I agree with basically everything you say here. And don't get me started on DiAngelo LOL!
Your take on privilege is my take. Specifically, that it would be great if everyone had the same level of (unearned) privilege. (Earned is another thing entirely of course.) A person should not be feeling guilty and weepy over having something that, …
I agree with basically everything you say here. And don't get me started on DiAngelo LOL!
Your take on privilege is my take. Specifically, that it would be great if everyone had the same level of (unearned) privilege. (Earned is another thing entirely of course.) A person should not be feeling guilty and weepy over having something that, in a perfect world, everyone would have. And so my tone when discussing privilege is not a negative one. I don't prop up privilege as an indicator of a problem - which is central to most discussions of privilege. Instead I treat recognizing privilege as just being able to access another tool that could make a person more aware of the world around them and how they individually engage with that world. My team and I make sure that the discussion is neither a demonization session or an oppression olympics, but rather a straightforward discussion of how difference can be recognized (we are all individuals) and how privilege is something everyone has (we all have commonalities). And so far, over I'd say >50 trainings since we first started discussing it, we've managed to have zero nonsensical lashing in/lashing out.
And that said, I also agree that this is not necessarily the definition of "privilege" in its modern usage. I'm stretching it, purposely. Believe me, I would love having the discussion without even using that damned word. But the word is out there - and remember, I live in SF - so the word is not just one that all trainees have heard of a lot about, it has strong potential to become an actual barrier to them being authentic and to stoke divisiveness and inability to connect with a client or colleague. And so I attempt to defang the word by coming at it from an angle that channels both universalism and individualism.
So far it has not come back to bite me, and I've been incorporating a talk on "privilege" for about a decade now, ever since it became a thing for my staff (and so, by extension, our training participants). If anything, I'm both checking the box of Must Discuss Privilege while also extending/reframing the value of recognizing both commonalities & differences.
What did bite me, over 20 years ago, was the reaction of a young, straight, white man to my supportive response to a bi woman - he reacted angrily to my saying something along the lines of "as another bisexual, I understand where you are coming from; we live in a straight world, and that can feel overwhelming". For some dumbass reason, he thought that my comment othered him as a straight man. Now I may dismiss his reaction to my boilerplate supportive comment as dumbass (I'll stick by that!)... but I am also not a trainer who wants ANYONE to feel othered. And so I've become more and more expansive in my language. Today, I'd probably refine my response to the bi woman into something like "I think I understand where you are coming from; it can feel overwhelming to be in a minority - we don't often see other people who are like us. And that's true for so many people, maybe even everyone to an extent, because we all can sometimes feel alone & invisible in this world."
That need to be expansive is how we can take back concepts like "privilege" that toxify conversations where it's all about identifying who has and who does not have privilege. When privilege is discussed in terms of being an automatic part of the human condition, people don't automatically get their backs up. And they are able to understand the message being delivered i.e. we all just need to be aware of our differences so that we can be kinder. No guilt tripping is taking place and so no need for anyone to get defensive or tune out.
Re DiAngelo. Before the pandemic, a few people in an personal growth organization we've long volunteered for suggested White Fragility to us. My partner read it in good faith, but was appalled by a good deal of it so called it to my attention. We worked together on a review of sorts, which became more of a critique. We put the critique up and linked to it from the organization's discussion list for volunteers. Kaboom! Major upset. It turned out that the leadership of the org had been using the book as a key part of their internal training, and we were attacking a sacred cow. To make it worse, we later learned that this landed just after an apparently stressful leadership retreat on DEI issues, as people were trying to recover from the heated discussion (of which we know no details) - and so to them it felt like somebody just threw another match on fire they were trying to put out. Worst case landing.
We are in our own ways beloved and respected by the long timers there, but for some of the newer folks we are seen as a bit dicey to this day - we heard that some who didn't know us wondered if we were white suprematicists (and one person simply called my partner one to her face and refused to discuss it further - a behavior which would have been very alien to the heartful organization this used to be, which teaches good communication).
As it becomes infused by concepts from neo-progressivism, long time norms of behavior and framing get trumped by the prescriptions and values of that political ideology.
We are about to go to the first in-person broader retreat (for leadership and volunteers) since then. It will be interesting. We are not in any position of power, as you are with your organization. We have puzzled about how to have a constructive impact; there are many ways to fail in this situation.
And regarding "privilege", your response is very thoughtful. In fact even as I was laying out a summary of my* general case against using the (most common) neo-progressive framing of privilege as a building block for any healthy political philosophy, I was in the back of my mind wondering if in a situation like yours, it might be impossible to avoid the word in your training. And if so, then perhaps the best strategy might be like fighting a wildfire, where setting a controlled backfire moving towards the flames can burn up the fuel load and make a firebreak.
And indeed, that sounds pretty similar to what you describe! (Except I was just speculating, and you have been doing it!). Hats off.
