Newsletter Special: Robin DiAngelo Social Science Racism
David Shasha
Robin DiAngelo and the New Corporatist Anti-Racism Industry
I have often discussed the problem of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the New Black Separatism industry:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/coates/davidshasha/7r-J6K9j27Q/e9jnzDmZUF8J
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/coates/davidshasha/BvD7ZQLD3rY/bCTELxU8DwAJ
Indeed, I have compared Coates to the radical Zionists, people like Tikvah Tablet Liel Leibovitz, who would like nothing better than to have a Race War; as we saw in his effusive praise for the Coates-inspired movie “Get Out”:
In 2015, Randall Kennedy, an academic and activist of the old Civil Rights MLK school that Coates so emphatically rejects, provided one of the most substantive and trenchant critiques of his Jet-Set Black Radicalism:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/coates/davidshasha/Dla8gd0qHt4/bUWflslbCAAJ
As he wrote there:
An important concept in Coates’s book is what he refers to as “The Dream.” He defines it only vaguely. He seems to intend for it to refer to a myth about the United States that he suspects that many Americans believe is real—the image of the noble, innocent, well-intentioned, generous country that is open, full of opportunity, and committed to liberty and justice for all. Coates tells his son:
I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.
Those who believe in the Dream, Coates maintains, are not only misguided; they are dangerous. The Dreamers, he writes, “are pillaging Ferguson … they are torturing Muslims, and their drones are bombing wedding parties. … [The] Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong. … The Dreamers accept this as the cost of doing business, accept our bodies as currency, because it is their tradition.”
Given the disparate nature of the acts noted, not to mention the variety of those engaging in the conduct he scorns, I am not at all sure about whom Coates is speaking when he refers to “Dreamers.” Sometimes he seems to be referring exclusively to whites. Hence he writes: “We [black folks] have taken the one-drop rules of Dreamers [white folks] and flipped them. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.” In describing the depredations of Dreamers, however, Coates leaves unaddressed a puzzling ambiguity. After all, the person in control of the United States drones that have bombed wedding parties is a black American—President Barack Obama. Is he a Dreamer?
Kennedy notes the problem with the New Black Separatism is the very messy entanglements of bourgeois African-Americans who have worked through the system, and found success in the post-MLK era.
Indeed, it is not that we are living in a Post-Racial era, but that we are also not living in a hermetic culture where the races are separate.
Kennedy seeks to continue the struggle, while Coates and his many acolytes want to flatten the discourse:
Echoing Ellison, I maintain that within the confines of a still-racist America, blacks—including black cops—have the wherewithal to do bad things that are not properly attributable to white racism. Just as blacks have done wonderful things independently of white domination—consider the blues, gospel, jazz, and rap—so, too, have blacks done dastardly things independently of white domination. Consider bigotry by African Americans that cannot properly be excused as mere black imitations of white folks’ vices.
And of course, it is Ralph Ellison, the scourge of the New Black Separatists, who is referred to here. It marks the division between an older tradition of Integration, and a new tradition of nihilism and cynicism.
It is something that we can see in the nobly heroic figure of the late John Lewis; a central figure in the Civil Rights Movement, and a firm adherent to the sacred tenets of Christian Humanism:
Historian Jon Meacham, who is a strong proponent of American Religious Humanism and the Civil Rights legacy, will soon be publishing a book on Lewis and his politico-religious view of this country rooted in morality and Social Justice:
https://www.axios.com/john-lewis-biography-jon-meacham-09573800-16eb-470b-8b3f-275fe2441726.html
“The Power of Hope” is a title with the resonance of this storied activist past; a tradition that is now being decimated by a new generation of Corporate shills and Race hustlers.
I just learned about ideological Coates ally Robin DiAngelo from Daniel Bergner’s exhaustive profile in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, “’White Fragility’ is Everywhere. But Does Antiracism Training Work?”
