book describes. The primary argument seems to be that we should stop discussing the lived experiences of black people and the issues they keep trying to bring up because talking about things is the real issue. It also strips away any agency from black people by suggesting any coverage of these issues is because of the media and white liberals instead of what black people want.

vandalatyou 6y ago

This is over-delicate introspection given reality that does not exist. Cultures differ, wars have been fought. This is something that either becomes overt or is sublimated successfully. Children think that understanding the underlying issue makes the problem go away.

andreskytt 6y ago

Writing as a non-American. All if this is horrible, but it is not just the horror of US. In my former Eastern European country, that has never ever had a sizable non-white community, people are reading these books, picking up on Twitter fights and apologizing for jokes they told on tv ten years ago. Writing a book with no mention of it being based on a particular society thus assuming the situation to be the same in Helsinki, Rome and Minneapolis, now _that’s_ racist.