Chapo Trap House - 428 - No Crying in Raceball feat. Jen Pan (6/15/20)

Episode Date: June 16, 2020

We’re joined inside our Cry Cube by the New Republic's Jen Pan to examine the current non-fiction best-seller, Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility.” You can find Jen's review of White Fragility here: https://newrepublic.com/article/156032/diversity-training-isnt-enough-pamela-newkirk-robin-diangelo-books-reviews

Hello gang, it's your choppo coming at you at the beginning of the week, as always. So we're coming to you today, we like the rest of the country have been, you know, experiencing a moment of protest and crisis, still reverberating out from the murder of George Floyd by the police and ongoing protests in all 50 states of the country against police brutality and racism. And, you know, this is a moment in time when everyone is looking for something to do, they're looking for, you know, how do I do and say the right thing in this moment of, in this moment of increased racial awareness and tension throughout the country. And one of the things that we've noticed this week is that among white people who are looking

to fit in now, there have been like certain texts and books and films that are being sort of prescribed for you to deal or sort of cope with this current moment or, you know, say the right thing. White people have been given homework. Yes. You know, T talked about it on the episode we have with him. Yeah, there's a lot of like reading lists out there. And one of the things on these reading lists is now shot up to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. It is a book called White Fragility by an author called Robin D'Angelo. And, you know, I thought, hey, I'm white, I'm fragile.

I'm a small being. Maybe you should check this out. I'm a small soft fragile being. I'm a small being. White Fragility was the working title of our book. I'll just say to join us to discuss White Fragility and what to do, how to talk, how to think. We're joined by our friend, Jen Pan, who you may remember from the Joker episode, which was, you know, let's be honest, a film about white fragility and white male rage as SNL put it.

And of course, back from his show, Jern among the Philistines, it is our colleague, Virgil Texas. Thanks for having me. And me as well. So we all read like a like a chunk of this book. I did the beginning, but like before we get into, you know, what's in the book? Like what do we make overall about like this concept of not just white fragility, but like this moment of these sort of prescriptions for like how to be a white ally, like how to think and how to talk about these things

and like this whole slate of, like you said, like homework that's been assigned to the country. So, you know, for my part, the context in which I encountered white fragility is a few months ago, I was, I was assigned to review it for the New Republic in sort of the broader context of the diversity industry, which, you know, you guys are probably aware is this like massive, bloated $8 billion industry, which sort of encompasses like anti-racist trainings, sensitivity workshops, like cultural competency, implicit bias training. And that is incidentally the industry in which this author of white fragility, Robin D'Angelo

works, right? And so I think that, you know, a kind of interesting component to the conversation is the fact that there's kind of been this, you know, emerging body of literature that talks about how these diversity trainings don't work. They don't reduce people's biases. They don't really make workplaces more diverse. And in some weird cases, they even like make people's biases stronger. So I think that's kind of important to keep in mind when you are thinking about, you know, Robin D'Angelo and white fragility and how her book is basically a documentation of how these trainings don't work, right? Yeah.

She is a diversity trainer, right? And her case studies in this book is she goes around to people's workplaces and to their schools and talks to them about racism. And her whole thesis is that white people in the room become extremely uncomfortable. They don't like what they're hearing and they don't react well to her. So maybe that's, you know, a way to kind of kick off like what it is that she's getting at. I think too, one of the things that like kept jumping out at me when I was reading this is that she kept saying like, I cannot correct or deprogram my unconscious bias and feelings of racial superiority. I will always be like this. I will always, you know, walk around

with, you know, latent white supremacy. And I'm like, then why am I listening to you? Like why are you the anti-racist trainer? Because she like every other paragraph, she's like, look, I know about racism. Take it from me, a racist. She doesn't do a very good job at justifying her anti-racist credentials, except that she can charge people $10,000 a session, a speaking session for it. I mean, like for like a two hour, like it's better than podcast or money, the hourly rate. It's amazing. Yeah. And if you're never done being racist, then all you can do to work on yourself is, you know, kind of participate in these steps of self-improvement, which of course include

buying her book and attending her seminars. Right. I mean, there's no, there's no cure. There's a treatment you have to take all the time always and keep paying her. I mean, I guess what was like sort of weird to me about this moment and the required reading as represented here by Robin D'Angelo and white fragility is that, you know, if we're in a moment where white people are just, you know, once again, perpetually being like, damn, there's a lot of racism in this country. That's fucked up. Like, you know, what can I do? It's just like, it would seem to me if you were, if you like, if you wanted to

educate yourself, like maybe read a fucking history book, you know what I mean? Like read any history of the United States, like, or any, like, actually, like, like black author who's written about like this, but like, this is a, this is a white woman and like the whole thrust of it is through this kind of like corporate HR model, where like every, every, every sort of sort of like field of inquiry or sort of tension that she's unpacking here is all like, I'm just imagining sitting in like a windowless air conditioned room with a big white board with someone like, you know, pointing at me. And the book begins this way with a, it just begins with like this. I'm just going to read a little bit. She says,

I am a white woman. I am standing beside a black woman. We are facing a group of white people seated in front of us. We are in there, you see a turtle on its back. Yeah, exactly. It's all this. Yeah. Voight comp test for racism. She says a script to a Saint Vincent music video. We are in their workplace and have been hired by their employer to lead them in a dialogue about race. The room is filled with tension and charged with hostility. I have just presented a definition of racism that includes the acknowledgement that whites hold social and institutional power over people of color. A white man is pounding his fists on the table. As he pounds, he yells, a white person can't get a job anymore. I look around

the room and see 40 employees, 38 of whom are white. Why is this white man so angry? Why is he being so careless about the impact of his anger? Why doesn't he notice the effect of this outburst is having on the few people of color in the room? Why are all the other white people either sitting in silent agreement with him or tuning out? I have, after all, only articulated a definition of racism. That white man's name, Marine Todd. Dear penthouse, I never thought this would happen to me. She does a lot of hypotheticals that I am, well, not hypotheticals. She does a lot of anecdotes that I'm like, oh, come on. Yeah. At another place in the book, she says something

like, I just can't understand why these white people would react like this upon getting an opportunity to learn about their racism. That opportunity, of course, as you pointed out, Will, is in the workplace, which, of course, is something that she never bothers to not only just interrogate but doesn't even acknowledge that the context in which these trainings are unfolding is quite often in her case in the workplace, where, as we all know, there are many different power dynamics already at work. The main one, of course, being between the bosses who organize such workshops and then everyone else who has to... Yeah, it's mandatory. The idea, why are you being open to me, the person that your fucking

asshole boss paid to yell at you for an hour? Right. Does she actually never address that? Never. No. Like, not once. She never mentions that this is a mandatory school assembly where your employer is now being invited to interrogate the most intimate parts of your psyche and brain and experience.

About a very politically charged topic, like who the fuck wants their boss talking to them about racism. Yeah. Can you guys give me some information that certainly will not be put in your file for later use? Yeah. Yeah, you will not be punished. Well, she mentions that, too. At one point, she apparently made a joke about... Also, I get the impression she is very weird around Black people.

