Robin DiAngelo, one-hit wonder
The people who bought "White Fragility" aren't rushing out to get her new book.
One of my favorite YouTubers, music reviewer Todd in the Shadows, has a regular feature called “One Hit Wonderland” examining the careers of singers and bands who only had one popular song. A portion of these videos, “the failed follow-up,” is dedicated to examining why the next single couldn’t capture the magic the big hit.
If Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility was her “Funkytown,” Nice Racism is looking very much like her “Designer Music”:
Is Robin DiAngelo’s 15 minutes of fame just about up?
The author perpetuated critical race theory and saw her ideology go mainstream after a 2018 book, but now her follow-up effort Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm has tanked with a listing of 1,980 on Amazon. It hasn’t cracked the top 10 in any category, and 30% of the reviews are one-star.
DiAngelo’s first book, White Fragility, was on the bestseller list for a year, spending time at No. 1 after the George Floyd killing in May 2020. However, her newest book sold just 3,500 copies in the first week.
Actually, a better comparison might be something like “We Are The World” (or its Canadian equivalent, “Tears Are Not Enough”) which everyone bought because it was for a good cause, and then completely forgot about. DiAngelo’s new book is “What More Can I Give” in this metaphor.
Even I read White Fragility after I saw a copy at my local library, and figured I might as well see what the fuss is all about. Honestly, I didn’t hate it. At least, I didn’t hate all of it. I thought it made some fair points about how how white people sometimes behave toward racial minorities, and how they - sorry, we - can perpetuate inequities and injustices.
I also thought it featured a lot of “heads I win, tails you lose” logic, with DiAngelo effectively arguing that trying to counter accusations of racism is itself proof of racism. The infamous “White Women’s Tears” chapter was where the book truly lived down to Matt Taibbi’s legendary review.
Taibbi also read Nice Racism - so far, it seems like the only people who’ve actually read it are those who hate-read it - and, my God, I wish I was capable of writing like this:
Nice Racism, the booklike product released this week by the “Vanilla Ice of Antiracism,” Robin DiAngelo, begins with an anecdote from the author’s past. She’s in college, gone out to a dinner party with her partner, where she discovers the other couple is, gasp, black. “I was excited and felt an immediate need to let them know I was not racist,” she explains, adding: “I proceeded to spend the evening telling them how racist my family was. I shared every racist joke, story, and comment I could remember my family ever making…”
Predictably, her behavior makes the couple uncomfortable, but, “I obliviously plowed ahead, ignoring their signals. I was having a great time regaling them with these anecdotes—the proverbial life of the party!” She goes on:
My progressive credentials were impeccable: I was a minority myself—a woman in a committed relationship with another woman…I knew how to talk about patriarchy and heterosexism. I was a cool white progressive, not an ignorant racist. Of course, what I was actually demonstrating was how completely oblivious I was.
No shit, the reader thinks. Instead of trying to amp down her racial anxiety out of basic decency, this author fed hers steroids and protein shakes, growing it to brontosaurus size before dressing it in neon diapers and parading it across America for years in a juggernaut of cringe that’s already secured a place as one of the great carnival grifts of all time. Nice Racism, the rare book that’s unreadable and morally disgusting but somehow also important, is the latest stop on the tour.
Reading DiAngelo is like being strapped to an ice floe in a vast ocean while someone applies metronome hammer-strikes to the the same spot on your temporal bone over and over. You hear ideas repeated ten, twenty, a hundred times, losing track of which story is which. Are we at the workshop where Eva denies she’s a racist because she grew up in Germany, or the one where Bob and Sue deny they’re racist by claiming they think of themselves as individuals, or the one where the owning-class white woman erupts because no one will validate her claim that she’s not racist, because she’s from Canada?
Maybe I’ll get around to reading it myself. Copies should be available in the clearance section before too long.
Shot:
…Hundreds if not thousands of Uighurs, a severely persecuted minority from western China, have been detained in recent years in the Middle East and in Asian countries. Many of them are secretly deported to China, where they are incarcerated. These forced repatriations are part of China’s campaign against Muslim minorities which, according to the US government and human rights groups, amounts to ethnic genocide. More than a million Uighurs have been held in a vast system of reeducation camps and prisons in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang. In the camps, Uighurs and other Muslim minorities such as Kazakhs are -indoctrinated and, in some cases, tortured. There are also reports of slave labour and forced sterilization of women.
For decades, Muslim countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had been safe havens for the Uighur diaspora. But as China’s economic might and global reach grow, governments around the world have started to push Uighurs out of their countries and assist China in its international manhunt.
Since 2017, several thousand Uighur students, workers and businessmen have fled Cairo after Egyptian authorities started a nationwide crackdown. ‘At Cairo airport they had lists with three colors. People with their name marked green could fly out, yellow names had to stay at the airport and red ones were arrested,’ says Abduweli Ayup, a Uighur activist based in Norway. In some cases, the Uighurs were questioned by Chinese police officers in their prison cells in Egypt before they were deported to China.
[…]
The forced repatriations are a frightening sign of China’s growing influence over foreign governments. Beijing is increasingly putting economic and political pressure on countries to cooperate with its authoritarian police system. In 2015, Thailand sent 109 Uighurs back to China after they tried to escape from Xinjiang to Turkey via southeast Asia. The men and women were flown back in a special airplane with black hoods over their heads and guarded by policemen, according to Chinese TV reports. Cambodia, Malaysia and other Asian countries have carried out similar deportations.
Even in European countries, which do not extradite people to China, dissidents and members of China’s minorities do not feel safe from Beijing. Several Uighur families in Germany and other European countries told me that they receive warnings and even threats from Chinese authorities if they talk publicly about their family members in the reeducation camps or report human rights violations. ‘They force your father or mother to call you and ask you to stop talking to the media, otherwise there would be bad consequences,’ explained one Uighur woman who now lives in Munich.
China is also using Interpol, the international police organization based in Lyon, as a tool for forced repatriations and to silence critical voices. Dolkun Isa, the president of World Uighur Congress, an international organization of exiled Uighur groups, was the subject of an Interpol ‘red notice’ — an international wanted–person alert — for 21 years. China never provided any proof or explanation. ‘The space for Uighurs in the world is getting smaller, because China is putting more and more pressure on other countries,’ says Isa.
Speaking of authoritarian governments in that part of the world, Oliver Stone’s dictators’ PR tour has now taken him to Kazakhstan, and this trailer must be seen to be believed. (Note: this “documentary” is eight hours long.)
Via Curbside Classic, proof that pickup trucks were once used mainly for work and car companies had to convince people to use them as regular transportation. Crazy, right?
Um, Tibet?