DiAngelo Episode Feedback Post
Added 2022-11-05 07:41:15 +0000 UTCHey everyone,
We often get useful feedback from the folks on here and so I thought I'd make a post just in case anyone had any comments on the episode. It seems to have went down well which is nice to see. Maybe we will stop hearing about the old Kendi episode now... probably not but a man can dream!
Cheers,
Chris
Comments
I still think Avenue Q covered the topic better. I also don't think her point would be so controversial if it was just: there remain systemic racist structures & institutions that impact people and generalized racist sentiments can still be found including amongst those who are not overtly racist. It's all the rest of it and the rather explicit exporting of the US' particular issues as if they are a universal lens that grates.
Christopher Kavanagh
2022-11-18 07:36:51 +0000 UTCMaybe the culture in a DEI training workplace is so far outside of my wheelhouse that I just can't relate, but I really don't think the story about DiAngelo being racist to her colleague and the ensuing discussion happened. If it is true, her colleague was straight-up power-playing DiAngelo, knowing that in that kind of environment a woman like DiAngelo would absolutely kowtow to anything she said, no matter how tiny the transgression. It also incredibly manipulative posturing on DiAngelo's part: Telling the story of a time when she said something so so so minor, felt TERRIBLE about it, and took an extremely overblown response on the chin because she's just THAT woke.
Will
2022-11-18 03:45:18 +0000 UTCSomething that was bugging me about the episode that got brought back up while listening to the psychoanalysis discussion in the beginning of the episode dropped today, specifically in how the idea that white people might be racist by default is treated as equally preposterous to the idea that people develop Oedipal complexes by default. and like, it's not like the mechanisms for this are equally speculative; we're at most a few generations out from explicit racism in cultural messaging going out of style in white-dominated societies around the world, and it's not necessarily hard to see how those explicitly racist messages have turned into implicit ones which we all grew up being exposed to. and admittedly when DiAngelo is giving all the examples of "I can't be racist because X" it seems like she's more just appealing to people's personal experiences with people who say those kinds of things, so it's fair to say she doesn't have much grounds to generalize: but the reason for this phenomenon would be more or less, anyone who is saying that is betraying that they don't see how they could've absorbed prejudices through cultural osmosis, and since they pretty much certainly were exposed to racially-prejudiced cultural messaging, that means that they didn't notice any prejudice or bias, and instead were absorbing it. I don't think you were entirely wrong in pointing out culty vibes in the "if you say you're not X that means you're definitely X" framing, but in this case that instinct—that someone who says "I can't be racist because [thing that applies to plenty of people who are super racist]" is telling on themselves—is pretty reasonable, and I wanted to point out that it shouldn't be dismissed.
Nikko Pomata
2022-11-18 01:58:04 +0000 UTCWell... since you asked... This was much more what I like from you both. The fact-checking and sense-checking was bang on. It is an incredibly difficult area to discuss, and you both did it well. If you could do your interviews more like this (pre-record, and then check and comment afterwards) it would be much better.
Jesta
2022-11-16 07:50:44 +0000 UTCI was also thinking about Avenue Q while listening to DiAngelo's lecture, and I think they do a much better job of it because they spring it on the crowd. In the song they're talking about small "microaggressions" like wanting restaurant staff to speak English, but at the end they say "everyone is just about as racist...as YOU!" and point directly at the audience. It comes as a surprise and makes the audience think, in a way that DiAngelo does not since she's preaching to the choir (even though she says she's not). Also, Matt's mention of "masochism" and repentance for sin reminded me of this passage from Jean Paul Sartre's autobiography, about being the prophet of existentialism: "Later, I gaily demonstrated that man is impossible; I was impossible myself and differed from the others only by the mandate to give expression to that impossibility, which was thereby transfigured and became my most personal possibility, the object of my mission, the springboard of my glory. I was a prisoner of that obvious contradiction, but I did not see it, I saw the world through it. Fake to the marrow of my bones and hoodwinked, I joyfully wrote about our unhappy state. Dogmatic though I was, I doubted everything except that I was the elect of doubt. I built with one hand what I destroyed with the other, and I regarded anxiety as the guarantee of my security; I was happy."
Mark K
2022-11-15 18:43:14 +0000 UTCDiAngelo anecdote about her white friend not wanting to live in a poor (black) neighborhood makes me feel she have traded her race blindness with class blindness. About that, I highly recommend Season 3 of Atlanta, they did an amazing exploration of the concept of whiteness and its intersection with class.
