This happens because whiteness is actually one of the most fragile things in the world, right up there with butterfly wings, glass, and dudes when it comes to dating and rejection. For real. I know the societal narrative is that women are allegedly delicate little flowers who are too emotional, and songs such as Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats” and Jazmine Sullivan’s “Bust Your Windows” certainly help reinforce the idea that women can’t let anything go, but, y’all, any time at the end of the night at a club or a bar, when a woman doesn’t give a guy her number, instead of cutting his losses, he’s out here acquiring JG Wentworth’s services in order to get a structured settlement for the three vodka sodas he bought her throughout the evening while still applying uncomfortable pressure in hopes of wearing her down and getting the number. Because rejection or anything that doesn’t positively reinforce his fragile sense of self cannot be accepted. Same for whiteness.
That’s why calls for substantive changes such as defunding the police are generally met with pushback, requests to slow down and let bureaucracy do its thing, or deflection tactics, which, even if there are good intentions baked within them, are not really meant to bring about long-lasting results. The call to action to buy books written by Black authors and Blacking out the NYT bestsellers list comes to mind. As great as it was to see so many talented writers get the attention they deserve, it was still a little unsettling that the majority of books being amplified and receiving a boost in sales were antiracism books. Which are valuable, of course, but the fact that for many white people and non-Black POC, learning about Blackness means reading about how Black people survive (or don’t) trauma and pain often suffered at the hands of white people reinforces the idea that whiteness is central to what it means to be Black and that Blackness = pain, hardship, and devastation.
While all sorts of these performative maneuvers have been around in various forms, so they’re nothing new, social media has made it so that performative allyship has the ability to spread farther, wider, and faster. What performative allyship didn’t expect was that we’d keep up with it and put its actions under a microscope, in real time, and analyze it. And the results, while brand-new to some and unsurprising to others, should be alarming to all: Performative allyship is often born from “not knowing,” an utter astonishment that participants’ understanding of society is in stark contrast with how it has always really been.
Last summer, social media became, more so than usual, a place to dump any and every emotion, and I noticed a trend. Among the heartbreak and anger, similarly themed comments cropped up from many white people: “I didn’t know it was like this,” “I cannot believe this is happening,” “This is not the America I know.” Huh? This is the same America since 1619. The same America that had Japanese internment camps. The same America that ravaged Indigenous peoples. Just like how all of Pitbull’s songs sound the same (MISTAAAAAAAH WORLLLLLLWAAAAAAAAAAAI!), this tune of oppression, violence, gaslighting, and inequality is the same dusty-ass song America has been playing for centuries. So how could anyone be surprised by the events of summer 2020? Given the history of Black people being murdered by white people, not just privately, but in highly public ways—from lynchings during the Reconstruction era to Lamar Smith, a farmer and civil rights activist, being shot dead on a courthouse lawn by a white man in broad daylight while dozens watched in 1955—how was it possible that so many were shocked that police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds is something that could happen in America?
James Baldwin once wrote, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time.” I would like to add to that quote:* To be white in America is, in some ways, to not be conscious at all, rather to be in a state of constant awakening; a state in which grace and patience from others is requested and expected, yet others’ hope that the “newly awakened” would remain just that, awake, and retain information that would inform their behavior going forward is deemed unrealistic. And so, without fail, many revert back to their old ways, dip out of consciousness again only to be awakened once again when another tragedy happens. This Groundhog Day cycle of awaking from ignorance only to forget and be jolted to life again is not only unsustainable, but impossible. To not know this is the America we’ve all been living in means one had to intentionally avert their eyes and ears, because it’s all around us. In Cathy Park Hong’s searing and essential book Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, she writes about the fantasy of white innocence, which has troublesome ramifications and is a luxury that’s not afforded to any other group in America:
Innocence is, as Bernstein writes, not just an “absence of knowledge” but “an active state of repelling knowledge,” embroiled in the statement, “Well, I don’t see race” where I eclipses the seeing. Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement. Innocence is not just sexual deflection but a deflection of one’s position in the socioeconomic hierarchy, based on the confidence that one is “unmarked” and “free to be you and me.” The ironic result of this innocence, writes the scholar Charles Mills, is that whites are “unable to understand the world that they themselves have made.” Children are then disqualified from innocence when they are persistently reminded of, and even criminalized for, their place in the racial pecking order. As Richard Pryor jokes: “I was a kid until I was eight. Then I became a Negro.”
And since we are living in the aftermath of summer 2020, with the time-honored tradition of promises that this time will somehow be different, I have to ask, “How?” Ma’Khia Bryant, an Ohioan teen, was gunned down by a Columbus police officer mere minutes before the guilty verdict came in for Derek Chauvin. What makes this death even more heartbreaking is that 1) she called the police because she was being bullied and a knife was her only self-defense, and 2) several Columbus police officers chanted “Blue Lives Matter” at the scene of the crime. Perhaps when I was younger, I could have taken those promises at face value and believed them. Been convinced that change was coming around the bend despite the absence of evidence. But I have lived too long and seen too much. As someone on the cusp of forty,* it would be foolish of me to have faith and “trust the process” based on nothing but verbal intent.
