All material based on Robin DiAngelo’s work has since been removed from LinkedIn learning:
Of course he criticised it.
https://giffenman-miscellania.blogspot.com/2016/08/nigel-far...
Source: https://www.robindiangelo.com/
Yes, and you can confirm it yourself:
https://twitter.com/DrKarlynB/status/1362774562769879044?s=2...
Rhetoric like this is deeply problematic, especially for mixed-race people: https://www.aei.org/op-eds/anti-racist-education-is-anything.... About 1 in 6 children today are mixed race, and most of them have some white ancestry. What does it mean to a mixed-race person to tell them to "be less white?" I don't want my half-white daughter being told "be less white." (More like me, less like my wife?)
The thing is--if some random guy on the street said it, like when someone yelled "go back home" to my wife and daughter, I could shrug that off. You can't eliminate bigotry from society completely. But educated people normalizing this sort of rhetoric in Fortune 500 companies is intolerable. That's bigotry backed by a theoretical and ideological framework. That's something I can't just shrug off. I have been reading Thomas Chatterton Williams (an American writer of mixed heritage who now lives in France) lately. In my view, he has the better take on this: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/part-of-a-larger-battle-....
We also can't overlook what this rhetoric does to ordinary white people. "Be less white" is easy to say for educated and privileged white people like Robin DiAngelo. They aren't bothered by the implications of this because of their own status and security. They see it as harmless "punching up." Let me tell you, that's not how my grandmother in-law perceives it. To her, "white privilege" is an academic abstraction. She grew up in real poverty and never went to college. By contrast, "be less white" is quite easy to understand as a statement of overt racism. And, perplexingly to her, its overt racism that's evidently being given sanction at the highest levels of our society.
[1] An excellent assessment of DiAngelo's book: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/dehumanizi....
where she states: > raising White children to be White is a form of child abuse
Feel free to read the full context. So no, she may have not provided the slides. But yes, this is on point for her if you read even the smallest bit of her papers.
I understand the academic underpinnings of that idea, but that's not how normal people understand the term "white." The Bureau of the Census, for example, certainly appears the believe that "white" reflects a racial category: https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html.
It is not surprising. Immigrants from Nigeria are the best educated immigrant group and income correlates with education.
We rarely get the chance to see that the idea of whiteness comes from a need of protecting an in-group from exploitation, while excusing and justifying the exploitation of outsiders to that group.
The census is an interesting example because for the first 70 years or so, starting in 1790 the US census had just 3 "race/ethnicity" categories. You could be "Free white male/Free white female", "All other free person" or "Slave". Which is part of the reason for creating the category of whiteness. There's also some really gross stuff right through the 1800s where the census was tracking people with various percentages of "black blood".
https://www.pewresearch.org/interactives/what-census-calls-u...
I suppose I'm just saying that the census, as part of the machinery used to implement and maintain white supremacy, is not necessarily the best authority on race.
If you're feeling angry at things you've heard before and reacting with things that have been said before, that is not curious conversation. That is ideological battle, in which people use hardened pre-existing points to bash each other's positions. We don't want that here—but please understand why: it's simply a question of preserving this site for its mandate.
Battle mode a.k.a. flamewar takes over threads completely if allowed to, and destroys the curious conversation that HN is supposed to exist for. Since we're trying to be a particular kind of website, we need a community which understands what the site is for and avoids using it for what it's not for.
Some accounts are not only using this particular thread for ideological battle, but are using HN primarily for ideological battle overall. That's the line at which we start banning accounts. If you're not familiar with how and why we draw the line at that standard, there's lots of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stith_Pemberton
They supported Nazi Germany against US embargo rules, inventing Fanta to keep business in the Nazi economy
https://timeline.com/fanta-coca-cola-nazi-845ee7e513af…
Theyve had Columbian union organizers murdered by right wing militias
https://prospect.org/api/amp/features/coca-cola-killings/?__...
They've built an empire off of oppression.
And now they want to shame middle and working class white people for OUR sins of birth?
Lol
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stith_Pemberton
They supported Nazi Germany against US embargo rules, inventing Fanta to keep business in the Nazi economy
https://timeline.com/fanta-coca-cola-nazi-845ee7e513af…
Theyve had Columbian union organizers murdered by right wing militias
https://prospect.org/api/amp/features/coca-cola-killings/?__...
They've built an empire off of oppression.
