#20 / Staying Afloat
Hey everyone,
What do you do when one of your favorite authors writes a vicious take-down of another one of your favorite authors?
Do you feel personally attacked? Do you wonder if you’ve been wrong about the other author and their ideas this whole time? Do you get angry at the first author for betraying you? Do you admit that maybe they’re both right and both wrong, and wish they could just peacefully work out their differences? Do you fling open your china cabinet and hurl all of your dishes into the alley?
All of that happened to me this week when I read this John McWhorter review of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. (Except the last one.)
I haven’t read White Fragility, which in the wake of George Floyd’s murder shot to the top of the best-seller lists, but I’ve been familiar with DiAngelo since mid-2019, when I started learning about antiracism. My co-facilitator Rose and I were just starting up our white Jewish racial justice group, and she lent me her copy of DiAngelo’s previous book, What Does It Mean To Be White?
That book opened my eyes to a lot of stuff. One of the key arguments is that many white people don’t need to think much about race, and so they don’t realize how much it shapes their lives—not just the lives of people of color. One of the effects of white people being systemically dominant, while being unaccustomed to thinking about it, is that many of us find it excruciating to talk about race at all—this is "white fragility." I identified with these ideas, and I found DiAngelo’s analyses of systemic racism compelling. I won’t summarize it here, but suffice to say that it was crucial for me, and I regard her work highly.
John McWhorter is a linguistics professor who writes a lot of popular books that make learning about the history and dynamics of languages super fun. He’s an academic, but his writing is snappy and relatable and full of verve—he uses his linguistic toolbox to full effect. He’s always an enjoyable read.
But damn, this review. It’s scathing. He uses words like “condescending,” “infantile,” and even “dehumanizing,” to describe his level of regard for not just the idea of white fragility, but antiracism in general, and for DiAngelo herself. (He’s not the only one.) The reading experience would be kind of brutal even if I hadn’t been triggered.
And I did actually feel personally under siege at first. I’ve always had a problem with putting popular figures on pedestals, and coming to feel as if they can do no wrong. It happens gradually and it’s difficult to notice. This was the moment I realized that I’d done this with both DiAngelo and McWhorter. What it felt like was mental whiplash: “maybe I’ve been wrong about DiAngelo this whole time… is this antiracism stuff all bullshit… wait, maybe McWhorter just has a personal axe to grind… can I trust anything he says… ?”
Once I slowed down and analyzed the review a little more logically, I began to see the places where McWhorter had good points, and the places where he was making assumptions or letting his personal feelings intrude in his arguments. I realized that I had some defensiveness to look into about my place in the world of antiracism work, which I’m still extremely new to. (McWhorter claims that the concept of white fragility talks down to Black people, and he’s Black and I’m not, so that’s shaky ground.) And the incendiary words felt more and more like the typical landmarks of another outrage-y screed engineered to generate clicks.
“But I thought you were better than that, John!” Well, I guess he’s not. Time to take him off the pedestal, and DiAngelo, too, for that matter. Nobody has all the answers.
So that leaves me, a self-styled synthesizer of opposing viewpoints, to try to assemble something from this wreckage. Once I got past my emotional response, I remembered that I believe deeply in considering opposing viewpoints and trying to learn from them. I also believe in regularly questioning my own beliefs. So then: what the hell do I actually think about all this? I’m having some trouble writing about it.
It’s a hot topic in so many ways. You’ve got a best-selling yet polarizing book, massive questions about the extent of systemic racism and what to do about it, and an interwoven thread about the merits and dangers of “cancel culture” running through all of it. How do you untangle this and make some sense out of it?
I mean, writing is hard enough. And this is a thorny idea for a piece, and so I feel some pressure to put in the time it will take to do it justice. Am I good enough to do that? Then add in the timeliness: even though the topic demands careful crafting, it’s also carrying a severe case of Someone Is Wrong On The Internet Syndrome. "I can’t let this stand without a response!" "Yesterday is already too late!" "Time to panic!"
You can see from what I hope is this measured reflection that I’m not going to rush it. Maybe a synthesis of the topic will be better received once tempers have cooled a bit, anyway. McWhorter’s working on a book about antiracism as a new religion, so I’m sure there will plenty of opportunity to spout hot takes when that’s released. But that’s not really what I want to do.
