The phenomenon of wokeness has speedily come to exercise great influence over our culture.(1) In 2018 Robin DiAngelo published White Fragility: Why it’s so Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. Her very widely distributed book has become a canonical text in the secular worldview. In my own Christian denomination, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, one administrator placed this book first on a recommended reading list.(2). No recommendation could have been less helpful. The book’s pseudo-science and erroneous theories can only worsen relations.
The book teaches that racism is inevitable; that our society is held together by racist systems designed to make white people supreme and to oppress blacks; that treating people according to their character rather than the color of their skin is a racist ideology; that America since its beginning was a racist nation; and that Christian missionary work is actually the transmission of white supremacy to oppress people.
In Particular, “white fragility” is,
The state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves [in white people]. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.(3)
In practice, the charge of “white fragility,” functions to coerce white people into agreement with the tenets of critical race theory. Basically, the author says that if you are white, you are a racist, and that if you disagree that you are a racist, that in itself demonstrates that you are a racist. Talking about racism wrong is racist, and not talking about it is just as bad because silence is violence. This leaves only the option of being manipulated into adopting the positions advocated by DiAngelo.
The book White Fragility is directly contradicted by both Christianity and science. For the moment, let’s look at four concerns:
1. The author admits the book is steeped in identity politics and critical race theory
DiAngelo asserts that all gains that have been made in reducing oppression have come from identity politics, which is false. She admits that her book “is unapologetically rooted in identity politics.” (xiv4). But if you think that her movement is continuing the work of Martin Luther King, you should understand that the movement she represents specifically rejects and inverts the fundamental premises of that movement. James Lindsey correctly states that DiAngelo’s approach “disguises the fact that the term [identity politics] arose in explicit rejection of the means and methods of the movement it claims to continue.”(5) ( Several pages of the book are devoted to undermining King’s hope that “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will grow up in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”(6)
DiAngelo teaches that the color blindness King advocated is an “ideology of racism”(7) and faults those who embrace color blindness as racists who “enact racism in ways that allow them to maintain a positive self image.(8)
The book’s foreward is written by Michael Eric Dyson, a known critical race theory scholar.(9) The book quotes from authors associated with critical race theory form beginning to end, including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram Kendi, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Marilyn Frye, David Wellman, Cheryl Harris, Charles W. Mills, Joe Feagin, Martin Barker, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Toni Morrison, Christine Sleeter, Zeus Leonardo, Amy Stuart Wells, Resmaa Menakem, Carol Anderson, Michelle Fine, Kimberle Crenshaw.(10)
Lindsey’s Social Justice Encyclopedia entry on “Critical Race Theory” neatly summarizes the ideas in DiAngelo’s book:
[C]ritical race Theory is centrally concerned with power, which it holds in higher regard than truth (indeed, it holds the postmodernist position that claims to truth are assertions of power by specific means). Second, it distinguishes itself from “traditional” civil rights and instead favors identity politics (in the radical sense). Third, it is not interested in progress but revolution. Fourth, it calls into question “the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”(11)
But being human is not about power; it is about choosing to love. Love is the opposite of power-seeking.
Love suffers long and is kind; loves does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; dos not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things (1 Corinthians 13:4-7).
To make power relations central to your life is very fundamentally to misunderstand what being human is all about. Christianity teaches that Jesus, God Himself, stepped down into His creation and took on our humanity. “He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:8). He died to reconcile us with Himself and with each other. He bears our sins, dies in our place, but also provides the ultimate example for how we should live. He never taught us to seek power but to renounce power. All this the present social justice movement and critical race theory practitioners desire to destroy and if successful will racialize our culture.
2. The case for white fragility is built on theory, anecdotes, and mind-reading
White Fragility downloads lots of theory to the reader while assuming the existence of vast societal structures that it never even remotely demonstrates actually exist. The asserted existence of these systems and structures is offered up in a sugared glaze of anecdotes and stories.