Donkey kong
2022-11-14 06:03:06 +0000 UTCIt’s almost as if she traded her race blindness for class blindness. This is the epitome of liberal thought in America, the problem is not that there are extremely poor people, it’s that they are not racially mixed. And on the other side, the problem is not that so much economical power is concentrated in the hands of few, it’s that the boards of directors are not racially (and gender-lly) mixed enough.
Donkey kong
2022-11-14 05:50:24 +0000 UTCThe memorable thing for me was her comfort 'as a sociologist' at being able to talk for and about all white people. The arrogance and narcissism is astounding. I have always believed that America really suffers from a lack of understanding of class. I think Middle Class academics across the world can be similarly blind to the structural nuances that prevent social mobility .... but Di Angelo takes the prize for tone deafness. Her book is full of blatant racism dressed up as a gift of awareness and self-reflection ...
Nina Davies
2022-11-12 11:37:16 +0000 UTCThere are much better conversations about structural racism out there. I think the point Angela tried to make in DiAngelo's story was more about DiAngelo's overall smugness during the interaction than that she didn't want to do a black person's survey. She was developing a relationship with a new organization around anti-racism. Instead of respecting the way this organization and Angela set things up, or wanting to learn about them, she walked in acting like she knew everything and didn't need to follow their procedures. DiAngelo does a poor job explaining this. She does a poor job explaining a lot of the concepts. I'm not sure if it's because she wants white people to get defensive so they can see defensiveness in themselves, or if she just doesn't get it herself. I'm attaching a youtube video on "How not to be an Ally" that does a much better job describing some of these points. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_GBygr4zqc
Carrie Williamson
2022-11-09 18:35:31 +0000 UTCMe again. One other thing I just wanted to add, was that I think the rise in popularity of ancestry testing may eventually lead to a change in attitudes to race. I recently did an ancestry test, prompted by one of my colleagues because we got to talking about family and we discovered we were both unaware of the identity of one of our paternal ancestors. And he had tested himself and found some surprising & interesting results. I had always assumed due to my dayglow white skin (similar to Chris) that I was just a bog standard white person, but I discovered I was actually part NZ Maori. Which is super cool. Being the nerd I am this prompted me to take this fascinating online course (https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/identity-in-the-age-of-ancestral-dna) which is taught by a black researcher Dr Anita Foeman who has extremely different opinions on race compared to DiAngelo. And I learnt my story is actually really common because factors including historic racism and the ubiquity of affairs means many people are much more ethnically diverse than they have grown up believing themselves to be. And this is only increasing in recent times due to migration. So she feels that society is coming to a place where we will have to dramatically rethink what race actually means to us. Anyway I just thought it was an interesting idea.
Emma
2022-11-08 23:08:49 +0000 UTCI agree, I didn’t mean full cultural relativism. I meant more along the lines of: if I’m interacting with a colleague at work who is Black or Asian or anything different from me, my goal is not to interact with them in a colorblind way. I want to see them for who they are and understand and appreciate everything that makes them them. I think that is more like what I was trying to express, which is different from saying “I don’t see color”
Jennifer Nelson
2022-11-07 13:51:31 +0000 UTC😀 True. But with this episode aswell as Lex and Haidt it really turns into a bug as the individual preformance doesnt reflect the compounding effect of the entire body of work
Klas Bergholtz
2022-11-07 12:46:31 +0000 UTCAgree with the need to focus on systemic factors and to avoid having 'default' comparisons but can't go all in on cultural relativism. I think cultures that allow women to vote/buy property are ethically and democratically superior to those that don't, at least on that axis. Not saying it is an exact science, but few people willing to go the full way on cultural relativism because the end result is being unable to say North Korea is 'worse' than a democracy and/or that slavery is inherently wrong.
Christopher Kavanagh
2022-11-07 12:39:22 +0000 UTCYeah, the friend conversation was odd. Feels like if she lived by her sword she should be giving equally bad examples for herself, but hers was extremely minor- essentially thinking she was allowed to mention a black women's hair to point out other white people's fragility but failing to understand the harm she could do.
Christopher Kavanagh
2022-11-07 12:35:52 +0000 UTCYup! This is how we felt too. I don't really care what is going on in people's mental dramas, it is what they do in the world that matters.
Christopher Kavanagh
2022-11-07 12:32:39 +0000 UTCI'll bring this up to Matt next episode!
Christopher Kavanagh
2022-11-07 12:31:09 +0000 UTCIt's a feature not a bug ;)
Christopher Kavanagh
2022-11-07 12:30:00 +0000 UTCI understand how it could theoretically fit together but I'd love to see any evidence that it actually happens. Do people who attend her training go on to be more active in addressing structural and institutional racism? To me, it seems better suited to making people hyper vigilante towards things like micro-aggressions.