Oh, she has to be. And the sub... How could she not be? The subtext of this book, too, that they never mention is that she's talking about Black people. Like, she says people of color, but she's not talking about, like, the whole chunk of Wisconsin or the mong of fucking Minnesota. She is talking about Black people who have advanced degrees and like... It's just like a very weird thing. It's a Black people, please like the book.

But at one point, she talks about being on a team doing an interview for a new web developer. The web developer is Black and the other two women on the team... She's never, by the way, clear about who's hiring who, who is the boss in this, who is anyone superior. That is apparently not relevant information. And she said, well, look, here's what we do. We do these anti-racist trainings. So that's what it is. And the woman was giving her a survey and saying, like, what do you want from my services? Because, you know, I need information from you. And she's like, look, we do these anti-racist trainings. She's like, and people don't respond well to them. She

could not stop saying that enough. She's just like, look, I'm bad at my job. Nobody likes me. I make people cry and angry all the time. But they don't punch me because they'd get fired if they did. So it must be working. Yes, exactly. And at another point, like she said, and, you know, one of the people that we gave these trainings to recently, for example, was asked not to come back. She doesn't say fired. She said they were asked not to come back. And then she said he was scared of, you know, so-and-so's hair. And it was like a woman who had like box braids or something. He went to an anti-racist farm upstate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the, the, she tries to make

sort of a joke to this woman that she just met. And she's like, yeah, they were scared of her hair, you know, how you guys have different hair. And, and like the woman like later points that this makes her, she says to another person that this made her uncomfortable. She's like, I don't know you. You, you've not been invited to the cookout. We don't have that kind of relationship. And she does a big thing where she atones and she pulls the woman aside and she's like, I would like to apologize and work through the racism that I did to you. Would you be amenable to that? And again, she never mentions if this woman is her employer or not, but they think she is. I think she is. I think she is her inferior. So she's

not going to be like, no bitch, leave me alone. Well, even if she wasn't inferior, like there's a certain level which you have to humor people in a workplace. And, and her, all of this stuff is built in the premise of we all have to get along. And the way we're going to get along is if we're all afraid of getting fired at any moment, we should treat life like we are under the watch of HR at all the times. Like at one point, at one point she quotes, no person of color whom I've met has said racism. Isn't it play with his or her friendships with white people? And you'd think that sounds sucky. Why would you be friends with somebody who like, there's always

this racial tension. Well, if you work with them and you don't really have a choice, but to have some sort of modus vivendi with them, that's true. If you, that's the, and those are the only interracial friendships she can imagine are ones that are essentially compulsory because they take place in the workplace. Yeah. And the consistent thing is that she does not know what friends are. Like I figured that out very early and I'm like, oh, you don't have. Yeah. She has another quote here. You have, you know, racism is not a topic of discussion between a white person and a person of color who are friends. This absence of conversation may indicate a lack of cross racial trust. And it's like maybe, but it

could also represent an abundance of trust because it's not something that comes up. That's possible. That's, that's, that's not impossible. But in her mind, that is precluded because once again, she's imagining all these relationships in the quasi, in the, in the quasi compulsory context of employer relations. Love to talk about racism all day with my POC friend. Well, I mean, this reminds me of like, again, we're talking about these sort of like prescriptions, these, these bullet points that are being offered now directed at white people like, you know, during, during a time in this country that, you know, is, is, is fraught with, you know, anger, trauma, anxiety over like the, you know, horrendous

state of the world. And like the one of them that I remember was like, you know, white people, like check in with your black friends and coworkers and just be like, Hey, are you okay? Like how are you doing right now? Are you are like, are you like just what are your emotions like right now at the, during this time of like anger and, and, and trauma? And it's just like, well, if they were your friend, you would be generally aware of what's going on in their life in the first place. And if they're not your friend, if they're just your coworker, like keep that shit to yourself. They don't want to hear that from you. Like they don't want to use like hearing over you there, your fucking shoulder to just be like,

are you okay? You know what I mean? Like, I mean, I was reading this over and over again. And after like it, I making myself laugh because I was high, that after every paragraph, I just kept saying, ma'am, this is a Wendy's, because it's the most like strange sort of environment that she completely decontextualizes. Like she doesn't talk about the fact that this is work, that she makes her money from selling these services and these programs and models. And the subtext is, of course, that this is all to one, lower liability for corporations for discrimination, and two, make it easier to fire people.

Yeah, just have something else, some, some problem relationship, some issue that can be then used as, as, as cause. Except it's not a Wendy's ever, of course, it's Unilever, it's Amazon. I'm sure she'll do something for ExxonMobil at some point. But like, it's all like universities and like major corporations that she does this for. Well, what about like the title of the book, White Fragility, which she claims, you know, she coined this term. So like, what is she talking about? What does she mean when she says,

You're bragging about that? Yeah. And what she means is, like, the fragility comes from like the discomfort, the anger, the resentment that occurs when like, ever a white person is asked to confront, you know, their place in America's racial hierarchy, or what race means in general, and, or like that they might in some way be complicit in racism, as she writes here, these include emotions such as anger, fear and guilt and behaviors such as argumentation, silence and withdrawal from the stress inducing situation. These responses work to reinstate white equilibrium as they repel the challenge, return our racial

comfort and maintain our dominance within the racial hierarchy. I conceptualize this process as white fragility. The white fragility is triggered by discomfort and anxiety. It is born of superiority and entitlement. White fragility is not weakness per se. In fact, it is a powerful means of white racial control and the protection of white advantage. And when I read that, I was just like, Oh, white fragility is like when an armadillo plays dead, you know, it's just it's a way of like escaping a like a dangerous situation. And like the thing is, in reading this book, she she writes over and over again about like the importance of if you're a white person

reading this, to like to really feel the discomfort that like, you know, these concepts and my ideas are causing you and to just sort of stay with that, stay in that moment of discomfort. And I was like, to by the way, and this is the phrase she uses in order to build your life. And this is a term she uses racial stamina, which sounds a lot like racial hygiene to me. Chris, could we could we work in a little bit of tomorrow belongs to me for that? I don't I'm not one of those optics people. But the phrase racial stamina is a bit of a mess. It's a little of the Ryan gives its gold to this fine. It's she's just saying that you've got to work up your race stamina to do the race marathon. And if you press

yourself, you will get a race high eventually. Race stamina is really more of a dump stat. You should put more into race intelligence, race strength, race charisma, if you want to if you want to min max. But on the concept of white fragility, I mean, obviously whites are fragile and they need to be wrapped in old newspaper when you move apartments. But I swear I only read three chapters of the book and all the chapters are very, very short. And I swear, just even within those three chapters, she defines the concept of white fragility about a dozen times with a different definition each time, like she's describing different aspects of the same God. Yeah. No, it's like it's like astrology. It's

everything. It's just it's just a lens for some sorrow. Yeah. She's she's really also just like packing in the word word count there. Like there is it's it's very, very repetitious because it's not a that thing. Like I read three chapters of it as well. And I was just thinking of like, you know, her her admonition that like I remain uncomfortable reading it. And to that extent, like, you know, she was very successful in writing this book. But like my discomfort stem from my like my just dumbfounded boredom of just reading, again, very repetitive material over and over again. But I suppose that's kind of the point. It has to be sort of driven home. And just that I made this note here. This is at the end