DiAngelo generalizes her own thought and projects it as being the feelings and thoughts of all white people. Insisting that we see white people as a group, as a collective, she believes that all white people share her attitudes. She bathes all this in a pastiche of quotes and references to critical race theory authors. Her book is a critical race theory echo chamber. Beginning with the assumption that critical race theory is true, page after page she sprays the reader with these assumptions. For example:
Predominately white neighborhoods are not outside of race--they are teeming with race. Every moment we spend in these environments reinforces powerful aspects of the white racial frame, including a limited worldview, a reliance on deeply problematic depictions of people of color, comfort in segregation with no sense that there might be value in knowing people of color, and internalized superiority.(12)
DiAngelo claims that our racism and even our whiteness is invisible to ourselves because we are participants in a white supremacist culture. How can she say that every moment I spend in a “white” neighborhood reinforces the white racial frame? I grew up in a mostly white suburban neighborhood near Portland, Oregon. When crime occurred on our street, we did not assume it to be perpetrated by any particular color of people.
The author admits that her book does not “attempt to prove that racism exists; I start from that premise.”(13) I believe there is racism and that there are racists. But where it does exist it is rooted in human fallenness; it is not limited particularly to white people.
DiAngelo has a different definition of racism: “Racism is a structure, not an event”(14). “Racism is a deeply embedded system of institutional power”(15) “Our institutions were designed to reproduce racial inequality” and “The default of the current system is the reproduction of racial inequality.”(16) The problem, she says, is that “we are taught to think about racism only as discrete acts committed by individual people, rather than as a complex, interconnected system.”(17)
3. White Fragility insists on the inevitability of racism; so that were its claims even true, there can be no effectual corrective
If you are white, you are racist. DiAngelo:
“Everyone has prejudice, and everyone discriminates.”(18)
“My psychosocial development was inculcated in a white supremacist culture. . . Most of us would not choose to be socialized into racism and white supremacy. Unfortunately, we didn’t have that choice. . . nothing could have exempted us from these messages completely.”(19)
“Racism cannot be absent from your friendship.”(20).
“I will never be completely free of racism.”(21)
“A positive white identity is an impossible goal. White identity is inherently racist; white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy.”(22)
According to DiAngelo, the best we can hope for is to “strive to be less white.”(23) Critical race theory teaches that all humans are hopelessly enmeshed in racism. Human society is permeated by systems of oppression, and racism is inevitable. Christianity, in contrast, teaches that all humans come from one beginning, humans rebelled against God’s instructions. But all can be reunited again through Jesus Christ who dies to make atonement for the sin of all humans. As written in the book of Ephesians:
Now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For He Himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of separation. . . [He creates] in Himself one new man from the two, thus making peace, and that He might reconcile them both to God in one body through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity (Ephesians 2:13, 14, 15b-16).
In Christianity, Jesus reconciles all humans with God and with each other. Jesus taught “If you bring your gift to the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift” (Matthew 5:23-24). Galatians 3:28 makes this clear:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Which is to say that Christian teaching makes all humans valuable. Rather than continuously focusing on race, and racializing every aspect of life, as Robin DiAngelo and those teaching critical race theory do, Christianity puts us all on an equally high footing, teaching that “God created man [humans] in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27).
Christianity, at its very core, is a positive and uniting religion because it sees humans as a single group. It teaches that “He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26). in contrast, critical race theory is intentional about dividing us.