You are using the word, but avoiding the toxic redefinition used by neo-progressives. Your usage is close enough to theirs to not trigger too many autopilot responses from the woke, and you are checking the box ("yep, they did discuss privilege, if they had not it would be bogus") but associating it with a more benign concept, and then giving it minimal emphasis by moving on to more actionable and relevant ways to be a good volunteer. Or at least that's my take-away.
It's so encouraging, as well as intellectually engaging, to discuss this stuff with you!
(* note from above; when I speak of "my" ideas or case etc, it's a shorthand for writing purposes; in reality my partner and I discuss these things frequently so they are "our" ideas, hard to disentangle individual authorship after 47 years of ongoing conversations!)
We live about an hour north of SF, so if the opportunity arises to talk in person some time, we'd love that. Cheers!
Thank you for the kind words! I'll extend the same offer if you & your partner are ever in SF: would be pleasant to talk in person. I can be reached at markmonday@hotmail.com.
The situation re. the agency you both volunteer at and Robin DiAngelo sounds rough. Especially the casual slinging of the term "white supremacist" which is all too common these days. (I've been accused of the same for wanting to establish an outcomes-based timeline within our equity work group - a group I actually established and which followed the work of our POC equity group, another group that I originally convened. The use of that phrase is so nonsensical that all I can do in response is roll my eyes and then LOL about it later to friends. Good job woke folks in reducing a powerful indicator of a societal evil into a petty way to take a jab at someone.)
Good luck at that retreat. That sounds potentially nerve-wracking. I would love to hear about how it went. Feel free to email me! I'm very curious.
I love what Steve has written about DiAngelo - I wish I had a link handy to that specific post. Matt Taibbi and John McWhorter have also written brilliant takedowns about that book and I have appreciated Coleman Hughes' dismissal of it on YouTube. And Matthew Yglesias wrote a great post excoriating Tema Okun, the person who is responsible for the demented modern reframing of "white supremacy" that many agencies like yours and mine have to deal with today. There are literal flyers posted at one of my agency's buildings that excerpts from her list of supposed White Supremacists Characteristics (e.g. individualism, worship of the written word, right to comfort, etc et al). I occasionally take down the flyers but they always reappear, like fruit flies. Someone in that office is certainly dedicated to performing virtue!
DiAngelo and White Fragility are an important marker for me on a personal/professional level. Perhaps the same with you? I can thank that damned book for being my own entry point into heterodox/contrarian writing - after reading it, I just had to find other writers who found it to be as repulsive and as excruciatingly banal as I did. So I guess for that, I have some degree of gratitude towards her LOL! Previously, I had not read much writing about identity - much more of a fiction reader. The last I'd read was way back in college, where I read and loved writers like Baldwin, Lourde, West, Nestle, and Wojnarowicz. Since reading White Fragility, my interest has bloomed again, and because of my disagreeable reaction to that book, I found the substack writers I mentioned above, along with Amy Chua, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Asad Haider, Freddie deBoer, and the writer/trainer Chloe Valdary. All of these writers are excellent, and along with Marie Kennedy here on substack and of course Steve QJ on both substack & medium, they really feed my soul and mind, and help me to always remember that faddish, othering group-think should be continually questioned and challenged.
I read WF because so many of my friends and colleagues had read it and spoke approvingly of it. Foolishly, I thought I could find some value in it, as a trainer and as a colleague who is central to the antiracism efforts at my agency (which is literally a part of my job description). But oh man, what a waste of time. I have so many objections to its thesis, but I think its most egregious flaws are:
(1) Does not provide a way forward. Instead, it encourages white people to navel-gaze, self-flagellate, and become passive bystanders. It is a depressingly nihilistic book.
(2) Reduces white and black people to the level of caricature: whites become inherently toxic racists and blacks become saintly magical figures in the DiAngelo worldview. She is a profoundly essentialist writer, which is an appalling thing for a supposed progressive liberal to have become. She ignores so much of the good work that came before her.
(3) Is a testament to DiAngelo's own failures as a trainer. She literally provides 1 example of a white person who has learned her supposed lessons and "broken through." That amazing white person is... Robin DiAngelo. Like, literally, she is the only one in the book who has learned her (own) lessons. LOL! Does she not realize that her book is a testament to her own failures as a trainer? I would be embarrassed for her, trainer to trainer, if the book wasn't such a runaway success.
(4) Astonishingly, she has taken all of the examples of how she has failed both the business field and working class people in her past trainings and used them to create a book that aims itself at progressives. Astonishing because the level of chicanery is profound. Rejected by both Wall Street type professions and by teachers etc. in her prior work, she uses examples of those rejections to reach a new audience, one that is sufficiently monied and masochistic to accept and pay for her lessons and her book: the white progressive who is eager to indulge in self-hating and in circular firing squads. I actually think DiAngelo herself thinks she is "doing the right thing" but what I think she is doing is grifting.