To be honest, I had never heard of Professor DiAngelo before, and was intrigued to see that there is now a very profitable cottage industry in Anti-Racism Training in White Corporate America that is paying huge dividends for the Separatists and their Caucasian allies:
In early June, Robin DiAngelo addressed 184 Democratic members of Congress who had gathered, by conference call, for what the party leadership had named a “Democratic Caucus family discussion on race.” It was 10 days after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, gave introductory remarks, and soon DiAngelo began. “For all the white people listening right now, thinking I am not talking to you,” she had a message: “I am looking directly in your eyes and saying, ‘It is you.’” She cautioned the white officeholders not to think that because they marched in the 1960s, or served a diverse district, or had a Black roommate in college, they were exempt from self-examination. Until they reckoned with the question of “what does it mean to be white,” they would “continue to enact policies and practices — intentionally or not — that hurt and limit” Black lives.
The invitation to speak to the caucus was just one in a deluge for DiAngelo. Before Floyd’s killing, she was a leading figure in the field of antiracism training or, as she sometimes describes it, antiracism consciousness raising. It’s a field shared by nonwhite and white trainers, and DiAngelo, who is 63 and white, with graying corkscrew curls framing delicate features, had won the admiration of Black activist intellectuals like Ibram X. Kendi, author of “How to Be an Antiracist,” who praises the “unapologetic critique” of her presentations, her apparent indifference to “the feelings of the white people in the room.” In 2018, when she published her manifesto, “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism,” Michael Eric Dyson provided the foreword. She is “wise and withering,” he wrote, “in her relentless assault on what Langston Hughes termed ‘the ways of white folks.’” “White Fragility” leapt onto the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, and next came a stream of bookings for public lectures and, mostly, private workshops and speeches given to school faculties and government agencies and university administrations and companies like Microsoft and Google and W.L. Gore & Associates, the maker of Gore-Tex.
It is a conversation taking place outside the impoverished African-American community; focused solely on White Corporate America and pandering to Liberal Guilt.
Sadly, it does not mention the role of people like Coates in that racist configuration, as the feted writer continues to cash the checks of Trump confidante Ike Perlmutter, the head of Marvel Comics:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/TcIDvNf1Fac/rBf_7N6iAAAJ
Indeed, there is rarely any actual discussion of White Jewish Wakanda racism in the case of “Black Panther” and its creator Stan Lee, the object of a recent biography by the aforementioned Liel Leibovitz:
https://www.jewishlives.org/books/stanlee
I have just written a brief Trumpnote on the Black Separatist situation that I called, “How to Make a Trump 2020 Campaign Video: The Confederate Way”:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/davidshasha/muhpV3sbA28
Here is the complete note:
Last weekend MSNBC broadcast a report by Trymaine Lee on the Confederate Monuments controversy:
Lee and New York Times reporter John Eligon traveled the South to see those monuments, and to interview the Trumpfans of the Confederacy.
I was struck by one single detail in all their interviews with the hostile racists: the two men refused to accuse the South of being traitors to America.
As I watched the string of often uncomfortable encounters, I began to think of Ta-Nehisi Coates again:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/coates/davidshasha/7r-J6K9j27Q/e9jnzDmZUF8J
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/coates/davidshasha/BvD7ZQLD3rY/bCTELxU8DwAJ
Indeed, he was the first person I thought about right after Charlottesville:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/coates/davidshasha/ozwpLAvsg-0/useW5JE_AQAJ
The refusal to accuse the Confederate wannabes of treason is very Coates because it assumes that America and its Union is not legitimate in the first place, which of course plays right into the hands of the Trumpists.
It was interesting to watch Lee and Eligon re-litigate Slavery and the Civil War in a way that reminded me of the Peter Beinart battle. It was an unnecessary PILPUL that could have been avoided if the two African-American men simply accused the White racists of being Hate America Right Wingers.
But they never did it.
So, after I read the DiAngelo NYT profile, I did a Google search to learn more about the matter, and came across an excellent article “On ‘White Fragility’” by Rolling Stone gadfly Matt Taibbi that reinforces some of my thinking.
