If you walk into the UVA Bookstore, you will find school supplies, clothes, technology, and, of course, books. These books range from historical works to presidential biographies to children’s books to perhaps one of the greatest abominations in literature: Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility.
Let it be known that I have never read DiAngelo’s disgusting excuse for a book in its entirety. I have read a few pages of it in preparation for a presentation on “whiteness” as a first year participant in UVA’s Blueprint Leadership Organization. Those few pages are enough to declare DiAngelo’s ideology evil, the ideas discussed in the presentation farcical, and everyone who gives credence to any bit of it duped.
In White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo derides all white people as racist. Not because she thinks all white people believe all non-white people are inferior solely on the basis of skin color. No, that would be actual racism! In this book, she uses a fake redefinition of “racism” to declare that since white people were never largely held in bondage or the victims of Jim Crow laws in this country, they have “institutional power” – regardless of the institution or its nature. It is this power – which non-white people don’t possess, according to DiAngelo – that makes white people racist, because the power they hold is only theirs due to their race.
While this is nonsensical, she goes further. White Fragility goes on to describe white people’s reactions when you tell them they are racist with zero evidence. The terms “white fragility” and “white rage” are used to describe this phenomenon. Because, as it turns out, everyday people don’t give a damn about the phony definition of racism that abstracts the word from individuals’ ideologies and actions. So, when you tell them they are racist, they want a concrete example. And they get upset when you fail to provide one (because you don’t have one!), and instead, tell them they were born with the wrong quantity of melanin to be considered innocent of this great offense which is being racist.
Oh yeah, that brings me to this point: since racism equals prejudice plus power in the make-believe fantasyland Robin DiAngelo lives in, and since only white people hold this power, that means a non-white person can never be racist. Ever. Even if that person bestows upon someone else a contempt or belief of inferiority solely because of the differences in their skin colors, that non-white individual isn’t racist and never can be unless the current system is destroyed and rebuilt upon “anti-racist” (which is somehow different from “non-racist”?) principles.
Given the divisive, virulently racist, and frankly anti-true nature of White Fragility, it should be a scandal that this University even considered putting it on their Bookstore shelves, let alone actually selling it. This book should be banned from our Bookstore for the same reasons UVA would never sell a white supremacist’s book extolling the virtues of white people’s skin color. This is not a matter of “academic freedom” or “freedom of opinion” – you do not get to hold an opinion that is devoid of truth. Our University should be ashamed of itself and should take this book (and all others like it) off its shelf immediately. Replace it with another president’s biography or something. At least those add value to our society and make people smarter. White Fragility and the ideas espoused therein make people stupid and the best way we can prevent that is to reject any opportunity the race hustlers think they have to infiltrate our school.
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