I mean, what is the knowledge that’s being absorbed this time that wasn’t years prior? Much if not all of the information circulating now isn’t new. It has been percolating for decades, written, explained, and monologued by many Black people, ranging from the famous to those sitting on stoops and in backyards. Many of these murders (“executions” is probably the apt word to use here) have resembled countless others from the past. So this renewed vigor, which is the first I’m seeing in my lifetime, where is it coming from? Why is there such a Tracy Flick from Election level of intensity that overshadows and obfuscates? What is driving this emboldened outspokenness when previously, Black people’s needs were met not with solidarity or the open hearts of this era, but deafening silence? Enter white antiracism educators.
Y’all, the amount of white people posting selfies of themselves holding Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility last year, talking about all they learned, and recommending others read it if they wanted a good primer on how racism and antiracism work, had me cocking my head to the side à la Whitney Houston in that Diane Sawyer interview and saying, “Show me the receipts.” For real. Show. Me. The. Receipts. If they’re crisp like a bag of pork rinds and not yellowed like they were excavated from an 1897 time capsule, I’m going to need you to stop this performance because you just learned what antiracism was. If folks who worship at the altar of Robin and other white antiracism authors don’t have this same level of enthusiasm for Black antiracism educators such as Ijeoma Oluo, Ibram X. Kendi, and Austin Channing Brown (just to name a few), the same amount of revelations when reading their work, and the same desire to amplify their writing to o
ther white people as they do Robin or even Tim Wise, I’m going to need them to stop and take a look at the subtext in that message they’re conveying: 1) that the Black people experiencing the pain are not to be believed, but a white person who has a degree in studying the pain and will never actually experience it is now the authority/expert, and 2) the package in which previous antiracism thinking was presented aka by a Black person is not as palatable as when the teaching is presented to me by a white person. That, in and of itself, is a problem, if not one of the major hurdles, to antiracism work.
Ya know, I distinctly remember the outrage when, in 2017, former vice president Mike Pence and a cavalry of other white male politicians looking like a painting of the Last Supper (at Red Robin Gourmet Burgers and Brews) sat around deciding the state of women’s reproductive rights. Yet, where is the uproar over the fact that DiAngelo, Wise, and others of their ilk are considered the leading authorities and are the ones who the majority of white people will listen to over the everyday Black activists who have been doing this work for decades? There wasn’t any. Don’t believe me? Let’s use DiAngelo as an example and look at the trajectory of her book and career since the New Yorker labeled her “the country’s most visible expert in anti-bias training.”
At the time I’m writing this, White Fragility has been on the New York Times bestsellers list for ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-FOUR WEEKS. That’s two and a half years.
By comparison, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist has been on the list for forty-six weeks. Granted, his book was published a year after hers, in 2019, but the ratio is glaring: DiAngelo’s book has been on the list practically since publication, while Kendi’s has been on the list for only half of its book life. Admittedly, neither her popularity nor her work in this field happened overnight. She earned a BA from Seattle University, then an MA and PhD from the University of Washington. She then went on to write books, teach, and coined the phrase “white fragility” in a peer review in 2011, and she has been doing anti-bias training since at least 2007. She has put in years of effort, but there are a couple problems: her rates and the fact that anti-bias training actually doesn’t work. First, a word about the money issue.
Let me be clear: If there is a demand for what you can supply and it’s not illegal and won’t kill anyone, I commend your entrepreneurial spirit to give it a go and turn that into a business. Furthermore, I happily encourage people, especially women, POC, and the LGBTQIA+ community, to ask for what they think they’re worth, because it’s in the best interest of the employer to underpay for services rendered. So, yes, get yours. Make sure that you’re being paid enough to cover your rent/mortgage, bills, and unexpected expenses. HOW. EV. ER. When I read what DiAngelo’s rates were for public speaking engagements as well as for running antiracist workshops, I was like, “Call me Robin Hood and slap some green control-top pantyhose on me because I’m about to rob this chick because she’s rich rich.”*
In all seriousness, it gave me pause because of the lack of financial parity for people of color in every single professional arena in America. Various publications such as The Daily Beast have reported that Robin DiAngelo got paid $12,750 for the same conference keynote speech that Austin Channing Brown was paid $7,500 for. The disparity is infuriating, especially when you consider that DiAngelo only addressed what her salary range actually was after the conservative website Washington Free Beacon raised eyebrows by reporting on her rates for several speaking engagements. Then she took to her website, writing on her accountability page (lol) that while her average rate was exaggerated by the Free Beacon, she did admit the following: “my fee has ranged from pro bono (zero) to upwards of $30,000, which is well within the standard range for a bestselling author who is in high demand.” Riiiiiiiight. Let’s be real, it’s not about the amount per se, but the fact that $30K is not the standard or attainable rate for 99 percent of Black antiracism authors and teachers, who have been in this field just as long as she has, but their complexion is wrong, so for her to seemingly pretend otherwise is disingenuous.
