Robin DiAngelo is a Sinister Fraud

Her ideas on whiteness are bs, as is her perceived victimhood

This painting has white fragility. Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

You have to give her points for marketing herself.

In our era of BLM, white Americans who say they have Black friends are desperate to do the important work of appearing to support Black lives on their social media. They are a market ripe for an opportunist like Robin DiAngelo, a self-proclaimed educator and consultant on race relations. Her book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism was released in 2018 and had a huge increase in sales after the George Floyd tragedy in 2020. By all measures, the book has been a smash hit.

Here are the book’s general principles:

• White fragility is by definition a “defensive response” when whiteness is called out, and it takes very little to evoke that defensiveness in a white person.

• White people are used to viewing themselves as the "default" race and are thus insulated from feelings of “racial discomfort.”

• Racism must be continually identified, analyzed, and challenged in every interaction. The question is not if racism is at play, but how.

Who could argue with the book’s thesis from its white author that American whites should acknowledge their racism? Indeed, there’s truth to it. Racism was and continues to be a reality of life in the United States—is that really new information for anyone? But that is what this new “antiracist” lexicon does: it takes a kernel of (rather obvious) truth and magnifies it to an unacceptable level of sophistry.

The fundamental truth is that DiAngelo’s ideas are not progressive; they are religious in nature, grounded in the principles of Christianity. Being born white is the original sin. To cleanse yourself of that sin, you must see the priest (in this case DiAngelo), confess your sins, and get absolved by saying some prayers using the language the priest tells you to. As someone who happily belongs to a religion that rejects these ideas, I must also reject this brand of pseudo-progressivism.

There are people from sects of the left, university administrators, and corporate executives who are willing to pay DiAngelo thousands for a single appearance. Her workshops feature scintillating topics like “The Dangers of White Culture in the Workplace” and “How to Run a White Affinity Group” (who’s gonna tell her what that sounds like…?). Notably, she was a featured speaker at Evergreen State in 2017 just before the campus descended into anarchy, during which a group of students held the university’s president hostage.

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Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire just released a new film, Am I Racist?. Basically, Walsh goes undercover with the intention of discrediting antiracist educators and activists, the humor stemming from the ridiculousness of their interactions. Some are calling it "the Borat of the DEI industry.” It’s not far off, if you eliminate the Jewish aspect entirely.

One thing we find out from Walsh himself is that his producers paid DiAngelo $15k to sit for a 2-hour interview. So DiAngelo got $7500 per hour for a meeting where the interviewer’s express intention was for her to spew her usual ideas. She is now complaining that she is the victim in that situation.

After the movie’s premiere, DiAngelo went into what appears to be a desperate attempt at damage control in her release of a lengthy statement. It doesn’t help her; it just shows how easily she got duped. First she says that she suspected fraud when she first arrived at the interview, which the producers told her was for a film called ‘Shades of Justice,’ but sat through it anyway. Then after that:

“After reviewing the sequence of events and discussing it with my colleagues, I realized that they had lied about their agenda and I had been played. Unfortunately, last month I started receiving hateful and misogynistic emails. Some referenced the Daily Wire (Ben Shapiro’s website), which announced the film is indeed being released. It is not titled ‘Shades of Justice’ nor is it meant to support the anti-racist cause. […] ‘Am I Racist’ is not only about me and I was not the only one who fell for their deception. Sadly, many of those being mocked are women of Color.”

But why should any of that matter if her ideas should hold true for all of white America, of which Walsh and his target viewers are part? If she suspected that she was the target of a hoax during the interview, why didn’t she just get up, leave, and return the $15k? It’s because she did not entertain the idea of fraud at all; DiAngelo could not have imagined someone not from her fan base paying her for her time. DiAngelo seems to believe that her inability to discern between an adherent and a heathen is someone else’s fault. If she emerges from the interaction not realizing the difference, she’s the victim by default.

Let me be clear: I agree with basically nothing that Matt Walsh says or does. I am not a fan of the Daily Wire. I despise Ben Shapiro and happen to believe the sound of his voice alone constitutes a crime against humanity. I don’t think that making a movie with the purpose of trolling these types of people into saying things we already know about them was the best use of time and resources, especially since the inevitable outcome of that project was those same people emerging with a renewed sense of victimhood. That may very well have been part and parcel of Walsh’s plan, though.

Robin DiAngelo is not a progressive, a prophet, or an expert on race relations. She is posing as a guru for a deranged sect of the left within a new religion going by the name of “antiracism.” It’s no different in practice than modern “prosperity preachers” who trick their congregants into giving up their meager earnings to fund their private jets. But at least those religious leaders know they are committing fraud; the worst part is that DiAngelo doesn’t.

As a liberal, I am not into religious fundamentalism, and you shouldn’t be either. But hey, maybe that’s just my white fragility talking.

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