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 …
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.
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.