I mean, we all know that except for probably Kendi and author/journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, Black antiracism educators aren’t getting close to that rate, and we for damn sure know Black female antiracism educators aren’t getting anywhere near that rate. You can’t be teaching antiracism while not advocating for financial parity for the people of color beside you who have been teaching the same things your work is parroting to audiences who have no desire to hear it from the mouth of a Black person. It’s so wildly problematic and patently absurd. And to make matters worse, DiAngelo started donating 15 percent of her after-tax income “in cash and in-kind donations” only after it got out how much she earns. So, the alleged leading voice on white fragility and white guilt seemingly was trying to make amends . . . out of white guilt? But that’s not even the worst part.
When a white person is considered the leading voice in how to be antiracist, it creates more harm and mental anguish for Black people because they are proven right yet again that there is no conceivable way that, even when armed with years of education and personal experience, they can be seen as authorities on antiracism, or the many ills that stem from a racist society, including advocating for government policies and legislation, addressing racial disparities in poverty, jobs, mass incarceration, and housing, and how the police system was designed, as Olivia B. Waxman wrote in her Time magazine article “How the U.S. Got Its Police Force”:
In the South, however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered not on the protection of shipping interests but on the preservation of the slavery system. Some of the primary policing institutions there were the slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaways and preventing slave revolts. . . . Many local sheriffs functioned in a way analogous to the earlier slave patrols, enforcing segregation and the disenfranchisement of freed slaves.
All these varying ways of oppression and more need to be addressed with Black people in the room and leading the conversation. Of course, we know that it’s not “representation matters,” but “quality representation matters.” Just because one is Black does not mean one is qualified to spearhead antiracist work, any more than because I’m Black, I’m Rihanna’s heir apparent. I’m not because I can’t sing, but, more important, I cannot tiptoe across an NYC sidewalk grate in stiletto heels without falling. Like, Jesus may have walked on water in chancletas, but idk if She has the range to pull off what Rih did! Anyway. The point is that when qualified Black people are left out of the conversation and their contributions are ignored, so that only white people are in the room, it fills white consumers of antiracism teachings with the sense that they are to become the white saviors who will swoop in and save the day, and that attending these white-run workshops is the first step they need to take in becoming the social justice warrior, which no one asked for, by the way. And, as it turns out, these anti-bias seminars are, across the board, ineffective in the first place. Per a 2019 article in the Harvard Business Review by authors including Adam Grant and Angela Duckworth:
Evidence has shown that diversity training can backfire, eliciting defensiveness from the very people who might benefit most. And even when the training is beneficial, the effects may not last after the program ends.
The workshops ain’t working, y’all. And like I previously stated, it’s not just Robin. It’s the entire industry of White People Educating Other White People on How to Be Antiracist When None of Them Know What It’s Like to Be on the Receiving End of Systemic Racism. Enough is enough. We cannot continue watching Black people be slaughtered and be on the receiving end of micro- and macroaggressions, while trees are chopped down so white people can turn them into books, highlight the pages, and not change one iota of their behavior. The days of Racism Is Bad 101 have long been over, but we are still stuck there.
I mean, what is the point of the lessons, the seminars, the books, the real-life deadly consequences of racism if it’s not going
to be transformed into action? What purpose does knowledge serve if nothing changes? Knowledge and learning, truth be told, are the easy parts. Reading, highlighting, and posting prompts on social media for robust discussions in the comments section can be fun and get the adrenaline pumping, but ultimately wind up being nothing more than empty exercises the majority of the time. I can think of two main reasons why.
One, many performative allies operate as though racism is this abstract, philosophical debate that doesn’t have stakes in their world. The corporations need to step up. The executives need to do better. These celebrities should be canceled for [insert racially insensitive comment]. This white person is so unbelievably racist in a viral cell-phone video. These books are teaching me about past racism and discussing hypotheticals. The racism is always somewhere other than where anyone is. Like, what is racism? Fucking Nickelback CDs? The band has sold more than 50 MILLION ALBUMS, but nobody owns a copy? LOL. Okay. Similarly, there is no audacity to perform racism in any and all of its ugly forms without a system, meaning people to support it. So somebody’s out here “racist-ing,” but if folks can’t even acknowledge the ways in which they intentionally and unintentionally hold up systems of oppression, how can they change their behavior? Simply put, they can’t.
So what ends up happening is the cycle of white guilt, which leads to the task of self-improvement, then goes back to white guilt because change isn’t happening fast enough or at all. And as we all know, guilt is never a good motivator to rectify behavior, but a license to wallow in the pity, which leads to more guilt about their participation in systemic racism, which is now combined with them feeling bad about the fact that they feel bad. Basically, white guilt is a Cathy comic, y’all. Like, that bitch always has a sob story. Constantly caught up in the drama without realizing she’s a key architect of the spectacle that is her life. Always getting fired and acting like she doesn’t know why. It’s like, “Cath, Jamba Juice let you go because you were making smoothies to bring home to your cats.”* #ThisConcludesMyAntiRacismSeminar #CanIGetPaid40K?
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