of the introduction. And I think this gets to the kind of the nut of what she's going for. She writes here, this book is intended for us for white progressives who so often despite our conscious intentions, make life so difficult for people of color, I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color. And then she goes on here, none of our energy will go into what we need to be doing for the rest of our lives, engaging an ongoing self awareness, continuing education, relationship building and actual anti racist practice. And I think this is where she gets in is like this is like this kind of it's like this this self fulfilling mechanism of people with her job is just like

hey, hey, you don't want to be fragile. Well, the way out of it is to like continue to do the work and you continue to do the work by again, hiring me buying these books continuing to do these things. And the fact that it's saying like, white progressives, this is aimed at you, you are actually the worst of all is just like, Oh, well, it couldn't be me. Oh, no, this book is a brochure for her services. Yeah. No, it's absolutely aiming it directly at the heart of like anxious white progressives is like that's that's her easy mark that she's going for here. Yeah, specifically women. The other thing is that nothing that she prescribes, which you just laid out will like educating yourself sitting with your discomfort, making

bullet lists or whatever. None of that is anything that's not anti racist action. Like as the old saying goes, that and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee, you know. Yeah. Well, that the idea behind all this stuff is that these racism is foundational and cannot be removed. All it can be done is ameliorated at a personal level. It's like original sin. It can only be atoned for, but then you have to keep atoning. You have to continually atone because you will continually sin because nothing can change. And so it's asked and the thing is, is that that is a persuasive thing for a certain class of highly educated person for whom the injustice of society is some sort of a psychic burden. This is a way for

them to alleviate that burden, but it's a way to alleviate that burden in a context where they never have to relinquish any of their material advantage. And she like her main thesis is that like, actually, if you're, you know, crying and uncomfortable and horrified, it's good. It means you're working. It doesn't mean that I'm doing a bad job and probably turning normal people into resentful people. Like you're, you're crying because it's working. And it reminded me of, do you guys remember the original amber listerine, like the mouthwash that like was on flavor? Yeah, like battery acid. Right. Tastes terrible. And the instructions on it were like, keep it in your mouth for like 30 seconds or whatever. And growing up

my mom was like, you like, because he's this stuff, it's, it's the best stuff. And I'm like, this stuff burns my mouth. Can we get like the minty kind that tastes like a cookie? She's like, no, no, no, that isn't real. That isn't medicine. This stuff is the medicine. The burning means it's working. I remember her saying those words to me. The pain means it's working. Turns out, by the way, years later, you are not supposed to use amber listerine very frequently. It's like douching. And you're not supposed to keep it in your mouth for as long as we're on the instructions. It actually fucks up the pH. It dries out your gums. It's fucking bad for you. It's, it's, you're not supposed to, it's not supposed to hurt. And

the stuff that I think she completely leaves out is that like, actually, doing anti-racist work usually does and should feel good. You feel closer to people, not farther away from people. It reminds you that all of the differences between you are being exacted upon you by an external force. And that, that's not you. And like, the relationships that you build with people who are unlike you become about who that person is and not about the, you know, not about the, whatever, social, political, cultural externalities to that relationship. It's nice. And I just, it sucks that like people are being taught that by the way, anti-racism very painful. You're going to cry. You're not going to like it. And it's like, then

why would they do? Well, that's just it. It's, it's assuming an audience and she says that she pitches this to progressive whites for a reason. They're the only people who would see this deal and say, sure, and not fuck off. No, no, thank you. Just like, just like in the media, just like in the Victorian era, it was only, uh, board rich people who would go to, uh, you know, uh, professor Graham's, uh, vitality clinic and have yogurt jammed up their ass and, uh, and, uh, uh, fucking Graham crackers put in their urethra because everyone else is like, that's insane. You have to have bought into the premise already. And that is why

it's nihilistic because it assumes, yeah, of course, most white people are going to say, what's in it for me? Because that's how people act about anything. That's why, that's why meaningful anti-racist action is, is class-based because it gives everybody a stake in changing things for the better. Whereas this just gives you a stake in feeling better about how bad things are always going to be. And not getting fired. Yeah. Uh, reading this book, uh, she, she, she does stress over and over again that like for, for

white people, like the, the beginnings of this journey begin with you being like sort of hyper-aware of you as a member of the white race and what that means. And it honestly, it really reminded me of, uh, on the Howard Stern show used to have this KKK guy call in and his sort of catchphrase would always be, wake up, white people. And I just think like, I just read this book as the anti-racist version of that where it was just attention to white people. Like just you are white, like, you know, you're not getting around it. Like, you know, so just you better start thinking about that of yourself in those terms all the time. Cause everyone else is and like, you know, that's how like, you know, that

is your destiny. That is the future is just you as like a white person. And that, and like, and that's it. And she thinks that's fine. She uses the, she thinks it's good. She uses the phrase fellow whites, which hello, fellow white. She thinks that's fine. Over and over again. She's imagining that her audience are people who are so fucking comfortable that this rate

that thinking of themselves as white can only have positive impacts. Whereas in a reality of steadily and declining standards of living for everybody in this country, racial awareness is the last thing people fucking need. Yeah. Historically speaking, elites developing a white identity has not been good for people of color. No. And, but like, I mean, I don't know, like going through this book, like the, I read the introduction and like the first chapter, which is like the broad overview. And then like her second, her second chapter is about like, is about white supremacy and sort of

like how race is socially constructed. And then the third chapter is about like the evolution of racism, like post civil rights movement. And broadly speaking, like, you know, she makes the point that like a lot of the way, like most white people think of race and this racism in this country is like, well, that happened in the past. Or, you know, it's just like they think of bull Connor unleashing dogs on people or like the Ku Klux Klan and things like that. But like, regard that like, you know, the contemporary world is that settled and like everything is sort of an objective, equal playing field right now. And that bringing it up or being made aware of it is in and of itself racist, which I guess like, you

know, like individually, I don't think she's wrong in that like most people's understanding, I'm just saying like most people's like, don't know shit about American history in the first place. And, you know, do react like poorly when they seem to like when they're made to feel like implicated in a history of racism or white supremacy in this country. But, but her whole thing is like, she's like, well, white, you know, white liberals have so much trouble talking about racism. Clearly they don't. So they love, they love talking about racism. Endlessly, they fucking talk about racism. You see those lips doing that video, they don't have to do that. Nobody made them do

that. The lip video, the apology video, all the celebs. Yeah, yeah, they love that shit. Like, it's clearly like, that's just something they did because they were bored. It's almost like a hobby for them. I don't think they're particularly like smart about it or doing anything productive. But clearly, they like talk white lives, like talking about racism and how it's bad for a read calls that post post racialism. This kind of like condition where, as you say, like white liberals, or I guess liberals of all sorts sort of set up, I don't know if I would call it a straw man, but they sort of invoke this concept of post racialism to be like, well, that's not me. And we really

need to talk about race. But as you pointed out, they, they are talking about race all the time. And once again, Robin D'Angelo's paycheck is contingent upon talking about race. So it behooves her to kind of set up the situation where nobody but her is talking about race. Like I said, I only read the like the introduction in the first three chapters of this book. But like, where, where else does this go? Because it just seems to me like the, the book is essentially just the introduction in the first chapter where she lays out like what her program is. And you know, why you should hire her. But like, what else is in

this book? Honestly, it's, it's pretty repetitive. Where it does get fun is like, where she tells you how not to behave when you're in an anti racist training that being forced to and observed by employers at work, where she gives like guidelines where she's like, she said, you know, a lot of white people feel like they need to be able to trust before they get into a conversation about race. And it's like, yeah, because they're not fucking stupid. And she's like the bad guidelines are, you know, don't judge, don't make assumptions and assume good intentions. And she's like, these are bad. None of these make sense. And intentions

don't matter. And it's like, actually, like, I agree that the, you know, the road to hell and all that, but like, she's not talking to people who are like, writing a crime bill. Like in inter on an interpersonal level, intentions are actually the most important thing. Like is people aren't building policy. She also gives she gives like a list of like things that you as like a good white ally can feel and say when when you're you're told in one of these workshops that you're reproducing racism, those include gratitude, motivation, excitement, humility, compassion. And then some of the things you can say when you're, you know, confronted by by your racism is I appreciate this feedback. This is very helpful.