Christopher Kavanagh
2022-11-07 12:29:43 +0000 UTCThe blanket generalisations about white people are a feature not a bug. DiAngelo takes people objecting as illustrating her thesis, but her thesis is also intentionally caricatured. It does feel like a cheap trick that dismisses lots of importance variances in people's actual lives and experiences.
Christopher Kavanagh
2022-11-07 12:26:41 +0000 UTCI enjoyed this episode. I agree with a lot of what DiAngelo says, especially around her analysis of structural racism (which is basically CRT). OTOH her advocacy of self-flagellation is super irritating and I'm not sure how helpful it is. Do our Black friends really want us checking in with them in such a cringy way? (though if you say something inadvertently racist that offends someone, I think an apology is in order). Ironically, to get to the issue of surfacing, addressing, and hopefully mitigating systemic racism, the best approach, ironically, seems to be the much maligned and misunderstood Critical Race Theory, whose goal is (unlike the personal self-flagellation DiAngelo advocates) is taking it out of the personal, mea culpa, I'm a racist territory, into the systemic (let's all analyze and be clear-eyed about systems of oppression). Lastly, I don't think that color-blindness should be anyone's goal. Differences between people and cultures is what makes people and cultures so interesting. The goal should be, IMHO, awareness and embracing of differences without the hierarchy of one peoples being superior to another, or any one being the "default" against which all the others are compared
Jennifer Nelson
2022-11-06 18:18:29 +0000 UTCWas not familiar with DiAngelo. After reading comments here and elsewhere there is a thread that arouses thoughts of similar critique of MacAskill, Singer and effective altruism - “not addressing the system.” Just interesting to think about the context and related groups that may join perhaps not in the critique, but in other ways. Great convo!
Jason Trock
2022-11-06 03:11:44 +0000 UTChahaha, loving the "ask any white person their opinion on racism and they'll have one" is hilarious. She uses the term "white people" as a joke cudgel. White people are great at denying the ever-present reality of death. AMIRITE?! (pause for manipulated laughter and whoops).
Erin Dougherty
2022-11-05 21:14:52 +0000 UTCI like the idea that Robin DiAngelo has a racist friend. One that would be like "I would never buy a house in a (black) neighborhood". Guess they've never really gotten to know each other ;) It's so obviously a conversation that never happened. I'm adding this strategy to my future grift tech: make up insufferable anecdotes that address completely made up "types" of people.
Erin Dougherty
2022-11-05 20:32:16 +0000 UTCI wonder if DiAngelo really believes her own sloppy thinking. Maybe she just is a complete charlatan. It seems obvious that what she is doing is not helpful. Either way, incredibly annoying. Great podcast though:)
Tim Graubaek
2022-11-05 16:06:00 +0000 UTCThe solution to systemic racism (or sexism or any other inequity) has to be systemic change and altered power relations. There's none of this in DiAngelo. Quite the opposite. Not only does she do guru-jitsu on any one who asks her a "what is to be done?" question. But her vision of privileged white people being the only possible agents of change, through some sado-masochistic, Opus Dei style spiritual mortification, reinforces the existing power relations of white supremacy. She has raided the academic literature on systemic racism, microaggressions, etc, but in a politically dishonest way as fodder for her cult.
Paul Bowman
2022-11-05 13:18:34 +0000 UTCArgh the smugness gets me! I identify as pretty far left and I actually 1000% agree with her about how structural racism exists and we need to be aware of that, and we need policies to close the gap. But if growing up evangelical has taught me anything it's that obsessively purity testing your own thoughts is at best a waste of mental energy, and at worst a potential prompt/trigger for mental health issues like low self-esteem and even OCD type issues. I like to try and imagine the outcomes I would like if I was an ethnic minority, by comparing it to my own experiences of sexism as a woman and what outcomes I would like to see to address sexism. I once worked in a very sexist company that routinely underpayed it's female staff, in spite of the fact that some of the male leaders actually prided themselves on how progressive they were. And had no self awareness of behaviours they routinely engaged in which contributed to the wage gap. But I don't imagine getting any satisfaction from those men being forced to confront their own hypocrisy and feel guilt and shame over it. I just don't care that much what goes on in men's heads. All I wanted was more $$$$ for myself and my female colleagues. I don't think individual men going on a journey of self discovery is a practical or timely solution to address these systemic issues. I think it needs to just be forced on business by government.