4. The book misrepresents facts in service to its ideology.
DiAngelo presents a distorted version of the history of America. She says it began with the attempted genocide of indigenous people and theft of their land.(24) “The US economy,” says DiAngelo, “was based on the abduction and enslavement of African people, the displacement and genocide of indigenous people, and the annexation of Mexican lands.”(25)
But is this really true? Did the colonists come here to kill native Americans and steal their land? Was the entire US economy based on the slave trade? Were the shipbuilders in the northern colonies African-Americans? Others have debunked these and other misrepresentations by DiAngelo. (e.g. Ben Shapiro’s review “7 Reasons Why White Fragility” is the Worst Book Ever.”(26)
America has failed its founding ideals in many ways but also sustained and fulfilled them in many ways. But it fits the goals of the author to represent America as being bad to the core because the author’s goal to overturn all. DiAngelo explicitly identifies a number of ideologies which she regards as negative, including individualism(27), meritocracy(28), capitalism(29), color-blindness(30), consumerism(31), objectivity(32), and democracy.(33) For DiAngelo, even “The romanticized ‘traditional’ family values of the past are also racially problematic.”(34) But same-sex marriage and LGBT rights are progress.(35)
Here, then, is a system that replaces belief in a personal God who loves humans and created them for moral goodness, with a hopeless, secular, materialistic religion which is almost purely about power relations, the acquisition of authority over others, and the suppression of any and all ideas which do not advance the woke idea. The facts of history are even malleable, to be engaged via merely utilitarian usage. They are useful to be portrayed so as to support the goals of critical theory, to deconstruct and replace the present civilization with something allegedly more just but almost certainly less human and less fair.
To Summarize, Christians should have nothing to do with DiAngelo’s fables, her “science falsely so-called.” The ideas presented in her book White Fragility, are incompatible with the facts of the world in which God has placed us. What do I suggest instead? Christianity. But if you want a book dealing particularly with race issues in America in the contemporary setting, read Shelby Steele, White Guilt. I discuss that book, here.(36)
There is much more woke danger in DiAngelo’s book, and in The Woke Danger 6 I plan to share additional concerns.
Larry Kirkpatrick serves as pastor of the Muskegon and Fremont MI Seventh-day Adventist churches. His website is GreatControversy.org and YouTube channel is “Larry the guy from Michigan.” Every morning Larry publishes a new devotional video.
Notes
1. I have discussed this phenomenon in four previous articles/videos in this series, titled
The Woke Danger 1: Applied Postmodernism. https://youtu.be/XnUsk_MR4Eg
The Woke Danger 2: From Evergreen to the Purge. https://youtu.be/lfPTCPc-Tj8
The Woke Danger 3: Collectivist Roots and Shoots. https://youtu.be/72I_qBRrWcc
The Woke Danger 4: Gramsci to Critical Theory. https://youtu.be/2EvV1RIrZHw
2. Resources for Conversations on racial Justice and Equality. 2. https://www.nadadventist.org/resources-racial-justice
3. White Fragility, p. 103.
4. Ibid., p. xiv.
5. https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-identity-politics/
6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP4iY1TtS3s
7. White Fragility, pp. 89.
8. Ibid., pp. 41-43, 76-77.
9. https://cta.lib.uci.edu/critical-theory-uc-irvine/schools-thought-reading-lists/critical-race-theory
10. White Fragility, pp. 16, 20, 23, 24, 29, 30, 34, 39, 45, 57, 64, 67, 89, 93, 94, 95, 96, 100, 110, 134.
11. https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-critical-race-theory/
12. White Fragility, p. 37.
13. Ibid., p. 5.
14. Ibid., p. 20.
15. Ibid., p. 24.
16. Ibid., p. 153.
17. Ibid., p. 3.
18. Ibid., p. 20.
19. Ibid., p. 69.
20. Ibid., p. 81.
21. Ibid., p. 147.
22. Ibid., p. 149.
23. Ibid., p. 150.
24. Ibid., p. xiii.
25. Ibid., pp. 15-16.
26. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWgnX84KD7A
27. White Fragility, pp. 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 21, 26, 85, 89.
28. Ibid., pp. 8, 21, 26, 66.
29. Ibid., p. 21.
30. Ibid., pp. 42, 89.
31. Ibid., p. 21.
32. Ibid., pp. 9, 11.
33. Ibid., p. 21.
34. Ibid., p. 61.
35. Ibid., pp. xiv, 40.
36. White Guilt--Kirkpatrick reacts to Shelby Steele. https://youtu.be/L-TwRKpHcbo