I agree with basically everything you say here. And don't get me started on DiAngelo LOL!
Your take on privilege is my take. Specifically, that it would be great if everyone had the same level of (unearned) privilege. (Earned is another thing entirely of course.) A person should not be feeling guilty and weepy over having something that, in a perfect world, everyone would have. And so my tone when discussing privilege is not a negative one. I don't prop up privilege as an indicator of a problem - which is central to most discussions of privilege. Instead I treat recognizing privilege as just being able to access another tool that could make a person more aware of the world around them and how they individually engage with that world. My team and I make sure that the discussion is neither a demonization session or an oppression olympics, but rather a straightforward discussion of how difference can be recognized (we are all individuals) and how privilege is something everyone has (we all have commonalities). And so far, over I'd say >50 trainings since we first started discussing it, we've managed to have zero nonsensical lashing in/lashing out.
And that said, I also agree that this is not necessarily the definition of "privilege" in its modern usage. I'm stretching it, purposely. Believe me, I would love having the discussion without even using that damned word. But the word is out there - and remember, I live in SF - so the word is not just one that all trainees have heard of a lot about, it has strong potential to become an actual barrier to them being authentic and to stoke divisiveness and inability to connect with a client or colleague. And so I attempt to defang the word by coming at it from an angle that channels both universalism and individualism.
So far it has not come back to bite me, and I've been incorporating a talk on "privilege" for about a decade now, ever since it became a thing for my staff (and so, by extension, our training participants). If anything, I'm both checking the box of Must Discuss Privilege while also extending/reframing the value of recognizing both commonalities & differences.
What did bite me, over 20 years ago, was the reaction of a young, straight, white man to my supportive response to a bi woman - he reacted angrily to my saying something along the lines of "as another bisexual, I understand where you are coming from; we live in a straight world, and that can feel overwhelming". For some dumbass reason, he thought that my comment othered him as a straight man. Now I may dismiss his reaction to my boilerplate supportive comment as dumbass (I'll stick by that!)... but I am also not a trainer who wants ANYONE to feel othered. And so I've become more and more expansive in my language. Today, I'd probably refine my response to the bi woman into something like "I think I understand where you are coming from; it can feel overwhelming to be in a minority - we don't often see other people who are like us. And that's true for so many people, maybe even everyone to an extent, because we all can sometimes feel alone & invisible in this world."
That need to be expansive is how we can take back concepts like "privilege" that toxify conversations where it's all about identifying who has and who does not have privilege. When privilege is discussed in terms of being an automatic part of the human condition, people don't automatically get their backs up. And they are able to understand the message being delivered i.e. we all just need to be aware of our differences so that we can be kinder. No guilt tripping is taking place and so no need for anyone to get defensive or tune out.
Re DiAngelo. Before the pandemic, a few people in an personal growth organization we've long volunteered for suggested White Fragility to us. My partner read it in good faith, but was appalled by a good deal of it so called it to my attention. We worked together on a review of sorts, which became more of a critique. We put the critique up and linked to it from the organization's discussion list for volunteers. Kaboom! Major upset. It turned out that the leadership of the org had been using the book as a key part of their internal training, and we were attacking a sacred cow. To make it worse, we later learned that this landed just after an apparently stressful leadership retreat on DEI issues, as people were trying to recover from the heated discussion (of which we know no details) - and so to them it felt like somebody just threw another match on fire they were trying to put out. Worst case landing.
We are in our own ways beloved and respected by the long timers there, but for some of the newer folks we are seen as a bit dicey to this day - we heard that some who didn't know us wondered if we were white suprematicists (and one person simply called my partner one to her face and refused to discuss it further - a behavior which would have been very alien to the heartful organization this used to be, which teaches good communication).
As it becomes infused by concepts from neo-progressivism, long time norms of behavior and framing get trumped by the prescriptions and values of that political ideology.
We are about to go to the first in-person broader retreat (for leadership and volunteers) since then. It will be interesting. We are not in any position of power, as you are with your organization. We have puzzled about how to have a constructive impact; there are many ways to fail in this situation.
Mark, your wisdom continues to impress me.
And regarding "privilege", your response is very thoughtful. In fact even as I was laying out a summary of my* general case against using the (most common) neo-progressive framing of privilege as a building block for any healthy political philosophy, I was in the back of my mind wondering if in a situation like yours, it might be impossible to avoid the word in your training. And if so, then perhaps the best strategy might be like fighting a wildfire, where setting a controlled backfire moving towards the flames can burn up the fuel load and make a firebreak.
And indeed, that sounds pretty similar to what you describe! (Except I was just speculating, and you have been doing it!). Hats off.