Emma
2022-11-05 11:44:25 +0000 UTCAgree!!
Emma
2022-11-05 11:27:13 +0000 UTCInteresting episode. The thing I found interesting is that DiAngelo herself made comments that were much more racist than I'd hear in my daily life - and in the classic definition of racism. To suggest to her friend that it was a black neighbourhood, or to assume people of colour have no interest in sending their kids to better schools or to live in nice areas and this is only something white people want I think is actually racist. Plus the one the guys noted about the baseball player having no agency. Makes me wonder if she is actually projecting severe racism she herself has on everyone else.
Scott Stacey
2022-11-05 10:27:38 +0000 UTCMatt, you seem to have a strange understanding of repression (and psychoanalysis) around the one hour mark. It doesn't make any sense for the analyst to trap their client into being a motherfucker in the way where its denial is proof of the affirmation as discovered and insisted by the analyst. Let's modify your example: suppose a client walks to the analyst's office for a session, and the analyst asks what is on their mind. "Well, I definitely don't want to fuck my mother!", they exclaim. Unless it was meant as some proud, ironic proclamation, responding to a century of Hollywood glitter, and/or defusing the stress, perhaps even attempting to control the power dynamic of the situation - that is, if this was an honest statement - this would be closer to what you were reaching at. Yet it's a completely different dynamic, because it's freely shared (as opposed to coerced) information about what the client thinks isn't the problem! Out of all the possible things in the universe, there is one specific topic which the client believes is totally irrelevant to discuss. It's not the price of rice in China, or the rings of Jupiter, but the person who gave birth to them. That's interesting. To get rid of the pop psychologized Freudian trauma, imagine if they said "I definitely don't want to kill my wife!" instead. What could be more meaningful than this comment! Figuring out what that means isn't going, "A-ha, so you do want to kill your wife!", "Nuh-uh!", "Yuh-uh!", "Nuh-uh!", "Yeah you do! End session!" or the like. While there's many types of voodoo to the practice (and some of this you can attribute to Freud), this is more or less the opposite of what a psychoanalyst is trained to do. Principally, it's the job of the person undertaking analysis to discover some internal truth and its interpretation, while the analyst brings in the active listening and questioning which allows for this to occur. It should be almost commonsensical that here you'd start digging around the topic of spousal relations. Is this really what we call a Kafka trap? To bring this to racism and DiAngelo, a more realistic analytic case might then be in a client bringing up how their non-racism is a specific non-issue, perhaps revealing their assumption that the analyst believes differently. This clearly implies racism has something to do with something, even without going into psychoanalytic jargon as to how. DiAngelo would be more like the analyst who greets you at the door with a "Hello, white oppressor!", which, rather than being the same structure of discourse, represents almost the opposite. Or, editing in another example about negation (of this analytic kind; see 'Negation' by Freud in 1925) which occurred to me you could find within the machinations of the Gurometer: "strategic disclaimers" which absolve the speaker of the responsibility about what they're saying. They're not being conspiratorial because they say so. Perhaps it is exactly this disavowal which already allows us to have a pretty good idea of what's coming next. You could flip this around on DiAngelo: maybe the fact that she is disavowing her racism through claiming to be a racist (in a combined self-flagellation/stand-up act which is a clear source of enjoyment) means that she really well and truly is the racist she claims to be. Conceivably, Jordan Peterson really is just as much of a self-absorbed shit as he pontificates of all mankind. Extrapolating this to all of mankind gets more complex, psychoanalytic or not. Now that we've established that the Gurometer is a psychoanalyst, does that mean we're all fucking our mothers? 😕
Exai
2022-11-05 10:05:42 +0000 UTCReally enjoyable episode, good intro to a name I had heard much about but whose work I had not engaged with personally. A helpful intro to her whole 'thing' and I have found it a useful springboard for more googling and head scratching about her work. Only wish would be a bit of time spent glancing at her academic publications, which she makes available on her website - https://www.robindiangelo.com/publications/ (scroll down past the books). In articles like "Respect Differences? Challenging the Common Guidelines in Social Justice Education", she outlines a 'critical social justice pedagogy' which posits that 'knowledge is socially constructed' and, at least in some cases 'dominant knowledge claims must be silenced' in order to 'dislodge' students from those perspectives and create space for marginalised ones (see p 3-4). Would have been interesting to hear your thoughts on the way that a pedagogical/epistemological approach like that might be playing out in her public speeches and corporate work. There was also a NYT article on DiAngelo from 2020 that might be of interest if you are going to do any further thinking about her - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/magazine/white-fragility-robin-diangelo.html - will you be powering up the gurometer and seeing what it has to say about her?
