Robin DiAngelo Thinks Society Will Never Improve

Progress depends on ignoring her counsel of despair

Antiracism

ROBIN DiANGELO THINKS SOCIETY WILL NEVER IMPROVE

Progress depends on ignoring her counsel of despair

Julian Adorney

Robin DiAngelo is one of the most influential people in American culture. Her term “white fragility” made the shortlist as an Oxford Word of the Year in 2017, and that was before she really blew up. Her mega-bestseller White Fragility (2018) has reached millions of readers. Her speaking fees run tens of thousands of dollars per hour, and she's given keynotes and trainings at countless universities and corporations.

With all her influence, it’s worth asking: should we be taking advice from her on how to reduce racism? I think the answer is no. For one thing, in spite of the fact that Social Justice Fundamentalists crow about how DiAngelo is the author that you need to read or listen to if you want to do your part to fight racism, DiAngelo herself doesn’t seem to think that racism can be beaten. If she doesn’t believe in the efficacy of her own work, why should we?

DiAngelo doesn’t think much of the idea that individual people can become less racist. In White Fragility, she says that “racism is unavoidable and … it is impossible to completely escape having developed problematic and racial assumptions and attitudes.” Speaking of herself (DiAngelo is white), she says that “I also understand that there is no way for me to avoid enacting problematic (racial) patterns.” For DiAngelo, no matter how much work you do, you're always going to be a racist.

Indeed, DiAngelo reserves some of her harshest criticism for people who think they have actually worked on their racism. In a telling passage, DiAngelo talks about “white people who think they are not racist, or are less racist, or are in the ‘choir’ or already ‘get it.’” Those people, she asserts, “cause the most daily damage to people of color.” That is: if you think that you're even a little bit “less racist,” then you’re in the group that (according to DiAngelo) does more daily damage to people of color than the established hate groups. For DiAngelo, you can of course increase your level of guilt and self-flagellation. But you’d better not think that makes you any less racist.

Of course, if people cannot change, then societies, which after all are made up of people, will also have a very hard time changing. And indeed DiAngelo argues that societal racial progress is often illusory. In Is Everyone Really Equal?, DiAngelo and co-author Özlem Sensoy endorse the idea of “new racism,” which they describe as “ways in which racism has adapted over time so that modern norms, policies, and practices result in similar racial outcomes as those in the past.” For DiAngelo, racist institutions such as Jim Crow didn’t really end; they just transformed. They may be less visible (they don’t “appear to be explicitly racist”) but they result in more or less the same outcomes. This is perhaps why DiAngelo describes “white supremacy” as “historical and continual” in White Fragility—that is, not something that we lived through, but something that we continue to live smack dab in the middle of.

Even when DiAngelo and Sensoy admit to some sort of racial progress (events like the election of President Obama are “significant and worthy of celebration”) they hasten to add that, “advances are also tenuous” and progress is liable to be rolled back. For DiAngelo, any positive change happens glacially; and even when it does happen, it’s generally a game of one step forward one step back. She and Sensoy stress that “systems of oppression are deeply rooted and not overcome with the simple passage of legislation.”

A great many Americans think that we’ve made strong racial progress as a society in the past 100 years. DiAngelo cautions against this kind of optimistic thinking. According to her and Sensoy, systems of oppression are “far less flexible than popular ideology would acknowledge.”

Why does DiAngelo think this way? In order to understand why her worldview leans so pessimistic, it’s necessary to understand her intellectual roots. Critical Theory (an umbrella term that includes Critical Race Theory, Critical Social Justice, etc.) is heavily influenced by the philosophy of postmodernism. In an article in Education Week praising Critical Race Theory, Stephen Sawchuk lays it out: “Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought….” In a section of Is Everyone Really Equal? titled “A Brief Overview of Critical Theory,” DiAngelo and Sensoy note that two of Critical Theory's primary intellectual influences are Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Derrida and Foucault are two of the standard bearers of postmodernism.