It's my responsibility to resist defensiveness and complacency. This is hard, but also stimulating and important. And so on and so forth. You know, how people talk, like normal humans, normal humans just having right how they talk. I feel like you mentioned it before Amber, you brought it up where it's like she gives a an example from her own life where she, you know, made a a black woman coworker feel uncomfortable or not even coworker, it's not even defined what the relationship is. She made someone feel uncomfortable and then had to make a sort of a tone for it. But first she had to ask if that person was okay with her making amends for it. And like that whole dialogue, I was trying to like put my finger

on like what it reminded me of. And the first thought I had was like data from Star Trek, the next generation trying to like relate to learning a new concept about humanity. But then I realized that that was like really unkind to data, who was way more tactful and like aware than this person was. Well, data wasn't trying to sell something. Data was more human than this woman. She does like talk about how it's wrong to like want basic trust. And she says like whites demand comfort. They think that an essential measure of trust is to be nice. And she says, and according to dominant white norms, and it's like, is there a different definition of nice? Is there are there racial definitions? Like

first of all, you should be nice. I don't know how that's controversial. Like be nice. It's a, you know, it's a bumper sticker. If you actually wanted to get across an idea to somebody you don't know, being nice is a good way to start the idea that well, they should accept the abrasiveness. They should accept confrontation because it's the only way they're going to learn. They haven't learned it that yet though. They have to be butted. And that's where the implicit coercion comes in, because that's what makes sense. Imagine the person could leave the room. It only makes sense if they get fired, if they leave the room. Imagine saying that you would approach any other kind of education in this

way where it's like, you piece of shit, third graders, you're learning long division today. It's not the ideal conditions for learning. No, I don't, she's telling people to sort of like resist their basic desire for like human amity or whatever. My favorite line of the book actually isn't from Hertz from Michael Eric Dyson's intro, where he says this quote, Robin D'Angelo is the new racial sheriff in town. She is bringing a different law and order to bear upon the racial proceedings. She is dropping the throwdown gun of compassion on the bullet riddled corpse of discrimination. I mean, that's all coercive. The idea is everyone has got a gun to their head at all times. Then we're all going to

treat each other nicely, not because we actually feel that way, but because we're afraid of the alternative. And I don't know about you guys, but that sounds like a harmonious social order. That's like the NRA's idea of a polite society. It's all just sort of like psycho, psycho cult shit, which I think is intended to sort of justify the fact that people are being subjected to something. It's just to smash down like basically the human instinct to be like, this seems weird. And she says at some point, like, you have to let go of the messenger and focus on the message. It's an advanced skill. And it's like, well, some messengers are full of shit and they are conflicting messages.

There's not one big black people summit where they all agree on what the correct line on something is. You kind of have to actually, the messenger is a very essential part of the whole thing. She's trying to deprogram basic human behavior for what I truly believe is like an insidious design for like, PMC sort of employee compliancy and complacency. And then any pushback to that, she takes as more evidence of the persistence of white fragility, which again is awfully convenient for her. Yeah. I'm not bad at my job. They're just awful. Yeah. Amber, you mentioned it, but I do have a sneaking suspicion. I worry that the overall

purpose of things as best embodied by this woman in this book serves sort of two functions, at least as far as a professional role goes, which is like one is to justify the need for more counseling sessions like this. And the other, I think, well, what are the people who hire her get out of it, like these corporations? And I think like the really insidious thing is, I think what they get is like a very covert form of like union busting and kind of like anti-solidarity in a way. Let's sort of like make all our employees as hyper aware as possible of these like sort of like this racial anxiety and paranoia so that they're like they never feel like they're part of a kind of a shared struggle or like a mission, which is would be actual like anti-racist

practice is investing people in a shared struggle that you work towards together to better everyone's life is because like that when you're invested in that and like in something like that, I think that is what does do the work that this person is supposedly trying to sell you on, which is like, I don't know, realizing a common humanity or like dissolving those differences rather than making people sort of hyper aware. And like I said, instilling a kind of like a constant paranoia about it, not just for white people, but I would imagine if you are one of the three black employees that she mentions in these companies, I mean, I would imagine like after one of these things, like you're not exactly going to feel totally like warm and you're not going to

you're not going to feel exactly completely at ease with your white coworkers when they line up to fucking like ask, you know, do a wellness check on you at after lunch and like say how racist they are. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And and also like all of a sudden, everyone's looking at you. And it's like, I'm at work, like I would be mortified. Like it just I would be mortified if someone even tried to I've had people like say something offensive to me. And I was like, I was kind of gross. And then their apology later has been so much more uncomfortable than the thing that they said, where I'm just like, please, just can we just pretend that this never happened? Like I'm from the Midwest. I do not want to discuss my feelings with anyone ever. They're gross. They're

disgusting. Also, I'm alone at work. Yeah, I'm at work. The author seems to not recognize what her actual job is as someone who, you know, goes to Fortune 500 companies to insulate them from legal liability when an employee does the Chris Rock routine. She keeps saying things like in her anecdotes, framing them as this company brought me in to foster diversity. And it's like that. No, they didn't do that. That's never happened. Yeah. Yeah. She doesn't she she never uses words like hired or fired. She never uses like, you know, boss employee, she avoids that completely. And I can't tell virtually, you might be right. Like for the whole time, I'm like, Oh, she's trying to obfuscate this. But she's so weird, doesn't know how to talk to people that she might not

know what her job is. And she's been an academic her entire life. Yeah. So her job is fake. And any of you or which of you got the section where she's talking about like white women crying and she's like, she's like, she's like, when I when I need to cry, I do it quietly and I go in a corner and I don't let anyone console me. It's like, holy shit. Also, by the way, yes, she literally says like, white women don't cry. But also she says, look, I make women cry a lot. And but they shouldn't do that. And it's like, I just feel like maybe you're doing a bad job if you're making people cry at work. There's no crying in race ball. Okay. Yes. Very good. She says that it's actually killing black people when white women cry, like, and then she brings up Emmett Till,

like you are literally putting black people's lives in danger, which actually indicts her because she is making them cry. So it's like, bitch, you are killing black people. Stop making white women cry. It's dangerous. They're I mean, the white women are just like a single gun. You're like the NRA for fuck sake. It's a controlled demolition, I think is the way she would think. Well, okay, but I wanted to talk like, just go back real quick. We should we'll talk more about white women's tears because this section is insane. But Will mentioned sewing paranoia, which is like a constant thing in this book over and over again, not just where you're being like surveilled and moderated, but also she creates like this, like ghost POC that can see deep into

your subconscious and see all your badness. She says, like, you know, you have racist That's just called God, Amber. You have that's called black Jesus. You have racist patterns and POC know you have them, which is like this weird combo of like white liberal narcissism, where you flatter yourself by like, everyone's thinking of you at all. Yeah. And POC are just thinking about you all the time. They have no they have no internal lives outside of racism. And then also kind of like this weird kind of mystical belief in like that like melanin makes people clairvoyant or something. Like it's like a very weird like they're thinking of you. So it does make you feel like not only are you being surveilled by your boss, but by all the