Articles
Saida Grundy — “Your Anti-Racism Books Are a Means, Not An End”
This was a more well-reasoned take on the dangers of anti-racism becoming a popular phenomenon, and on the limits of “consciousness raising.” Particularly compelling was the worry that once we’ve dispensed with the low-hanging fruit of Confederate statues and horrible team nicknames, we might think we’ve actually made some lasting change:
Overemphasis on awareness can also lead to a preoccupation with the racist symbolism of certain sports mascots, band names, brand logos, and public spaces, while obscuring the deeper forms of harm behind these iconographies. Consider the public consciousness about Confederate statues: It has resulted in the widespread removal of these monuments, but it has also meant that people have stopped short of examining their more insidious effects. These statues were part of a highly organized and aggressive lobbying campaign by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC)—a nationwide organization founded by pro-slavery white women—to promote the “Lost Cause of the Confederacy.” The Lost Cause was a venomous mythology that minimized slavery and venerated those who fought to preserve it. But public commemoration of Confederates was just the tip of the iceberg—the UDC’s main goal for the Lost Cause was to target public-school curricula.
The UDC stealthily pressured school boards to purge all texts that it claimed as doing “injustice to the South” and replace them with neo-Confederate propaganda that cherished slaveholders as martyrs and celebrated slavery as benevolent to African Americans. The statues of tyrannical white supremacists like Nathan Bedford Forrest, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis were but ornaments topping off the UDC’s national policy victories. To topple those statues today—without overhauling the textbooks and curricula that soft-pedal slavery and omit its devotion to anti-Black violence—seems equally ornamental.
BBC — “Why is billionaire George Soros a bogeyman for the hard right?”
This week, the Chicago Tribune published an anti-semitic, racist editorial by one of its longtime columnists, in which George Soros is mentioned several times; it is insinuated that Soros is the shadowy force behind the current protests for racial justice, and that he is provoking lawlessness in our cities.
I know that Soros is constantly used as a dog whistle to whip up anti-Jewish sentiment among white nationalists and conspiracy theorists, but I realized I didn’t know the full story—why George Soros? I also wanted to be able to better explain why simply mentioning Soros (without even referring to his Jewishness) is anti-semitic, and dangerous. This piece answered a lot of my questions, and more: it also showed exactly how this kind of scapegoating—a hallmark of classic anti-semitism—can lead to devastating violence.
It turns out that the man who murdered 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh last year was obsessed with the idea that George Soros was bankrolling the migrant caravans that he saw as an invasion.
It was the worst act of anti-Semitic violence in US history - and it was carried out by a man obsessed with George Soros.
The social media posts of the gunman, Robert Bowers, revealed he believed in a dark anti-Semitic conspiracy theory called "white genocide", with Soros as the mastermind.
The theory claims white people are being replaced by immigrants and will ultimately be eliminated. It explains the neo-Nazis' chant, "Jews will not replace us!" as they marched through Charlottesville.
Joel Finkelstein, director of the Network Contagion Research Institute, discovered one post where Bowers referred to Soros as "the Jew that funds white genocide and controls the press", and claimed that he pushed for gun control and open borders.
Finkelstein, who has received Open Society funding to investigate what he believes is a growing threat, concludes that white supremacists like Bowers see Soros as a Jewish mastermind pulling the strings. "These violent actors are justifying their violence by pointing to Soros as a supreme form of evil," he says.
Mood
U2 — “Every Breaking Wave”
I want to highlight late-career U2 this week. Because if you’re like me, you may have never really listened to it. All I really knew about U2’s actual music from the last 15 years was “uno, dos, tres, catorce” and the infamous partnership with Apple, in which iTunes automatically downloaded their 2014 album Songs of Innocence onto millions of devices.
It turns out, though, that Songs of Innocence is a great record. It’s almost as good as 2009’s No Line on the Horizon. Not that U2 is an oppressed artist in any way, but I’d still argue that the fact that Songs of Innocence was entirely written off by so many people strictly because of how it was distributed is an all-time musical injustice. (And I know that it was a little worse than that—apparently the album would re-download itself if you tried to delete it, and had a habit of auto-playing itself when you’d connect to Bluetooth. But it’s still a great record.)
The sea knows where are the rocks
And drowning is no sin
You know where my heart is
The same place that yours has been
We know that we fear to win
And so we end before we begin
https://open.spotify.com/track/1LqyRBUM9VpzWjiZpBi9KM?si=JGck19JVS7uOxfGWuHk-Dw
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Thanks for reading. Please take care, and write back if you can!
Love,
Aaron