Taibbi hits many of the right notes:
A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (Amazon’s #1 seller!) reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power contests.
It’s been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it surged past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today cheered, “American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary escapism.” When DiAngelo appeared on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon gushed, “I know… everyone wants to talk to you right now!” White Fragility has been pitched as an uncontroversial road-map for fighting racism, at a time when after the murder of George Floyd Americans are suddenly (and appropriately) interested in doing just that. Except this isn’t a straightforward book about examining one’s own prejudices. Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it?
DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.
He continues to mark DiAngelo’s Social Science as deeply Anti-Intellectual and Anti-Cultural:
This dingbat racialist cult, which has no art, music, literature, and certainly no comedy, is the vision of “progress” institutional America has chosen to endorse in the Trump era. Why? Maybe because it fits. It won’t hurt the business model of the news media, which for decades now has been monetizing division and has known how to profit from moral panics and witch hunts since before Fleet street discovered the Mod/Rocker wars.
In order to better contextualize the DiAngelo Race conundrum in a Sephardic Convivencia context, I have included in this special newsletter my articles on Jonathan Haidt and the New Jewish Social Science in order to underscore how the for-profit go-getter academics, whether from the Left or the Right side of the political spectrum, have undermined our intellectual-cultural heritage, as Randall Kennedy noted when he referred to Ralph Ellison, and the genius of African-American civilization:
Just as blacks have done wonderful things independently of white domination—consider the blues, gospel, jazz, and rap—so, too, have blacks done dastardly things independently of white domination. Consider bigotry by African Americans that cannot properly be excused as mere black imitations of white folks’ vices.
In my article on the dangers of the New Jewish Social Science, I too refer to Ellison:
In thinking about the trend as it applies to Sephardim, I would raise the trenchant criticism of the great African-American writer and public intellectual Ralph Ellison:
As we see in the following citation, Ellison saw the domination of Social Science scholarship as a means of control by a White Supremacist regime:
Ellison saw modern social science as a way of rationalizing and justifying the methods of economic and social control of the South. Myrdal’s social science left little room for blacks to be seen as anything more than objects, never more than the sum of their oppression. He found that both troubling and oppressive. He observed, “Men have made a way of life in caves and upon cliffs; why cannot Negroes have made a way upon the horns of the white man’s dilemma?” Ellison thought that the “solution to the problem of the American Negro and democracy” rested only in part on white action. The solution also required “the creation of a democracy in which the Negro will be free to define himself for what he is and, within the larger framework of that democracy, for what he desires to be.”
It is quite likely that many of the Corporate titans that find themselves listening to Robin DiAngelo are part of the White Jewish Supremacy that has so stigmatized and erased the Sephardic heritage.
We have continually seen in the “Jews of Color” discourse how it is possible to be “Anti-Racist” while still identifying with the White Jewish Supremacy:
Like the Anti-Racist seminar movement that is all the rage in Corporate America, there is also a parallel cash bonanza in “Jews of Color” advocacy in the Ashkenazi community. We continue to see a flood of reading lists, profile articles, and position papers designed to instruct the White Jewish Supremacists in how to treat the African-American Jews in their midst.
As I have indicated however, the movement is an internal Ashkenazi phenomenon, as the African-American “Jews of Color” identify Jewishly as Ashkenazim, and are themselves fully blind to Anti-Sephardi racism.
Indeed, in my attempt to reach out to a number of the leaders of the movement I have been faced with utter silence. As I read the names in these articles from the White Jewish Media, I look for e-mail addresses and dutifully reach out and try to engage. And as with the Leftist Jewish organizations, there is never a response.