POC by the POC hive mind who can read your thought. Yeah, because a panopticon is the only way to enforce this thing. If everyone is always under surveillance, everyone can always be judged and and and ticketed for racial transgressions. They will never transgress. But of course, they will also never change the views. But that's because these people don't think that's possible. They don't think that those things emerge from malleable and changeable systems of systematic and structural oppression. Well, one of the things that I always I was thinking of in this is that like one of the demands that like teachers unions often make is that they want a break room just for teachers with no administration whatsoever, because they need to be able to have a private

room where they can talk about work without management watching them. And that historically has been like a really essential foundation of solidarity, particularly in diverse workplaces, like having a private place away from bosses where employees can talk. And what she is suggesting is essentially the obliteration of like the spaces of solidarity of like the idea everything has to be mediated and moderated through HR who work for management. Yeah, there's no idea that like if they got together, they might realize they have like shared interests and might start to understand each other more and even understand the unique challenges that one another faces based on, you know, their position and identity and stuff. No, we're going to do this. We take the reins on

this. We're the boss. Yeah. I mean, Amazon has an algorithm for detecting which of their whole foods locations is most likely to be a potential labor trouble spot. And one of the things that they look for is lack of diversity. Because diversity is a can be a dividing tactic by management. They can drop the white frailty bomb if it looks like they're talking too much with each other about organizing. It's like, oh, you guys really want to, wow, you guys think you have, you guys want to organize together even with this Karen against us who care about race and made you do the mandatory racial awareness seminar. You're going to let all these Karen's dictate what should be going on here just because they want to form a union. Yeah. Well, and also,

like in this situation, diversity is very euphemistic. What I bet a lot of what they're talking about is things like language barriers. Yeah. But anything that can be used, anything can be used as a lever as a wedge. Yeah. And because they have, they control the way that they control what the racial policy and politics and the atmosphere are through their human relations, human resources department. So that they could basically like stoke at their discretion whenever they want people to get really tense about race to their own ends. So we've learned that white women should absolutely not cry. And if they do cry, there should be some sort of crying pod perhaps provided by the employer. Sort of like those breastfeeding shacks that they have

at airports now. They should have those for white women's tears in every workplace and home. And quite frankly, I'm a favor of that. I'm sick of these broads and their emotions to keep that away from me, ladies. But I also, the thing that Jen said is true where she says, I too cry human tears. But when I do it, I go find a corner and I refuse to accept comfort, which by the way, the I'm fine bitch is the most high maintenance bitch there is. She's way more high maintenance than me who's just like, I'm mad at you. Because then we work through it. The girl that goes in the corner and cries is in fact the one drawing attention to herself. I'm imagining one of her one of her seminars is like the end of Terminator two where they where they they they slowly lower

white fragility into like a molten blast furnace. And then she goes, now I know why you cry, but it's something I can never do as a white woman or something I should never do as a white woman. She goes underneath the lava and cries under the lava. So you can't literally kills black people sort of like the middle chunk of the book. Matt Virgil, what did you what did you learn from your sections of the book? I learned that white frailty is is a varied it's it's a land of contrast and basically anything can be white frailty. It's amazing. All all interactions are infused with it. It cannot be divorced from any behavior. It's inherent inherent and in the instinctual at this point in all white people. And that it it can only be neutralized in a moment through

basically a full mental concentration on race, every and the entire history of race in America every time you encounter a black person because it is about as Amber says, it's not really about minorities or any kind of like racial diversity, specifically about black people. And and that the only way to interact with the black people in your life who are implied but never stated outright all coworkers or employees in her imagining is to just have a forehane throbbing at every moment to remember the entire history of racial oppression in this country and your specific beneficiary, the fact that you're a beneficiary of it. There there is a the thing that I found most interesting though is that she she keeps things so elastic in that in that way

that like horoscopes are elastic so that everything in your life can be filtered through it and found to be descriptive of it because it's so broad a brush. At one point she's she's talking about the need for white people to acknowledge their privilege and how white people resist acknowledging their privilege because they don't imagine themselves to have privilege and that they have but that that's not true and that and then she rejects the idea that privilege is something that white people have but aren't aware of she says no no you are aware of it she she says she quotes some other race theorists is saying that white people saying that they're unaware of racism or of their privilege. It's like if someone walked by them and just stuffed money into their

pockets they wouldn't be able to notice that which is an insane comparison because otherwise she stresses that these things that these notions of white superiority are embedded from like childhood and the people get them by age three and yet she then at the same in the same breath says no you should be hyper aware of them at all moment and if you aren't it's because you're you are being selfish and you're being racist even though by her own architecture these things are like deeply embedded psychological concepts but in her mind it's as obvious as someone literally putting money in your pocket which does not make sense at all it's what it is in the moment that justifies like we've said reading the book and going to the seminars and and using the new tropics

that I'm sure she the anti-race of new tropics she's going to start selling. I would not be surprised if she started selling anti-racism new tropics off this shit like my new stack will reduce the racism lobe in your brain by 20% and increase your your anti-racist folds in your cerebrum. Well you know what I think it's it's going to end up being and I wait for it because I I I wanted to see the biggest odds on this in order I mean right now this is like Scientology where you abuse people into saying that they're bad and then they and then they come out compliant and you can do whatever you want with them but what I think she's going to do is sell racist training workshops where it's like like yoga in America is not lucrative but you know what

is like lucrative it's not lucrative to be a yoga teacher unless you're like a like you have like a personal client that pays you $500 a session what is lucrative is the schools to teach yoga teachers so I think she is probably going to branch out from this by training more anti-racist trainers and make it a full multi-level marketing scheme there's still a little marketing it both MLM is a good model I like to think that her next move is to sell DVDs where you know you do the anti-racism moves at home while watching her do them and something like an anti-racism bow flex which I'm kind of picturing as a crash test dummy that's like a person of color that you know it and you do you put in the DVD and you know you follow along with your your crash test

dummy uh figuring out how to talk to them how to use human language yeah MLM is a good model too though yeah for sure I mean that's all that's left everyone's selling each other MLMs that's it that's the only growth energy in the economy now you know amber like and it's sort of the brilliant thing is that like even her own writing certificate knowledge is like doing these things also actually does perpetuate racism and white fragility even in like being aware or talking about them so it's like a totally vertically integrated system yeah where it's like you create the racism in America first you create the racism then you get the anti-racism then you get the money then you get the power what is that not synergy um vertical integration vertical integration yes