Artemis Green
2022-11-05 10:05:38 +0000 UTCI also really enjoyed this ep, DiAngelo isn't someone I was that familiar with so I can't really judge if the selected speech was typical, but man, it was rough to listen to.
Ian Andersen
2022-11-05 08:52:25 +0000 UTCIt was a really enjoyable episode to me. It did however highlight a bit of the methods shortcoming in that narrowly looking at one piece of the gurus oevre at a time limits the decoding. The broader contextual information (like her wealthy status) needing to be dropped to inform the listner was very needed this episode
Klas Bergholtz
2022-11-05 08:10:56 +0000 UTCWhile I have little sympathy for DiAngelo, I think something y'all got off the mark is how you characterize the purpose of her work. Y'all accuse her of possibly moving the focus from structural/institutional issues and solution to personal psycho-analysis work. I imagine she would probably agree with the institutional causes of racism, but she sees one of the issues to addressing these issues as the inability for white people to acknowledge race generally. She probably thinks there are all these white liberals who would be most likely to inact policies to "fix" institutional racism, but can't because they're ignorant about race issues broadly and afraid to discuss them. So her job is to be the stick that knocks the rock of white fragility out of the cogs in the machine that would fix institutional racism. I think the way she goes about it is totally wrong and really cringe inducing, but I think the argument that she's refocusing attention away from institutional solutions isn't necessarily fair. She would probably think she's just doing her role as a white woman to do something about structural racism, and it's the media/corporations faults for focusing on her instead of broader issues/solutions (of course, she might say this as she shoves another wad of cash into her pocket from an appearance fee). I say this without having listened to the Seattle talk, or much of her work generally, so maybe there's something I'm missing. The episode was very enjoyable overall, however! The inability for some liberal white people to understand that nonwhite people are humans too is to me like Weinsteinian podcasting is to Chris.
Nick Brouwer
2022-11-05 08:04:44 +0000 UTCVery enjoyable pod on Robyn DiAngelo. On a side note, I too enjoyed harris’ pod on Ukraine so much I DMed it to Cathy young. But like Chris, this doesn’t mean I agree with all of harris’ work. I don’t. And it’s ok to like some, and dislike some. It’s rather tedious to have people tweet ‘But what about this other (irrelevant) thing harris did? Having said that, some people do cross a line for me and I want nothing to do with anything they say, even if I agree with one thing. They’ve crossed a line over an issue I find too important to ignore. As for cheering about us stealing indigenous land, even though it was a recognition of that, I found whooping unsettling. It seemed inappropriate for such a somber moment. I didn’t agree with DiAngelo’s initial definition of racism as intentional. It’s certainly not how it was framed to me in Aboriginal Studies OR Sociology at university. It most definitely includes unconscious or subconscious discrimination, stereotyping, ignorance etc I had a list of reservations and outright disagreements with DiAngelo but one by one they were crossed off as I listened, and I couldn’t give it the attention I wanted due to time constraints, but I think there is one glaring omission that DiAngelo makes, the result of which is that I don’t feel included in the discussion. I am white, but my primary carer is not. Some of my siblings are white. Some are not. She literally says ‘all white people are raised to be racially illiterate’. How could a brown person raise me to be racially illiterate? As a member of a mixed race family, I experienced the pain of racism when it was directed at my family. So I didn’t take the world for granted. As a dark haired, dark skinned person from a middle class family, I’ve been called boong, wog, and chinese. People outright refused to believe I was white. My family was all the confirmation they needed. OTOH, people aren’t colour blind. They think they are, but our brains are hardwired to notice difference. It’s how we interpret that difference that drives our behaviour. There was a time when I encountered many races and felt quite comfortable. The American obsession with race DiAngelo’s framing of it, has made me feel more uncomfortable - not less. And I find myself less inclined to be involved in discussions of race because I don’t like this new definition she is touting. The idea that I would treat a piece of work from my brown sister differently to a piece of work from my white sister is horrifying and I don’t understand why Robyn did that with a tedious survey. D’angelo presents herself as the enlightened racist, a concept that I found most amusing. She alone, is free of socialisation. She is the seer, and we should look to her (and pay big bucks to hear her speak). I think DiAngelo probably started with a reasonable hypothesis that racism is ingrained in many systems and attitudes that we don’t question as white people. But then she took a concept and ran a mile with it until it has become nonsensical redefining racism beyond all recognition.
Staunch Atheist
2022-11-05 07:59:13 +0000 UTC