And now they want to shame middle and working class white people for OUR sins of birth?
D'Angelo gets paid 10s of 1000s to white wash corporate criminals as social justice heroes.
As someone who remembers being told, as a child, their father was stupid because 'Irish people are stupid', DiAngelo's work makes me feel exactly the same way.
If you're interested in doing some more research of your own I can recommend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynical_Theories
I also had to look up “white neurosis” to find out what it’s supposed to be (the previous articles assume it as an axiom). Amusingly, the top result on DuckDuckGo was an even nuttier website on the opposite side of the US spectrum¹ which quoted some academic as describing it as a new disorder that afflicts white people (presumably Americans) causing them to react “defensively, aggressively, or defectively” when they’re reprimanded for their privilege. I guess neuroses cover such a wide variety of mental states that you could make the case that an inability to relate with others of different skin colour is a type of neurosis but from the way the term is used, it sounds like it’s more loaded than that.
I stopped reading there because life’s too short and I started to become depressed considering that it’s likely only a matter of time before this sort of thinking crosses over to my side of the pond (as we refer to the Atlantic). The Covid-19 and other right-wing conspiracy theories have already caused enough societal damage. :(
1. https://needtoknow.news/2017/09/university-iowa-prof-identif... (the “Covid-19 is fake links on its side-bar were too much for me)
“emo-cognitive” is a rather obvious term for things that exist across both emotional and cognitive categories, that the two domains are viewed as cross-linked but that cross-domain terminology is unsettled seems clear (searching for “emo-cognitive” returns links like [0].)
[0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=A+taxonomy+of+emotion+a...
> I also had to look up “white neurosis” to find out what it’s supposed to be
The subject paper is largely about what that (in the sense it's title is concerned with) is; why would you “look it up” rather than reading the paper itself?
> The data showed 27 percent of non-Hispanic white Americans have bachelor’s degrees and 8 percent hold master’s degrees, according to the 2015 census. The survey also revealed that 4 percent of Nigerians in the U.S. have doctorates, compared to 1 percent of white Americans. And Nigerian-Americans’ education achievements top those of any other U.S. immigrant group. Asians come closest, with 12 percent holding master’s degrees and 3 percent having doctorates.
This article and it's viewpoint on the culture matches what my friends who are either Nigerian or have lived in Nigeria tell me. I believe it's also one of the main reasons that Jews have been able to do so well financially as a minority despite a long history of oppression -- education helps free you from being a victim to the dominate modes of sidelining a given group (I am Jewish and this certainly has been a big factor in both my family's values and others that I know, and has allowed my own family to escape poverty in Russia).
[1] https://www.ozy.com/around-the-world/why-nigerian-americans-...
It’s also not just a parental income thing. Whites in the bottom 20% of the income spectrum have much double the income mobility of Black people in the bottom 20%. The structural barriers to Black mobility go well beyond income: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353
DiAngelo bears some striking resemblances to Marx, and not only in terms of her binary, literally black and white worldview.
Marx was a wannabe academic who devoted his life to writing books about the oppression of the working classes. He lived off the largesse of patrons and supporters, notably Engels, but also his own family, and thus never had a "real" job in the sense the working classes would have recognised. DiAngelo is an actual academic who derives the majority of her income from preaching to her political supporters, although she cloaks it in the language of "training". A major criticism of Marx both in his time and after was that he had no real idea of anything he was talking about, for example he wrote extensively about factory conditions in England but had never actually been to a factory and in fact rejected his friend Engel's invitation to visit one. He wrote extensively about the working classes but had no working class friends or acquaintances beyond his housemaid, whom he abused terribly. Instead his knowledge of the world came entirely from reading books and thus ended up often distorted or wrong, for example, he had a habit of criticising factory conditions from decades earlier which had in fact been fixed via British regulation - something that in his world view wasn't supposed to be possible.
We can see echoes of all this in the way that DiAngelo (a white woman) and her followers (almost all whites) are obsessed with systemic racism, even though genuine systemic racism of the form "blacks may not enter this bar" was wiped out decades ago in the USA. Like Marx, they often rely on sleight-of-hand to argue the problem is still present and unfixable without enormous social change.