she's making people more racist that they have to buy their anti-racism shit yeah genius she's honestly we have no choice but to stand yeah an entrepreneurial legend yeah well version were there were there were any anything from your section of note uh yeah there were a few interesting things uh some of which we already talked about because uh you know she peppers uh her text and the text is very slim with these anecdotes about doing the workshop and people being indignant about it which I thought was just my section but apparently just the whole book is yeah uh you know if this if she if she had taken a single screenwriting class she'd know that this is where the rising action should be uh chapter seven through nine uh but yeah I mean I I just couldn't get over the

fact that she's not making this connection that everyone she talks to is like fuck off where they're attending these paid mandatory services it's like that it's like that line that you know uh if everyone you meet is an asshole well then turns out you're the asshole yeah and it's like like she can't grok the idea that you might be indignant about getting written up because you did racism and that you know why wouldn't you be indignant it's literally a punishment having to talk to this person this isn't a punishment is precisely what someone says when they are punishing you yeah it's for your own good you gotta stay in a room all afternoon it's not okay so there's okay so there's two interesting things for my my section uh first

I just first this paragraph which is funny to me uh capital can shift with the field for example when the custodian uh this is in the context of this mangled discussion of bourgeois uh capital can shift with the field for example when the custodian comes upstairs to speak to the receptionist the custodian work clothes and the receptionist and business attire the office worker has more capital than does the maintenance person but when the receptionist goes down that's in quotation marks to the supply room which the custodian controls to request more whiteboard workers those power lines shift this is the domain of the custodian who can fulfill the request quickly or can make the transaction difficult the domain of the custodian is a level 40 dungeon

not a less you have multiple healing spells and a resurrect uh but yeah it's like oh I I I I guess in this kind of genre of book a lot of it is just kind of like bad readings of bourgeois because like her in her mind uh hobbitus is a kind of uh racial equilibrium and when it's disturbed by a person of color asserting their humanity or a brave um anti-racism consultant claxons go off and a white fragility happens and maintenance droids are summoned to repair the whole bridge uh that's you know again that's another definition of white fragility that just appears in my chapter uh okay I have this long anecdote that I think you'll all enjoy this comes from chapter nine white fragility in action so this is the climax this is where the action happens

this is like the big chase sequence I was leading a community workshop because an employer had not sponsored it the participants had all voluntarily signed up and paid a fee to attend for this reason we could assume that they were open and interested in the content we could also assume that they're complete sociopath freaks yeah I was working with a small group of white participants when a woman I will refer to as Eva stated that because she grew up in Germany where there she said there were no black people it's false by the way she had learned nothing about race and held no racism I pushed back on this claim by asking her to reflect on the messages she had received from her childhood about people who lived in Africa surely she was aware of Africa had some impressions

of the people there had she ever watched American films I also asked her to reflect on what she had absorbed from living in the US for the last 23 years whether she had relationships with African Americans here and if not why not we moved on and I forgot about the interaction till she approached me after the workshop ended she was furious and uh said that she had been deeply offended by our exchange and did not quote feel seen you made assumptions about me she said I apologize and I told her I would never want her to feel unseen or invalidated however I also held up to my challenge that growing up in Germany would not preclude her from absorbing problematic racial messages she countered by telling me that she had never even seen a black person before the American

soldiers came and when they did come all the German women thought they thought them so beautiful that they wanted to connect with them that was her evidence that she held no racism with an internal sigh of defeat I gave up at that point and repeated my apology we parted ways but her anger was unabated a few months later one of my co-facilitators contacted Eva to tell her about an upcoming workshop Eva was apparently still angry she replied that she would never again attend a workshop by me uh so I I I I just want to pause and ask how many white fragility workshops is this person attending just on a monthly basis yeah this is this is like one of those people that just spends their money on improv classes and it's like you're not getting on SNL it's not gonna happen it is kind

of like an improv class isn't it I mean there are games yeah yeah structure to it give me a POC give me an access of oppression but on the flip side of that if you're sending out these promotions to people who have already attended the white fragility workshop aren't you admitting the workshop doesn't work it has to be constantly reinforced it's not like there's new scientific developments in the field of white fragility that's like you know come it's like 80 new contents see but that's just it because it has it has to be reinforced because you have these ingrained things that are beyond conscious and they have to be extirpated repeatedly you have to keep providing yourself but that's why I think that she's eventually gonna get a new tropic because

what if you're on the go and you don't have time you want to get rid of racism but you can't go to a monthly uh session you know just pop a pill every day and you'll be you'll have the same anti-racism uh anti-racist antioxidants going through your system oh yeah I just wanted to finish out this um it's uh she diagrams her interactions with Ava let's start with the common emotional reactions that white people have and that Ava demonstrated when our assumptions and behaviors are challenged feelings singled out attacked silenced shamed guilty accused insulted judged angry scared outraged the willmeniker experience when when we have these feelings it is common to behave in the following ways as Ava did crying physically leaving emotionally

withdrawing arguing denying focusing on intentions seeking absolution avoiding the willmeniker girlfriend experience I was going to say the willmeniker managerial style but yeah now that works too that works too I guess just like I mean like for me like just to echo what you said Virgil like there there's a there's a part in uh in the introduction of the book where again just underscore this idea that like she's she's routinely shocked and taken aback just how just how often people really don't like attending her her seminars or talking to her and she says you're the very idea that they would be required to attend a workshop on racism outraged them they entered the room angry and made that feeling clear to us throughout the day as they slam their notebooks

down on the table refused to participate in exercises and argued against any and all points I couldn't understand their resentment or disinterest in learning more about such a complex social dynamic as racism and my note there is like yeah I just fundamentally back back again to our original point I can't imagine why anyone would resent having to do this as part of their fucking office hours of shit they have to do like they probably have emails they have to answer and shit they're probably freaking out about they got to spend two two hours where it's just like yes racism is is this like is this horrible like intractable problem in our society but it is so weird that like we're coming up with like the medium through which we are going to deal with this

finally is the office you shit that you have to do at work which is just like that I can't help but feel it's just a recipe for disaster oh yeah well I mean it's designed it's not designed to do anything about racism too but like this is the kid I realized that we all hated who would ask for more homework and then and then would be shocked when people are like why do we have to do this extra thing I don't she's like no it's fun we're getting we're getting better at math but like the idea of this being outsourced to has a secondary effect because again these are PMC jobs it has this secondary effect of credentializing and professionalizing anti-racism as a practice and essentially making it into an elite consumer good that some people can't afford and you know

what that means is that all of those poor people there's no way they could be anti-racist look I got the certificate I got the I passed the course and why would we ever trust these elite institutions to even be able to administrate something like that when they are major factors in like you know the academy the corporate world they're historically major factors in the production of racism I mean Charles Murray has a degree yeah I'm sorry but my boss is my friend and he wants me to be on racist because he likes me and he thinks it would make my life better I will say that something that validates the author's thesis here is that for the vast majority of people having to go to an employer mandated anti-racism workshop you're just going to turn your brain off for four hours