As Taibbi correctly notes, it is all about the Corporate Cash and its divisive tendencies:
At a time of catastrophe and national despair, when conservative nationalism is on the rise and violent confrontation on the streets is becoming commonplace, it’s extremely suspicious that the books politicians, the press, university administrators, and corporate consultants alike are asking us to read are urging us to put race even more at the center of our identities, and fetishize the unbridgeable nature of our differences. Meanwhile books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, which are both beautiful and actually anti-racist, have been banned, for containing the “N-word.” (White Fragility contains it too, by the way). It’s almost like someone thinks there’s a benefit to keeping people divided.
As is his wont, Taibbi occasionally goes off the rails, but his Leftist critique of the excesses of the PC movement and its Stalinist tendencies often hits the nail on the head, as he understands that the New Social Science with its repressive tendencies is ultimately about making a buck and not doing the dirty work of cultural reclamation and social change.
It has become more and more apparent, as I survey the current socio-political landscape, that the New Separatist Thought Police, like the tin-horn dictators in post-Colonial Third World countries, have simply taken over the repressive systemic apparatus they inherited from the racist establishment, and replaced their ideology without really seeking to reform what remains a corrupt patronage system.
Sephardim can look at the DiAngelo-Coates movement with profound skepticism, as we continue to see the White Jewish Supremacists making all their PC moves, and still maintaining their racial privilege.
As with the White Jewish Supremacist “debate” between Peter Beinart and the HASBARAH fanatics, Sephardim have been removed from the Adult Jewish Table and have no say in the future of the Jewish experience.
So too, those who have worked for many decades to bring American Blacks and Whites together, now see themselves being crowded out of the discourse by a new version of Separatism that is being pushed by White Corporate elites, who are happy to make the window-dressing moves that well-paid hacks like Robin DiAngelo insist they make.
But left out of the discussion is the matter of cultural creativity, and the intellectual needs of a civilization which has almost completely lost its bearings under the crushing weight of Idiocracy YEEZUS-Kardashians and other Corporate Hip-Hop shills, who demand that we stop reading books and stop thinking critically.
I have discussed the complex process of African civilization and American culture in my article on the brilliant Senegalese musician and statesman Youssou N’Dour.
As I said there:
It is worth recalling that at the height of his brilliant, but tragically-shortened career, the great Reggae pioneer Bob Marley found himself outside the cultural parameters of the African-American community, who deemed him to be a foreign “primitive” whose music did not at all resonate with them. In the Corporate Disco era, Marley’s music was seen as alien and weird.
In spite of the fact that Marley was an international celebrity, who played to packed football stadiums in Europe and Asia, his small American audience was largely made up of nerdy college students and elitist music snobs who followed the ins and outs of his career in the larger framework of Rock rather than Soul and R&B.
Since the release of the megahit movie “Black Panther,” ostensibly about African culture and pride, I have been thinking a good deal about the fact that Marley’s final New York performance was at Madison Square Garden, as the opening act to Lionel Richie and the Commodores!
http://www.bobmarley.com/lion-in-the-garden-1980/
Such a thing seems absurd to us today, as we see the ubiquity of Marley in the culture: t-shirts, rolling paper, and all sorts of other tchotchkes are being licensed and marketed to an enthusiastic public that sees Marley as a saint and prophet.
But when he was alive, the mass American audience wanted nothing to do with him.
“Black Panther” is purportedly about Africa, but its soundtrack contains nothing from the continent, preferring instead to load up on Corporate Hip-Hop and Poptrash.
In the end, it is all about Wakanda, and about how the actual African culture that it completely elides has become part of the latest Corporate myth that is forcing African-Americans further into lives of ignorance, poverty, and despair; while the New Social Science hucksters make away with piles of cash.
David Shasha
Robin DiAngelo and the New Corporatist Anti-Racist Industry
By: David Shasha
‘White Fragility’ is Everywhere. But Does Antiracism Training Work?
By: Daniel Bergner
On “White Fragility”
By: Matt Taibbi
Jonathan Haidt Against “The Coddling of the American Mind”
By: David Shasha
Giving Sephardic Women an Ashkenazi Voice: The New Jewish Social Science and the Danger to Sephardic Studies
By: David Shasha
By: David Shasha