Marx's books were filled with impenetrable academic language and terms that nobody outside his small 'intellectual' circles would have understood, e.g. the term "proletariat" which had fallen into disuse since Roman times was revived by an obscure Swiss economist and then adopted by Marx, with nothing in between, thus only a tiny number of people would have understood this word. Marx's writings are still largely unintelligible even to modern readers well acquainted with his ideas. Consider this passage:
"The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself."
The language is English but trying to parse insight or meaning from this paragraph is very difficult. Likewise "White Privilege" and the many similar articles are filled with text that feels like something written by GPT-2 to anyone outside the tiny circle of academics in that community. Here's an abstract from an academic paper of the genre (not by DiAngelo but someone very similar):
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1367549420985852
"Using #MeToo as a starting point, this paper argues that the cultural power of mainstream white feminism partly derives from the cultural power of white tears. This in turn depends on the dehumanisation of people of colour, who were constructed in colonial ‘race science’ as incapable of complex feeling (Schuller, 2018). Colonialism also created a circuit between bourgeois white women’s tears and white men’s rage, often activated by allegations of rape, which operated in the service of economic extraction and exploitation. This circuit endures, abetting the criminal punishment system and the weaponisation of ‘women’s safety’ by the various border regimes of the right. It has especially been utilised by reactionary forms of feminism, which set themselves against sex workers and trans people. Such feminisms exemplify what I call ‘political whiteness’, which centres assertions of victimhood: through these, womanhood (and personhood) is claimed to the exclusion of the enemy"
Not only does this text have the similar highly abstract, rambling feeling of Marxist writing but it even uses the same obsolete Marx-only words, like "bourgeoise"!
Plenty of people use it for a phenomenon which includes, but is broader than, White supremacy.
https://books.google.com/books/about/White_Identity_Politics...
https://www.vox.com/2019/4/26/18306125/white-identity-politi...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/who-does-t...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-disturbing-surpri...
https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/july-august-2019/the-...
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2019-10-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/maiahoskin/2020/10/14/the-uglin...
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/white-identity-p...
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25704860?seq=1
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/is-trumps-use-of-white-...
https://newrepublic.com/article/138230/rise-white-identity-p...
https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol87/iss4/4/
https://brill.com/view/title/55875
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-identity-polit...
http://www.bu.edu/articles/2020/identity-politics-election-2...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/opinion/trump-race-immigr...
> Marxism is not the right label to describe the post-1950s left wing politics in most countries.
In your original post you said “old left wing politics” not “post-1950s left-wing politics”, but even with the clarification, that probably depends on whether or not you include Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism within Marxism (I don't, but most of both the Right and people who agree with Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism do). If you do include those things, Marxism is, if not covering the left of an absolute majority of countries, at least the single most dominant left-wing movement of the post-1950s and pre-about-1990s period.
If you mean to restrict things to the developed West, then “Socialism" is fairly accurate if somewhat broad, but then Western Cold War era leftism was itself pretty broad.
> Left wing politics is, at most, the politics of Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn
Corbyn and Sanders are barely left-wing.
> And in its more common instantiation, it's more like the politics of Tony Blair.
Tony Blair, like Bill Clinton in the US, was part of an 80s/90s center-right reaction against left-wing politics that took over previously left-leaning (overtly Socialist, in the case of the UK Labour Party, more confused in the US Democratic Party case because of the ongoing overlapping post-New Deal and post-Civil Rights Act partisan realignments) parties.
Blair, like Clinton, was no kind of left-wing politician, and certainly not typical of the post-1950s left wing in his country.
Though if you are using “leftism” to mean actual leftism and “left-wing" to mean 1980s-1990s center-right neoliberal “Third Way” reaction, then, yeah, they are very different things.
All the profits from Fanta were kept away from the Nazi government by the American Coca-Cola managers in Germany and then handed over the parent company when the war was over. Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-coca-cola-invented-fanta...
The Columbia story has nothing to with racism. It's all internal Colombian politics, not one race raging a war against another.
John Stith Pemberton died 133 years ago and is irrelevant to any discussion regarding the current Coca-Cola.
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-coca-cola-invented-fanta...
Yeah right, really evil, specially evil when they handed all their profits to the US when the war was over.
The US embargo was on exports only, which is why Fanta was invented in the first place when the Coke syrup was no longer allowed to be exported. Coca-Cola did not violate any embargos.
The company was founded in Germany in 1923 ten whole years before the Nazis took over, and when US had good relations with Germany. You can't fault them for doing business in a friendly country.
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-coca-cola-invented-fanta...