and just try to not be involved to whatever degree that you can kind of like how girlfriends have to act when there's a new Martin Scorsese movie out on a streaming service which means that the only people that she ever really interacts with are the people who get really indignant about the workshops because they don't have the social skills to just be like oh this is a bullshit thing all right whatever yeah and just zone out because all the people in her book are just people with no chill whatsoever yeah I'm guessing too that she like like obviously she's going to focus on those people we probably have uh let's let's be honest other other social issues uh that they're dealing with all of them things going on in their life because again well adjusted people are just like this is

bullshit just keep your head down Ava said she didn't feel seen that's okay yeah yeah yeah that's a weird person that Ava was uh Ava Braun by the way that was Ava Braun by the way the one chapter I read about anti-blackness uh or no I it was the next chapter I just noticed that one of the women in one of the anecdotes is actually named Karen yeah there was there was another anecdote where she was brought in by a company to help them do a diversity and they said you know the last anti-racism workshop we did uh left people traumatized so why are you doing this anyone who's anyone who's actually actively grappling with this sort of you know fucking event that your employer forces you to do uh is basically going to be saying shit like that I guess like to tie it back to like the the

current moment uh what I what I couldn't stop thinking about when I was reading this was I think it was like about two weeks ago um Jay Carney who was of course Obama's former press secretary and is now high up in like the PR arm of Amazon uh it's in the White House he ran the White House Tilted World so uh Jay Carney two weeks ago uh went to a Black Lives Matter protest in Washington Square Park and of course posted a a selfie of himself you know he's got the mask on he's he's at the protest and he's like you know I'm here to support Black Lives Matter and George Floyd in this important moment um in American history and not even two or three weeks prior to that Jay Carney had been like spearheading an effort on behalf of Amazon to slander a Black man who

was trying to form a union at an Amazon fulfillment gulag in Staten Island and publicly um slandered this person by saying that like oh he he was fired for being lazy and incompetent and was by at end through his efforts to form a union and like gather people in a single space was was was putting his fellow co-workers at risk for COVID so this guy had no problem slandering a Black man for for advocate you know for for voicing his his humanity or you know standing up for himself in any way against this fucking employer which is the I don't know biggest company in the world on behalf of a fucking literal trillionaire like Jeff Bezos and then this asshole can just show up at a fucking Black Lives Matter protest and be like hey it's me Jay Carney I support all the good things

I don't have white fragility whereas just like I I can't help but think like that this is really what's at play here is that it gives assholes like fucking a walking fucking piece of shit like Jay Carney like the the the tools to fucking shield themselves from any what what is essentially their inhumanity to other people it's an alibi for elites yeah because nothing yeah I was gonna yeah I was gonna ask you guys why you think the book has been so popular like I think someone mentioned it's like number one on Amazon now even before that it was one of the New York Times best saw a list yeah yeah yeah I have a theory I have a thesis on that and these were for my notes so there was a recent onion article white ally willing to do whatever it takes to make sure

people aren't mad at him and yeah the dominant affect that I can detect is anxiety and I think that's the grease between the two cogs of neoliberalism and algorithmic media anxiety is the modern product of this ancient conflict between trying to be a morally good person and living in perhaps being complicit in us or feeling complicit in a society that is by virtually all measures bad and people try to treat this anxiety symptom with the same products what is generating it buy this book listen to this podcast post the square use the hashtag don't use the hashtag whatever within this framework you're going to get grifters and quack salvers multiplying because people are seeking an easy solution to an intractable problem you can take an aspirin to treat your

headache but there's still be a malignant tumor in your brain and because all this is being worked out publicly for the consumption of others and because we all have the tumor treating your own symptom usually just exacerbate the symptoms of everyone else and although there isn't anything per se wrong with taking the aspirin in my opinion if you're only concerned is treating the symptom you'll never cure the disease this is a this is a snake oil it's a placebo it but the thing is placebo's work so it's fine yeah until you don't have to think about racism again yeah that's the thing it's like if you're reading this and you're and it's making you feel like you have transcended these categories that you have for just the moment you're reading it a burnish burned off the the

taint of racism then you're gonna feel better about yourself you're taking pain killers after surgery and you know the next time you have surgery you'll take the pain killers again for most people but some people just get addicted to the pain killers and then they become involved in the white fragility mlm scheme yeah one of the chapters that i read was about uh beyond the good bad binary and the argument is a lot of people reject the idea that they have racial insensitivities within them because they have defined themselves as good and racism is a bad thing and since they're not bad therefore they can't be racist because racism is you know an overt act as opposed to an attitude that's the way that's and and her whole and she writes a whole

chapter saying no that's not not correct but the entire premise of the book is that yeah you can be good or at least better by reading the book yeah she really undermines her own job and the value of what she does definitely like over and over again she's like look i sell this you know seminar series and nobody likes it and people get mad at me and cry and it makes them worse they throw paper by head yeah just like improv exactly and uh and you just you just gotta keep doing it um but i think virtual stories that people are really anxious and i also i think it's people are especially you know since ferguson they are like oh shit there's this whole big problem and i don't know what to do about it so here's a small thing that i can do because the problem seems

so big and it's very complicated policing in america is really complicated and the fact that we have like a federalist system where like you know our police departments aren't even like uh aren't even like you know nationalized they don't have like national oversight it's all local and state everything it's really really hard and you know and and it's it's difficult and i think people are genuinely not just worried about what other people think about them which by the way isn't totally it's uh you know morally bankrupt either of course you want to be recognized as a good person but like they don't know what to do so they do this because it's it's a retreat from politics because the politics that would be involved in dealing with something like police violence

are so daunting and so confusing and if you do it wrong it might get worse and like that's a lot of pressure i would rather uh read uh the the white fragility book that's i mean as well i think our political options uh engaging with this issue through politics has largely been foreclosed upon at least in the past several decades and uh that's why we marched in the streets over the past two weeks because the lack of any other option to do anything except a simple physical act of defiance a reflexive act yeah and it makes you feel like okay well at least this is a little bit of something where i can feel powerful and i can feel close to people because our institutions have been hollowed out you know labor has been on its back forever people are worse off than they've

been for a very long time since the post war period you know it's been a steady decline and we don't really have any tools or organizations or institutions that we could use to wield power so it's either marching through the streets which i think is like a you know it can become therapeutic and it can become like you know people can forget that it's a means to an end and it can become a trap too but it's certainly more human and has more political potential than reading the white fragility book certainly certainly i mean i view it as an instinctual response and that's good that gives me a lot of faith in people that they have a not maybe not necessarily the answers but the moral framework to understand you know that this is wrong this is all going bad i guess that's

something that's something to build on and that impulse that that anxious desire to be a good person is something that can be utilized i guess just like uh jen you said not through not through the book jen you uh you reviewed this book for the new republic and i guess like just overall like the the things that people are trying to grapple with like on their own i don't think worthy of scorn or derision like you know being a better person being a more conscious person trying to combat racism in any way that individually you're you're able to or that that may be trying to separate yourself from things that you've said or done in the past that maybe you know weren't good or did make people feel uncomfortable or angry or something like that but like is there is there