For the postmodernist philosopher, nothing ever changes. Postmodernists see the world in terms of social “discourses.” These discourses (for instance, the idea that men are more drawn to leadership positions than women, or the idea that it’s better to be wealthy than poor) have a profound influence on all of us. In Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, professor Christopher Butler describes this logic: for postmodernists, “our very identity, the notion we have of ourselves, is at issue when we are affected by discourses of power.” Most of us would admit that we are deeply influenced by our socialization, but postmodernists go much further. For postmodernists, we are our socialization, nothing more and nothing less. As Butler puts it, for postmodernist philosophers “the conflicting languages of power which circulate through and within individuals actually constitute the self.” Indeed, postmodernists don’t even speak of the “self”; they prefer the term “subject,” as in one who is “subject-ed” to the social discourses that they see and hear. For postmodernists, we actually don’t have any individual autonomy, or any real self, at all; we’re just the products of our socialization. Butler again: postmodernism endorses “a distinctive view of the nature of the self which was a challenge to the individualist rationalism, and the emphasis on personal autonomy, of most liberals.”

But if individual autonomy doesn’t exist, then of course personal development cannot either. If there is no self, then there can be no self-improvement. If we are all just subjects controlled by the forces of socialization, the “discourses,” around us, then how on earth could we possibly do anything on our own initiative to become less prejudiced?

This line of thought may be bleak, but it’s something that DiAngelo very deliberately leans into. Echoing postmodernists like Butler, she argues that the forces of socialization define us. “Our socialization is the foundation of our identity,” she and Sensoy claim. “The forces of socialization are powerful,” and “once the message of our superiority or inferiority is internalized, very little outside force is needed in order to ensure that we will play our social roles.” The “fundamental acceptance” of our role in society, shaped by the dominant discourses we see and hear, is “complete by an early age.” 

Perhaps as a result of this, DiAngelo doesn’t think we have much in the way of free will. “The logic of individual autonomy that underlies liberal humanism (the idea that people are free to make independent rational decisions that determine their own fate),” according to her and Sensoy, “was viewed [by the founders of Critical Theory] as a mechanism for keeping the marginalized in their place by obscuring larger structural systems of inequality.” That is: we’re all defined by our socialization, and the idea that we can make any real progress for ourselves is just a myth that those in power use to keep oppressed groups down.

For DiAngelo, then, solving racism represents something of a chicken-and-egg problem. We’re defined by our socialization, so we cannot become less racist unless our socialization becomes less racist. But at the same time, our socialization is created and perpetuated by groups in power; so our socialization won’t change unless enough of us as individuals become less racist and then get into positions of power where we can change the discourse. Or as DiAngelo puts it herself in White Fragility, “Even if challenging all the racism and superiority we have internalized was quick and easy to do, our racism would be reinforced all over again just by virtue of living in the culture.” It’s the logic of a trap.

Indeed, DiAngelo herself has, in her own words, fallen victim to this trap. In a recent interview, she said that, “I don’t actually think I’m any less or more racist than anyone else, and that includes Donald Trump.” This is telling. DiAngelo has (presumably) been doing the work that she asks her readers to do, and for much, much longer. But after all of that, she’s still just as racist as the man who referred to Haiti and African nations as “sh*thole countries.” Her work has not made her any less racist; is it not fair to ask if it will fail us in the same way?

Thankfully, in the real world both individual and societal growth is possible. In the 1960s, the United States ended legal segregation; which, whatever DiAngelo and Sensoy seem to think, did represent a seismic shift in race relations and in equality under the law. On a more individual level, from 1958 to 2021, Gallup shows that support for interracial marriage increased from 4 percent to 94 percent of all Americans. That means a whole lot of people became a whole lot less racist. In the 1950s, white people tossed the n-word around like it was candy. Now, saying the n-word is a good way to get exiled from civil society. 

Racism remains a problem, but looking to the DiAngelos of the world to help us cure it is like having strep throat and then going to a doctor who insists that strep throat cannot be cured or even treated. Not only is this vision fatalistic and unlikely to do much good, it’s also just plain wrong.

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Julian Adorney is a writer and marketer with the Foundation for Economic Education, an organization that focuses on preserving our liberal social contract. His primary areas of study are critiquing leftist illiberalism and reducing affective polarization. You can find him on twitter here.