You are using the word, but avoiding the toxic redefinition used by neo-progressives. Your usage is close enough to theirs to not trigger too many autopilot responses from the woke, and you are checking the box ("yep, they did discuss privilege, if they had not it would be bogus") but associating it with a more benign concept, and then giving it minimal emphasis by moving on to more actionable and relevant ways to be a good volunteer. Or at least that's my take-away.
It's so encouraging, as well as intellectually engaging, to discuss this stuff with you!
(* note from above; when I speak of "my" ideas or case etc, it's a shorthand for writing purposes; in reality my partner and I discuss these things frequently so they are "our" ideas, hard to disentangle individual authorship after 47 years of ongoing conversations!)
We live about an hour north of SF, so if the opportunity arises to talk in person some time, we'd love that. Cheers!
Thank you for the kind words! I'll extend the same offer if you & your partner are ever in SF: would be pleasant to talk in person. I can be reached at markmonday@hotmail.com.
The situation re. the agency you both volunteer at and Robin DiAngelo sounds rough. Especially the casual slinging of the term "white supremacist" which is all too common these days. (I've been accused of the same for wanting to establish an outcomes-based timeline within our equity work group - a group I actually established and which followed the work of our POC equity group, another group that I originally convened. The use of that phrase is so nonsensical that all I can do in response is roll my eyes and then LOL about it later to friends. Good job woke folks in reducing a powerful indicator of a societal evil into a petty way to take a jab at someone.)
Good luck at that retreat. That sounds potentially nerve-wracking. I would love to hear about how it went. Feel free to email me! I'm very curious.
I love what Steve has written about DiAngelo - I wish I had a link handy to that specific post. Matt Taibbi and John McWhorter have also written brilliant takedowns about that book and I have appreciated Coleman Hughes' dismissal of it on YouTube. And Matthew Yglesias wrote a great post excoriating Tema Okun, the person who is responsible for the demented modern reframing of "white supremacy" that many agencies like yours and mine have to deal with today. There are literal flyers posted at one of my agency's buildings that excerpts from her list of supposed White Supremacists Characteristics (e.g. individualism, worship of the written word, right to comfort, etc et al). I occasionally take down the flyers but they always reappear, like fruit flies. Someone in that office is certainly dedicated to performing virtue!
DiAngelo and White Fragility are an important marker for me on a personal/professional level. Perhaps the same with you? I can thank that damned book for being my own entry point into heterodox/contrarian writing - after reading it, I just had to find other writers who found it to be as repulsive and as excruciatingly banal as I did. So I guess for that, I have some degree of gratitude towards her LOL! Previously, I had not read much writing about identity - much more of a fiction reader. The last I'd read was way back in college, where I read and loved writers like Baldwin, Lourde, West, Nestle, and Wojnarowicz. Since reading White Fragility, my interest has bloomed again, and because of my disagreeable reaction to that book, I found the substack writers I mentioned above, along with Amy Chua, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Asad Haider, Freddie deBoer, and the writer/trainer Chloe Valdary. All of these writers are excellent, and along with Marie Kennedy here on substack and of course Steve QJ on both substack & medium, they really feed my soul and mind, and help me to always remember that faddish, othering group-think should be continually questioned and challenged.
I read WF because so many of my friends and colleagues had read it and spoke approvingly of it. Foolishly, I thought I could find some value in it, as a trainer and as a colleague who is central to the antiracism efforts at my agency (which is literally a part of my job description). But oh man, what a waste of time. I have so many objections to its thesis, but I think its most egregious flaws are:
(1) Does not provide a way forward. Instead, it encourages white people to navel-gaze, self-flagellate, and become passive bystanders. It is a depressingly nihilistic book.
(2) Reduces white and black people to the level of caricature: whites become inherently toxic racists and blacks become saintly magical figures in the DiAngelo worldview. She is a profoundly essentialist writer, which is an appalling thing for a supposed progressive liberal to have become. She ignores so much of the good work that came before her.
(3) Is a testament to DiAngelo's own failures as a trainer. She literally provides 1 example of a white person who has learned her supposed lessons and "broken through." That amazing white person is... Robin DiAngelo. Like, literally, she is the only one in the book who has learned her (own) lessons. LOL! Does she not realize that her book is a testament to her own failures as a trainer? I would be embarrassed for her, trainer to trainer, if the book wasn't such a runaway success.
(4) Astonishingly, she has taken all of the examples of how she has failed both the business field and working class people in her past trainings and used them to create a book that aims itself at progressives. Astonishing because the level of chicanery is profound. Rejected by both Wall Street type professions and by teachers etc. in her prior work, she uses examples of those rejections to reach a new audience, one that is sufficiently monied and masochistic to accept and pay for her lessons and her book: the white progressive who is eager to indulge in self-hating and in circular firing squads. I actually think DiAngelo herself thinks she is "doing the right thing" but what I think she is doing is grifting.