Quote:
Originally Posted by Adder
I've no idea why you would want to read either of those two pieces past the first few paragraph, much less share them.
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Because they describe your (and many others') form of radical unthinking:
To insist that the conclusion that the arguer wishes to reach, with its implied corollary commandment, must be accepted by his or her opponent as a premise before the argument begins is not the move of a person who has confidence in their truth. It is the opposite of any form of reasoned argument. It is coercive. Except the people who argue this way claim that they cannot possibly be coercive, because you must accept the premise that they don’t have power—even if they are editing The New York Times Magazine, or threatening to get you fired from your job. You say they can’t have it both ways? They say, why not—and then accuse you of opposing the powerless, which, it turns out, is a form of authority that cannot be trumped.
That describes your argument on white fragility. If one does not agree with the construct you offer, one's view is invalid and only serves to prove the existence of white fragility. You assert no one can engage you intellectually on the subject. Any questioning of the concept must be viewed as being made in bad faith. Any questioning of your assertion it is made in bad faith must also be deemed to have been made in bad faith.
The author of the latter piece I cited gets to the meat of why you and others engage in this behavior: Your ideas are extreme, your ideology is often quite naive, and logic and facts undercut a lot of them. This is why you leap to the argument that anything that questions your antiracist statements is automatically racist.
Taibbi might as well have been writing about you when he cited the silly binary thinking he spotted in DiAngelo's work:
DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of this type is built around the same principles as Orwell’s Newspeak: it banishes ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform, center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices. Ironically, Donald Trump does something similar, only with words like “AMAZING!” and “SAD!” that are simultaneously more childish and livelier.
In Adderland, things can only be racist or antiracist. All in or all out.
Except criticism doesn't work that way. Nor does conversation. To have an engaging discussion where we reach greater understanding of DiAngelo's work, or that of any other author, we have to allow it to be tested.
This brings me full circle to the first cite I offered, where the lawyer critiques Americans' penchant for litigating rather than conversing about ideas. He asserts that we do this because we know our ideas have holes in them and cannot withstand criticism. (The ideas themselves are not bad, but people like you embrace their most extreme forms. You cannot merely agree with DiAngelo - you must genuflect in the most severe manner and profess to agree with her 100% on everything, a sentiment I think she would find uncomfortably orthodox.)
DiAngelo has some great ideas. She also wrote some really dumb statements in her book (as any author will, it being impossible to pitch a perfect game over 250 pages regarding a subject so complex). Taibbi has some fair criticisms of her. He also wrote some really dumb and cheap criticisms of her. But what's 100X dumber than anything either of them wrote is to reply to Taibbi, or any other critic, by saying the critic is racist for simply having the temerity to critique someone who is antiracist.
It is better to unpack Taibbi and DiAngelo, and any other writer, thinker, or pundit, rather than shut down discourse regarding them with the silly pavlovian retort, "Racist!"
I cited these articles not because they're exceptional pieces. I cited them because they happen to describe you, and you can learn from them.
