Ideology won't save us.
I read two longish articles earlier this week that I’ll be thinking about for a while. The first, “What’s Missing From “White Fragility”, explores the work of Robin DiAngelo who is known for her anti-racism work with white people and for popularizing the phrase, “white fragility.” It’s a fascinating look at the challenges of actually getting white people to actually respond - materially, measurably - to racism and white supremacy.
I would say denial manifests quietly. Agreement and enthusiasm can stall conversation just as well as aggression, withdrawal, and tears. Like McIntosh, I observe little that suggests America has learned anything about race over the past 30 years besides how better to conceal its racism. Trump’s election may have made some anti-racism work easier—getting butts in seats and books in hands—but it also gave well-meaning white people a monster next to which their casual racism now seems tame. It is enough to admit racism exists, that whiteness might be a problem. Any lower and the bar will be in Hades.
The second article that got be thinking is by Kalefa Sanneh (son of the Christian historian Lamin Sanneh whose books I’ve gained a lot from over the years) in The New Yorker, “The Fight to Redefine Racism.” In it, Sanneh digs into Ibram X. Kendi’s new book, How to be an Antiracist.
The modern battle against racism, as many people have observed, is driven by a kind of sacred fervor, and in “How to Be an Antiracist” Kendi makes this link explicit. “I cannot disconnect my parents’ religious strivings to be Christian from my secular strivings to be an antiracist,” he writes. Indeed, Christianity and antiracism were intimately connected for his parents. They were inspired by Tom Skinner, a fiery black evangelist who preached the gospel of “Jesus Christ the Radical,” and by James H. Cone, one of the originators of black-liberation theology. Kendi’s parents taught him black pride, and he took these lessons seriously.
Sanneh paints a complicated picture of Kendi’s approach, contrasting his with DiAngelo.
He wants readers to become politically active—to work to change public policy, and to “focus on power instead of people.” DiAngelo, the author of “White Fragility,” is unapologetically interested in people, particularly white people.
There’s a lot to wrestle with here, though I’m doing my best to leave it alone for now as I’ve got to finish the revisions for Rediscipling the White Church and part of me fears discovering some little tidbit of information that forces me to toss the entire project and start again. Catastrophe thinking I think that’s called.
I did appreciate my friend Brandon O’Brien’s response to both articles on Twitter.
One observation: white progressives have become so inured to the terminology (privilege, fragility) that it becomes jargon while white conservatives deny the realities = these groups light years apart in some ways AND YET oddly similar in their affect on POC.
Indeed. Ideology will not save us.
Speaking of Brandon, he’s got a new book coming out, Not from Around Here, which looks like exactly the kind of thing we should be reading right now.
School has resumed for our boys but the weather was just too nice on Wednesday so we grabbed a cheap pizza and hit the beach for a few hours before bedtime.