do you see a way out of like any of the the sort of trap that this book would seem to corral people in like that takes what are like i said on their own good and commendable instincts and sort of channels it into this weird like like i said psychological stalemate for both the the intended audience which are of course like affluent privileged white people and the people that it's supposedly trying to help which are their uh black um co-workers or employees or just black people in general like is it is there is there is there is there a way out of this psychological stalemate i mean i think it's hard because you know i think i feel like what robin d angelo would say is that you need to do all this work um you need to work on yourself before you can actually you know engage

in some sort of more substantive anti-racist action um and i think that's actually a very sort of popular formulation among liberals and among some segments of the left as well like you need to do kind of this like psychological evaluation and like rid yourself of racism before you know you can work um in solidarity with other groups um but of course you know that's kind of this fundamentally like non-materialist understanding of how like change happens right and i feel like you know we would say that the transformation is more likely to happen in the act of the class struggle itself um and that's just not something that her framework can like account for um so you know and i keep bringing this up over and over again but the

fact that you know she makes money from kind of believing in the latter interpretation of how change happens is awfully convenient yeah i actually i wanted to throw in this one thing here i i sent an email to some friends about this because there's a book called anti-racist baby um how do you get one i want one of those anti-racist babies amber amber i was going to i mean i was going to announce my memoir on another show um and uh it's uh doing very well which is insane because like if you like if you know anything about like children's pedagogy like it doesn't like the illustrations aren't very good and like it's a it's a what they call a board book where it's like pictures and stuff and ostensibly it's meant for babies but like the the language of it

doesn't make any sense for babies who they kind of go into it it's like you know anti-racist baby sees all the colors anti-racist baby does not claim to be colorblind and it's like well it's true that babies notice difference but like they sort people sort of arbitrarily aesthetically they definitely see nothing but faces but like to ascribe a concept like race to a baby like ignores the fact that they kind of think the dog is a person like it doesn't understand babies well doesn't it's the idea to be like the anti-racist baby is that why you're reading it like to tell your baby to be like the anti-racist baby or the or the parent to be like the anti-racist baby i think that it's sort of like teen vogue where actually all the women reading it are 35

yeah right so they're all going to be baby and instead of being baby they're going to be anti-racist baby yeah yeah yeah but like it's being sold as a as a like you know you're supposed to show it to your baby and be like why can't you be more like anti-racist baby a piece of shit but i was interested in this and so i did a like a deep dive on that i'm just going to read from this email on the sort of history of anti-racist children's pedagogy and there's been like a massive and i think cyclical liberal moral panic about kids books since at least the 1950s and from very early on there's been discomfort with criticism of books that feature non-white characters that are not didactically anti-racist and the whole like uh children's pedagogy world at this point

it was it's very like insular and weird and it's all these you know women they went to like seven sisters colleges and are very progressive or whatever but i didn't know this but the book um as reject heats is the snowy day does anyone know this levar bird i don't remember that one yeah i think i know so it's about it's about a little black boy that plays in the snow and uh and it's like incredibly popular it is apparently so controversial among these like children's pedagogy by the way people into kids books psycho psycho um so even kids that are into kids books or psycho play video games what's wrong with you be normal play violent video games like grand theft auto put that book down so children love the snowy day but like the thing is kids have really bad

taste uh and love a lot of terrible stuff and the snowy day is exceptional and it's beloved by adults because it's like really pretty and it's like a good kids book that parents don't mind staring at the arts really beautiful and it's just not like anything else in like children's illustration it's really modern and like cool and urban but it's still like warm it's not like cute which is like a relief a lot of times for parents who are sick of horrible children's entertainment and it was originally very popular but then it was a huge controversy because a lot of people backtracked their endorsement of the book after finding out that it was written not by as they had assumed a black man but by a white jewish man who grew up in a diverse tenement housing in

brooklyn and the reason for why this makes the book bad is like all over the place that it's like dishonesty on keats's part by omission like he should have said you know by ezra jack keats parenthetical uh a white man um by ezra jackson keats three parentheses around well actually his original name was cat said he changed it to keats because because the publishing industry was really anti-semitic and then some people were mad they said they said he should have referenced peter's blackness and be like one day a black child woke up um it would have been the introduction to the jerk and then my personal favorite uh that uh it's bad because he's couldn't possibly understand a black experience ah yes the uniquely black experience of being a kid that plays

in the snow um and there was this 1965 article a sort of predecessor to de angelo's whole industry the all-white world of children's books by this progressive educator and childhood literacy advocate uh nancy larik and it's considered a landmark in the little world of like liberal children's pedagogy but anyway the peter books became a massive franchise and to my knowledge keats never wrote one that explicitly referenced uh peter's race which ironically enough is what preserves their timelessness in her article larik fretted that many of the simplest picture books show negroes in the illustrations but omit the word can you imagine a contemporary liberal parent reading a book to their kid with the word negro in it which brings me to like this vulgar marx's

point that one of the reasons like anti-racist books and anti-racist children's books are more popular than books that are quote unquote raceblind or colorblind is that there are always updates and upgrades to be made to the discourse and language around race so books about race and racism are always going to be much better for the book industry and for sales than just books by and for and about people of color right like this stuff i think occurs at the expense of actual publishing diversity or whatever and it's like the reason this book is timeless is because it's just about a black kid if it was an anti-racist book it would be immediately out of date because it would use the word negro which was the politically correct term at the time anyway it's

just sort of a point that it's like obviously like this industry is it's more lucrative to publish about race and racism than it is to just publish people of color telling stories about people of color who have internal lives that are not purely mediated by their relationship to white audiences trying not to be racist i just think overall though if you're talking about children you're talking about babies whether they're racist babies or anti-racist babies they should be protected from pedagogues at all costs if i see if all pedagogues should be like taken in a plane and it should be crashing to a mountain you know what i'm not afraid to say it they gotta they gotta they gotta put them on a list man there should be a public list of published pedagogues a pedagogue

registry a pedagogic registry fuck yeah i agree well um i don't think we've solved racism no we did it's done i think we can all pat ourselves on the back we solved racism at least in the podcast world i feel i mean i feel a little less fragile at the end of all of this i think that's what this book has given me i mean just the act of getting through it was sort of um it toughened me up in a lot of ways and you know i've read a lot of bad shit uh for this show so i thought i was tough but uh this book showed me that no i'm actually just like a little little orchid ready to wilt at even the slightest heat or pressure so uh i think that about does it for this week i want to thank you jen pan for coming on and uh actually read it you're you're the only one of us who's actually

read all of this book so thank thank you for that for having me on you did jen you did the work and i would just hope that uh like jen you the listener will um continue to stew in your discomfort get a get a good boolia base going with your discomfort but um and yeah like uh and and just if i could if i could use uh you know this platform um to get any message out there about about myself i just would like to say in echoing the celebs i am responsible i am i am responsible for every every cringe reply that you see that's not separate from me that's me every bad podcast that you now feel compelled to listen to like me personally will manicure i'm literally responsible for that so i think just me admitting that is a first step towards doing and getting better thank

you will thank you well thank you i'm proud of you you just got to do that every day for the rest of your life and you might get somewhere good boy well until next time we will retire to our crying cubes where we will um we we will we will spare the world the sight of our tears so until next time everybody bye bye bye um I still have some love to give Won't you show me that you really care