Tipsheet

Rolling Stone Editor on Why ‘White Fragility’ May Be the ‘Dumbest Book Ever Written’

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  July 23, 2020 1:05 PM

If there is one non-conservative writer who you should read right now, it's Matt Taibbi. The Rolling Stone editor has been a surgeon in dissecting the Left's uncontrollable descent into insanity. Even if you disagree with most of his work, which I'm sure you will, his analysis of the Left's "woke" awakening is spot on and devastating. Taibbi torched these clowns for their historically illiterate and unhinged tantrum over Independence Day. Now, he's going off on the institutional Left's latest craze: fawning over Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility," a cacophony of intersectionality nonsense that appears to have driven Taibbi crazy just reading it. 

It's everything you'd expect to hear if you were forced to sit in some lecture about race quarterbacked by a "woke" lefty. You'd learn nothing about how to solve America's race issues, only that racism can never be eradicated, and that further entrenching racial divisions is the only remedy because unity doesn't appear to be the goal here. That's not an accident. From Martin Luther King to Jackie Robinson, the book appears to do well to pervert any notion of racial progress. There cannot be within this ethos. Taibbi nukes this book from orbit, calling it possibly the dumbest thing ever written, but also notes why it's no shock that it has caught on with lefty audiences, who are obsessed with race.

He notes that the "cancel culture" phenomenon was borne from this rigid, anti-intellectual movement that is race-obsessed. It's to the point where we have teenagers perusing social media accounts of their peers to find problematic tweets or posts and compiling them on spreadsheets; this is a "woke" hit list. Nothing Orwellian about that, right? It's super healthy…if you were a left-wing authoritarian. Oh, and Taibbi even noted that "woke" parents are just as bad:  

The problem, the aggrieved parent noted, was that his/her sons had gone to a diverse school, and their ‘closest friends are still a mix of black, Hispanic, and white kids,’ which to them was natural. The parent worried when one son was asked to fill out an application for a potential college roommate and expressed annoyance at having to specify race, because ‘I don’t care about race.’"

And? How on earth is this a bad mindset for young people to have? The kid clearly doesn't care about his roommate's background. Yet, the race war—the Left's version of it, the probable phantom struggle between Oceania and Eurasia. There can be no end. It must be perpetual. And there can be no debate. Double-plus good, huh? Also, with the racial division war being unending and solidifying divisions, that's how liberals maintain their competitiveness in national elections?

These kids are going to go to college, become more insane, graduate, and then spread an even more toxic form of "wokeness" into the sociopolitical sphere. It's a scary thought. Just look at what the first wave did to The New York Times, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben's Rice, the Washington Redskins, and even fruit snacks. They're all hiding under the bed, fearful of the lefty mob.

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The best part of this whole book is the notion that if you're white, the only thing you can do is "strive to be less white." It's liberalism in a nutshell: thinking is too hard (via Matt Taibbi):

If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.”

DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.

DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of this type is built around the same principles as Orwell’s Newspeak: it banishes ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform, center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices.

[…]

Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream,” speech…the framework for American race relations for more than half a century precisely because people of all races understood King to be referring to a difficult and beautiful long-term goal worth pursuing is discounted, of course. White Fragility is based upon the idea that human beings are incapable of judging each other by the content of their character, and if people of different races think they are getting along or even loving one another, they probably need immediate antiracism training.

[…]

Robin DiAngelo, I guess – who believes Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier because he “finally had what it took to play with whites.” Everyone familiar with this story understands that Robinson had to be exceptional, both as a player and as a human being, to confront the racist institution known as Major League Baseball. His story has always been understood as a complex, long-developing political tale about overcoming violent systemic oppression. For DiAngelo to suggest history should re-cast Robinson as “the first black man whites allowed to play major league baseball” is grotesque and profoundly belittling.

[…]

It takes a special kind of ignorant for an author to choose an example that illustrates the mathematical opposite of one’s intended point, but this isn’t uncommon in White Fragility, which may be the dumbest book ever written.

[…]

It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors.

Where we reside on the spectrum of righteousness is, they say, almost entirely determined by birth, a view probably shared by a lot of 4chan readers. With a full commitment to the program of psychological ablutions outlined in the book, one may strive for a “less white identity,” but again, DiAngelo explicitly rejects the Kingian goal of just trying to love one another as impossible, for two people born with different skin colors.

[…]

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.

War is not meant to be won; it's meant to be continuous. And yet, we're the ones who want to divide. We're the ones that are racist. We're the ones who are the Neanderthals. My eyes can't roll any harder. You all knew this was a liberal trash talking point, especially since before COVID torpedoed it, Donald Trump created the best job market for blacks in our history. Also, women, black, Latino and Asian unemployment had reached historic lows. More people were working than those seeking a job. The economy was roaring before China threw a stone at it. The obsession with race is going to bite liberals in the a** one day. They will overreach and go off the deep end. I know it seems they already have, and you could make that argument, but we still await the one battle where this movement will be exposed as a circus act to everybody else. The drunk McCarthy moment where he took on the U.S. Army has yet to materialize. The "have you no decency, sir" moment has yet to arrive, though it'll probably be framed as "what, are you nuts?"

If you want another reporter who is sick of this nonsense, here's Michael Tracey's thread about this book. It's also not flattering: