Beyond Jeremiads: Fighting Racism

It was inevitable that capitalism would commodify anti-racism. That is what capitalism does with everything.

 

Anti-racism had fallen out of fashion with the election of Barack Obama. While our small, radical left continued to see racism as a scourge on an historically oppressed people, the media celebrated the individual successes of some Blacks as a sign that the barriers to progress were largely removed and we were entering what they wanted us to believe was a post-racial era.

The arming of witnesses with high-resolution smartphone cameras forced anti-racism back into the national conversation. Lurid, graphic videos of police violence against Black youth brought disgust into living rooms, as it did over fifty years earlier with television exposure of the horrors of the war in Vietnam. Consequently, anti-racism experienced a revival, with millions of people across the country and across many demographics raising their voices in protest.

Yet, some saw an opportunity to be seized, a chance for a career, for advancement in a newfound industry of antiracism.

Academic lust for attention-- for the “new” -- birthed the concept of “microaggressions,” the notion that the subtlety of manners, body language, and casual speech carry the germ of racism, indeed, foster racism. 

But microaggressions are to the “macroaggressions” of premature death, poor health care outcomes, grinding poverty, and the super-exploitation facing Black people as headaches are to terminal cancer.

The champion of microaggressions, the leading merchant of the commodification of anti-racism, is unquestionably Robin DiAngelo. Despite no outstanding history in the anti-racism movement, DiAngelo exploded on the national scene with her number one New York Times bestseller, White Fragility. Her book got her unlimited invites on the talk show circuit. And she promptly monetized her fame through lectures and consultancies. Her con was a variation on the “we are all sinners” motif of the holy rollers. Like the stolid burgher in the first pew who must be embarrassed into seeing his or her sinful ways, DiAngelo forces the most racially sensitive liberal or progressive to examine his or her record of awkward moments, verbal stumbles, and clumsy locutions to find that “we are all racists.” She is quick to point out that her exorcisms of microaggressions do not lead to redemption, but must be repeated again and again interminably.

I have written about Robin DiAngelo before, unapologetically excoriating her book, her sanctimony, and her vulgar commercialization of her bogus anti-racism. Now she has a new book, Nice Racism: How Progressive White People perpetuate Racial Harm, and is again making the rounds of the talk shows. Her recent interview on CBS This Morning was typically cringeworthy, citing racial social etiquette as though it were on a par with lynching. She recounts a story of a dinner 30 years ago in which she clumsily sought to impress African American guests with her own racial sensitivity, a gambit that she elevates to a major act of white supremacy.

Matt Taibbi tells us (Our Endless Dinner with Robin DiAngelo) that the new book is simply a plagiarizing of White Fragility, though I wouldn’t know since I refuse to add to the DiAngelo phenomenon by buying the book. Taibbi performs a neat piece of gonzo journalism on the book, mocking her self-righteousness and superiority with his usual sarcastic wit.

However, there is a problem with our shared disgust with DiAngelo’s hucksterism.

It is not enough to simply call her out. Racism is real. DiAngelo’s popular pseudo-anti-racism shields millions of people from an authentic confrontation with the raw ugliness of racism; it leads people to believe that the barriers to racial justice have been overcome, excepting interpersonal relationships; it spotlights feelings, emotions, sensitivities over the hard evidence of racial oppression. In short, Robin DiAngelo deflects attention away from the heavy material burden that racism actually places on Black people.

Unfortunately, Taibbi and others who correctly criticize DiAngelo’s peddling of anti-racism often fail to affirm the actualities of racism, the material consequences of white supremacy.

In the last few weeks, articles have surfaced documenting the scandalous consequences of material racism.

The New York Times ran an article on June 28 with the odd, provocative title Black Workers Stopped Making Progress on Pay. Is It Racism?. The heading was odd because the article actually documents that the gap between Black male and white male earning has actually widened in the last 50 years! When was there progress?

Black men, on average, earned 56 cents for every dollar earned by their white counterparts in 2019 when adjusted for unemployment rates, according to The New York Times. 

The pay gap has persisted for generations, despite the fact that African Americans have dramatically reduced the education gap. Liberal ideologues have long argued that differences in wealth and income are driven by educational differences. But that excuse for racism evaporates in the face of the facts: “While African Americans lag behind whites in educational attainment, that disparity has narrowed substantially over the last 40 years. Still, the wage gap hasn’t budged.”

The seemingly intractable wage gap of 20% for all Black workers when compared to their white counterparts has a name. It is “structural racism.” “Racism,” because it damages its victims profoundly and with long-term consequences. “Structural,” because it super-exploits Black workers, enabling a pattern justifying lower wages for all workers and to the benefit of capitalist enterprises. 

It might be asking too much for a white “progressive” like Robin DiAngelo to bring these facts before the audience that allegedly brings her three-quarters of a million dollars a year in lecture fees. Evidence of decades of cheating Blacks of fair compensation surely deserves as much attention as regretted words over a dinner at a nice restaurant in a nice neighborhood.

Perhaps DiAngelo also overlooked the life expectancy numbers that came out in the wake of the pandemic from both the CDC and The BMJ (associated with the British Medical Association). Not surprisingly, US citizens, in general, lost more life expectancy from our failing, for-profit health care system than did our counterpart countries with national or single-payer systems (“8.5 times the average decrease in 16 comparable countries..”).

But the dramatic difference between whites and Blacks (and Latino y Latinas) is a national disgrace. Where The BMJ claims that the average white person in the US lost 1.4 years of life expectancy at birth between 2018 and 2020, the average life expectancy of Blacks dropped 3.25 years (and Latino y Latinas by 3.9 years)!

Quoted by NBC News, Steven Woolf, who led The BMJ study and is director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, said “What I didn’t anticipate was how badly the U.S. would handle the pandemic… These are numbers we aren’t at all used to seeing in this research; 0.1 years is something that normally gets attention in the field, so 3.9 years and 3.25 years and even 1.4 years is just horrible,” Woolf said. “We haven’t had a decrease of that magnitude since World War II.”

Life expectancy for Black men is now just below 68 years (68.3 in CDC data for 2020). That means that the average Black male will pay into Social Security and Medicare and see little or none of the benefits, a cruel consequence of the racism built into a dysfunctional social welfare and health care system.

The gap in life expectancy between Blacks and whites is now 5.81 years! Whether it is racialized health care or impoverishment or some other inequality that accounts for this gap, the result is a national scandal.

But more significantly, these numbers underscore outcomes that are baked into US institutions and do demonstrable harm to African Americans. The US socio-politico-economic system systematically produces and reproduces material deprivations on Black people, guaranteeing a second-class citizenship for generations to come.

Television interviews, self-help books, book club readings, sermons, and jeremiads have little impact on these obstacles to racial justice. Shaming, cajoling, or sensitivity training will not break the grip of racism on the material condition of Black People in the US.

Instead, we must impose racial justice on our institutions. We must insist upon workplace representation that reflects our multinational, multi-ethnic society. Popular notions of education reform, elevating role models, promoting inspirational talks, or leaving justice to the market have shown that they will not work.

Every past effort to rectify the economic inequalities imposed by racist practices-- from forty acres and a mule to workplace affirmative action-- has been met with resistance from wealth and power. When the discussion turns to reparative racial justice, the DiAngelos of the world and their corporate promoters stare at their shoes. They would rather talk about racism than incur the economic costs that would come with restorative change. That might cost their bottom line.

Less of Robin DiAngelo’s hustle, more affirmative action!

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

Winter in America...

 

From the Indians who welcomed the pilgrims

And to the buffalo who once ruled the plains

Like the vultures circling beneath the dark clouds

Looking for the rain

Looking for the rain

Just like the cities staggered on the coastline

Living in a nation that just can't stand much more

Like the forest buried beneath the highway

Never had a chance to grow

Never had a chance to grow

And now it's winter

Winter in America

Yes and all of the healers have been killed

Or sent away, yeah

But the people know, the people know

It's winter

Winter in America

And ain't nobody fighting

'Cause nobody knows what to save

Gil Scott-Heron (1974) Winter in America

When Gil Scott-Heron wrote these words, the US seemed to be in swift decline. Watergate had cast a shadow over government legitimacy; the US had lost/was losing the imperialist war in Vietnam; economic inflation, unemployment, and stagnation were crushing US living standards. For many in the post-war generation, the early 1970s were a low point in the prestige and influence of the US. 

Scott-Heron was masterful at blending politics with his art, without compromising either. It enabled him to force issues like apartheid, drugs, police violence, racism, and poverty into the listeners’ consciousness, while still entertaining. Many of his songs became anthems for progressive movements.

For many of us, Winter in America affirmed the terminal decline of the US: "It’s Winter in America, and ain’t nobody fighting, ‘cause nobody knows what to save." Hope was frozen, promise was frozen, and ideas were frozen with the onset of a metaphorical winter: a political, environmental, racial, and foreign policy crisis. 

Scott-Heron’s lyrics touched all the ills of 1974, noting that “all the heroes have been killed or sent away.” The “Constitution was a noble piece of paper…” that “...died in vain.” And “Democracy is ragtime on the corner.” He warns of “last ditch racists” and laments the “peace sign that vanished in our dreams.”

But we were wrong if we thought that the US had hit rock bottom.

Nineteen seventy-four was only the beginning of the long, painful decline. Average hourly wages today are barely higher than in 1974. The minimum wage continues to shrink in constant dollars. The obscene growth of inequality in income and wealth seems unstoppable. 

Constant and persistent aggressions-- proxy wars, invasions, occupations, and remote, video game-like massacres-- have become almost routine to the point that they tragically muster little domestic resistance. 

Racism remains a scourge on the US, though more and more along a class dimension. African American workers have taken an even bigger hit than their white counterparts; the growing poverty that afflicts the population, afflicts the Black population even more; and, consequently, the neglect, contempt, and official violence that always accompany impoverishment batter African Americans severely.

The competition for jobs in the US has shaped both a narrow, xenophobic response and a wage race to the bottom. The decline of unions, the legacy of anti-Communist purges in the labor movement, has further sharpened the competition for low-wage jobs.

The raging religion of market-fundamentalism has privatized or debased public wealth, commodified social services, and devastated public education. 

Where we thought Nixon shamefully broke the public trust, corruption, political dirty tricks, and lying are political commonplaces in the twenty-first century. 

What was winter in America in 1974 is now a veritable ice age.

And what is most tragic about the continuous decline in the US empire in influence, domestic peace, and mass well-being is the hollowness and ineffectiveness of the available political options.

US politics has devolved since the purges of the left in the 1950s and the failed liberalism in its wake, becoming a paper tiger incapable of confronting the multi-faced crises spawned by capitalism.

Twenty years into the twenty-first century, political partisans, devoid of new ideas, can only reflect back on earlier times, searching for a lost “golden era.” Today’s politics is largely politics in the rear-view mirror-- a politics of nostalgia. 

For the petty-bourgeoisie and the want-to-be petty bourgeoisie-- engorging on the table scraps of the ultra-rich-- the Obama presidency brought life at its fullest and greatest. Hipsters call a sector of this strata the PMC (the professional managerial class). The Obama trickle-up rescue of the economy in the 2007-2009 crisis cemented their loyalty to globalism and elite rule. They are socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Witness their Black Lives Matter signs in their nearly all-white, segregated neighborhoods. They are for symbols and gestures, but not at the cost of redistribution of their incomes or sacrifices in their lifestyles. For them, Trump is the scourge blocking the return to Obama-like civil management of national affairs. They are the dominant force in Democratic Party politics.

The forthcoming destruction of thousands of small businesses will prove a hard lesson for many in the petty-bourgeoisie, sending them scurrying for solutions. Far too many will find succor in the bitter victimhood that has traditionally fed an ugly, twisted populism with roots going back as far as the Know Nothing Party of the nineteenth century.

A similar economic devastation drives many workers toward the bogus radicalism of right-wing populism, especially in the Midwestern states racked by capital’s abandonment of industry for investments in other sectors or other countries. Without a viable, substantial movement to direct their justified anger at capital, they find scapegoats elsewhere. 

Other sectors of the working class long for the celebrated era of “middle class” prosperity after the Second World War, what the French call “Les Trente Glorieuses.” This highly romanticized era saw wages and benefits marching in lockstep with strong productivity gains for US workers, allowing many working class families to buy homes and automobiles, to take vacations, and to envision college education and upward mobility for their children. Forgotten in this idyllic memory is the ugly oppression of Blacks and other minorities and women in this period. Forgotten is the suppression of the left, the vulgarity of culture, and the uniformity of thought. Forgotten is the bloody footprint of US foreign policy around the world.

The social contract of the postwar period came at an often-overlooked cost. Working class leaders agreed to purge left resistance to capitalism and uncritically support US imperialist foreign policy, becoming complicit in the crimes of global anti-Communism. When the moment proved opportune, the US ruling class betrayed its part of the bargain and slammed the door on working class gains.

Though memories of this lost era grow dimmer and dimmer, nostalgia for this interlude holds much of the trade union leadership wedded to the Democratic Party along with a core of organized labor’s increasingly skeptical members.

For most voters, constrained by the two-party system, a desire for an earlier, often fictionalized period inspires their politics. The Biden and Trump messaging underscores this insipid nostalgia: “Build Back Better” (Biden) and “Make America Great Again” (Trump). We can only build back or restore that which is lost. And people are confused over what and why they have lost.

This should be a moment for the left. 

But sadly, most of the left is adrift in a sea of old and failed ideas. Some imagine the noble selflessness of the local food or art coop as a cooperative model for competing with multinational corporations and bringing capitalism to its knees. Do we recall the other “anti-capitalist” fads foisted on us by academic leftists? ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Plans)? Micro-financing? 

All of these strategies share a profound pessimism that capital cannot be directly confronted and defeated. Instead, they propose to outfox capital by nipping away at its margins. Despite the fact that similar utopian measures have failed over centuries, influential leftists continually resurrect them.  

The notion that the perfection of capitalist-style democracy can effectively challenge the inequalities and injustices of capital pervades the US left. Since the suppression of the Communist left in the Cold War, the self-described “New Left” has invested heavily in “democratizing” the structures and institutions currently serving capitalism. Whether or not this project makes any sense, it certainly hasn’t succeeded, despite the fact that the New New Left has embraced it. Every ineffective response to the growing crises of capitalism seems to confirm that the socio-economic-political system accompanying capital is its handmaiden and is not and cannot serve as an effective tool against its inequities.

There was a reason that US capital suppressed and continues to suppress Communist and socialist-oriented workers’ movements. It is not nostalgia to recognize that the ideology and strategies devised by Marx, Engels, and Lenin have in the past rocked the very foundations of the capitalist system, sending capitalists and their lackeys into a frenzy of violent resistance. Surely there is a lesson in that fact.

The cold wave of uncertainty, fear, and despair that is now sweeping the US will not abate unless we fight for a new future. The tools are there.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Trouble Ahead! Detour!

There is little good news to digest in the US. 

We are deep in the midst of an epidemiological crisis, with the US leading the world in infections and deaths. The daily totals have grown to 65,000 or more infections and over 1,100 deaths. To give context to the numbers, the total number of US Covid-19 deaths so far this year amounts to over 22% of all the US battle deaths since 1775. In the worst year of the Vietnam War (1968), combat deaths averaged over 1,400 per month. Those monthly totals are surpassed today in a day and a half, with the virus killing the most vulnerable, especially the elderly, African Americans, Latinos y Latinas, and the poor.

The US is losing the war against the coronavirus.

US infections account for as much as one-fourth of all infections globally, an embarrassing number for the supposed wealthiest country in the world, the self-styled beacon of democracy. How can a state claim to be democratic that cannot minimally guarantee the health and safety of its most vulnerable citizens? How can a state lecture, even intervene in other states to bring them the bounty to be won by emulating the US?

If democracy has anything at all to do with delivering the will of the people, then it must answer to the poor US showing against the coronavirus. A robust democracy would deliver a robust public health service, a universal and comprehensive system available to all, and not a broken, overwhelmed, profit-infected, catch-as-catch-can, class-privileged monstrosity. A real democracy would recall the failed career politicians, deny the soulless lobbyists, and sweep away the preening consultants who pollute our political system.

********

The failed response to the coronavirus is only one aspect of the acute political crisis sweeping the US. With a little over three months to the national election, the two-party circus is reaching new lows. What has been a bi-partisan fiasco in response to the virus, has been politicized into universal finger-pointing. Democrats overlook the disastrous earlier outcomes in New York, much of New England, and now in California, while witlessly blaming Trump. Republicans refuse ownership of the deadly results coming from states suffering Republican governance, while boasting of mindless allegiance to Trump. And President Trump stumbles through contradiction after contradiction, while candidate Biden wins support through reticence, with a shamefully inadequate answer to the coronavirus.

When not blaming each other, the two parties blame The People's Republic of China (PRC).

With the compliance of the media, the two parties are ginning up a new Cold War hysteria against PRC and Russia unlike any seen since the missile-gap panic of the early 1960s. Trump and Biden are sparring over who can produce the tougher policy against PRC. This senseless conflict can only end in disaster for the world. 

It’s increasingly clear that the anti-PRC project reflects the growing consensus among US elites that the PRC economy is dynamic and resilient and the US economy is declining, posing a threat to US global dominance. Nor is it a secret that previously secure ties to international “friends” are fraying. While the UK remains supplicant, Germany, France, and many other allies are reluctant to turn on PRC or Russia, and resent the US’s demands for conformity. A stronger PRC and a weaker US will only accelerate this trend. The US is an empire in decline.

Trump’s previous renegacy-- rapprochement with Russia, the DPRK, and PRC, deserting NATO, leaving Syria and Afghanistan, etc.-- has been tempered or extinguished by the security services, the military, and the political Old Guard, leaving him an unconventional, conventional politician. Domestically, his tax policies won the allegiance of Wall Street and the super-rich, dispelling the illusion that the ruling class could not live with him, his vulgarity, and his ill-manners. 

While it may be understandable that sectors of the working class would have viewed him as representing an alternative to the unfriendly globalist, corporate vision offered by the Democratic Party, that illusion should now be crushed as well. And as his poll numbers shrink, his “wilding”-- his erratic behavior-- only intensifies. In conventional times, Trump would be a dead fish.

But this is not a conventional time. The Democrats have attributed their past failures to intervention and subversion. The last refuge for a decadent political party is to place the blame elsewhere: Julian Assange, Wikileaks, dirty tricks, RussiaGate, the Chinese, etc. etc. The Democrats have no electoral strategy other than to ridicule and demonize Trump. Their pre-convention set of issues is unremarkable. It will be further diluted when it becomes a platform. And it will be turned into tepid dishwater when it becomes policy, should Biden be elected. This is a pattern repeated election after election, and Democratic Party loyalists learn nothing from it.

********

Looming over the election like an ominous storm cloud is a US economic crisis of unprecedented potential. Despite the stock market’s seeming independence from any reality, the collapse of employment and economic activity is real. 

Just as pundits think they see a flash of light from amongst the billowing clouds, the coronavirus strangles any tentative economic recovery. In the US, the great contradiction of 2020 is between a sinking economy and the deeply ingrained, wide-spread ideology of immediate satisfaction and narrow, individual self-interest that produces and reproduces tens of thousands defying the virus protocols. Decades of voracious, immoderate consumerism and the demagoguery of unqualified, personal rights have produced an allergy to selfless collective action. 

But the coronavirus is ideologically biased: it retreats before rational collective action and advances against self-centered, self-serving choices. Thus, the dogma of liberty as action without restraint, reason, or responsibility so widely preached in the US since the country’s birth comes face-to-face with a danger that devours its true believers.

Since the 1980s, finance capital has accounted for a greater and greater share of putative US economic activity. The character of that activity is further and further removed from productive activity and more and more engaged in accumulating and valorizing the chits of future and potential economic activity (speculation). Obviously, the viability of this process rests on thin subjective factors: public confidence. In a moment, economic disruptions can wash away the necessary confidence, resulting in a collapse as occurred in 2000-2001 and 2007-2009. We are there again.

Of course capitalism is resilient. But the disruptions of 2020 are far more dangerous than in the past, unleashing enormous, latent deflationary pressures. As investor and consumer confidence recedes, speculative “values” come into question, further eroding confidence and perceived value. A deflationary spiral ensues. And the tools available to Central Banks and Treasuries are depleted and less effective today. 

********

If there is an encouraging development in the US, it is the remarkable burst of anti-racism activism that has spread from major urban areas to small Midwestern towns.

Impressively, white people in large numbers have joined, even organized these actions which began as outrage at police violence against Black people and enlarged to tackle the systemic racism of US society. This may well be the most significant counter to the crisis of racial justice since the Civil Rights Movement of the last century.

As a result of these actions, US public opinion has undergone a striking shift. A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll (July 9-12) shows that 56% of the US people “hold the view that American society is racist”! 

Significantly, the most popular explanation for US racism with respondents was: “People of color experience discrimination because it is built into our society, including into our policies and institutions.”

In addition, 57% of the people surveyed “totally” support the “protests and demonstrations” that emerged after George Floyd’s murder.

Other significant findings of the survey include: 

● 75% of respondents “are encouraged that America is finally addressing long standing issues about racism in our society and working to ensure that all Americans are treated equally.”

● 71% of respondents “feel angry because our political system seems to only be working for the insiders with money and power, like those on Wall Street or in Washington, rather than it working for everyday people to get ahead.” [This number has only slightly changed since 2015].

● 50% of respondents “feel concerned that the protests on racial issues are creating social unrest and bringing too much change to the country, including erasing America’s history and significant figures in the country’s story.”

Arguably, there has never been a time in US history when a majority deemed US society to be racist and supported street action to oppose the injustices associated with racial injustice.

Surely this moment offers great opportunity and should not be wasted.

Fundamental to seizing this moment is clarity about the essence of racism, avoiding false steps, dead ends, and foolishness. Too many of today’s anti-racism warriors scratch away at the margins, confusing language, symbols, and postures with racial inequality. They attack straw men, words, statues, and buildings rather than the many barriers to equality. They fail to grasp that jobs, homes, security, and health are the substance of racial equality, and not the attitudes and interactions that spring from inequality. In the immortal words of the great Nina Simone: “You don’t have to live next to me, just give me my equality.”

Sensitivity training, street drama, and verbal hand-wringing will not remove the burden of low income, the absence of wealth, decaying neighborhoods, poor schools, and inadequate health care. They require political and economic solutions, redistributive solutions. The polls show that the US people are ready for a modern version of “forty acres and a mule,” a dedicated and effective round of economic affirmative action. Are the politicians? The leaders? The pundits? 

If this potentially historic moment is not to be lost, it must not be appropriated by Democratic Party politicians bent on using it as a bludgeon against the Republicans and subsequently cast aside. It must not serve as a frivolous expression of youthful rebelliousness, only to offend the forces now supportive of fundamental change.

The interdependence of these four crises--- epidemiological, political, economic, and racial-- offer a unique opportunity to enact fundamental change in the US. Does anyone believe that either Biden or Trump is up to the task?

The challenge requires a mature, committed, and ideologically sound Left to drive it. It is hard to disagree with BAR’s Glen Ford: “...the U.S. Left is so weak, it has been unable to put forward a narrative that explains the multiple crises that have been so devastating to the American people, or to even minimally fulfill our obligations in solidarity with victims of U.S. imperialism around the world.”

But that doesn’t change the urgent need to now forge a Left that understands the severity of the crisis, a Left that has a vision beyond capitalism, a Left that has a well formed notion of a socialist future, and a Left that has a proposal on how to get there. That is the job before us.

Greg Godels

zzsbloml@gmail.com

Racial Equality or Racial Exorcism?

My local PBS radio station reserves an early hour on Sunday for On Being, a saccharine-sweet mixture of pop-philosophy, psychobabble, and pseudo-religiosity hosted by Krista Tippett. Tippett drips with overly earnest sincerity as she probes guests with questions posed as profound and with deep existential import. While serious thinkers occasionally rotate through her show, more than a few of her guests are con artists, conjurers, or charlatans. 

Inevitably, in this time of long overdue mass resistance to racial violence, Tippett would discover and promote the “work” of Robin DiAngelo, the author of White Fragility, a New York Times best seller and a book enjoying wide-spread influence and popularity as an anti-racist guide to book clubbers, NGOs, foundations, and corporations. 

A curious feature of the On Being interview of DiAngelo and Resmaa Menakem, a Minnesota-based therapist and coach and author of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, is the absence of any reference to the core, structural elements of US racism. There is much discussion of racially sensitive etiquette and manners, of conflicted identities, of “...interpretations, perceptions, emotions, language…”, of discomforting conversations, and of racial “repair” (“And the framework that is causing white fragility is a refusal to repair, a refusal to see or feel...”). 

But there is little or no mention of the material condition of Black people, little or no mention of the substance of African American oppression, and little or no discussion of the prerequisites for achieving genuine racial equality.

DiAngelo shows no interest in exposing the material elements of the racial divide. Instead, she trades in perceptions and feelings between the races. There is, for example, no exposure of the ethnic cleansing (gentrification) that today plagues every US city and dislocates hundreds of thousands of African Americans from segregated cities to equally segregated neighborhoods in de-industrialized suburbs. 

Like the indigenous American peoples, African Americans are relocated from poverty-laced, low-income, segregated “reservations” to another poverty-laced, segregated “reservation” in abandoned, formerly white enclaves. The old, former “reservations” are now available at low purchase prices and minimal property taxes to a privileged urban gentry. 

Robin DiAngelo shows no interest in this development. Nor does she explore the “white privilege,” the profiteering, or the elite complicity that drives it. 

Neither does DiAngelo take note of the persistent wealth and income gap between whites and Blacks in the US. Consistently, since 1968, whites accumulate on average ten times the wealth of their African American counterparts. This means, of course, that every generation of Blacks cannot give the next generation an economic head start, which serves as a multiplier of African American disadvantage. Yet this in-your-face racism apparently escapes DiAngelo. 

The wealth gap condemns and forces more and more Blacks into often substandard residence in low-income areas that become literal Bantustans, results of the formal (Jim Crow) and informal apartheid policies imposed by the US ruling class since the Civil War. Like South Africa’s former apartheid regime, it is these segregated areas that are maintained decisively by the brutality of police. 

These areas, euphemistically referred to by white elites as “The Black Community” instead of the old pejorative “Ghetto,” exist as food deserts, lacking the selection and quality of their white counterparts, but, often, at higher prices. Schools serving Blacks are notoriously inferior. The 1974 Milliken vs. Bradley Supreme Court decision institutionalized urban school segregation, legitimizing and encouraging white flight to the suburbs and exurbs. There is no mention of this structural racism of education, health care, human services or its effects on infant mortality, health outcomes, and life expectancy, in the On Being interview.

Nor does DiAngelo decry the criminalization and mass incarceration that has become a feature of African American oppression or any of the other features eviscerating the material quality of Black life.

Hers is the anti-racism that ignores actual racism.

Commodifying Anti-Racism

Everything can become a commodity in the capitalist mode of production. From ideas to the water that we drink, capitalism strives to incorporate them into the vast commercial marketplace. Commodification creeps into every aspect of human experience, as an answer to every whim. So it should not be surprising that even ideas like anti-racism should be appropriated, commodified, and sold in the marketplace.

In the sixties, anti-racist organizations like the Black Panther Party were laudably able to utilize the white liberal guilt of celebrities and elites to raise funds for socially useful projects like day care, breakfast programs, tutoring, etc.

But since that time, others have exploited liberal guilt and the perceived need of institutions to appear racially sensitive to establish a veritable diversity industry. Diversity training, the broad field DiAngelo’s product falls into, has a long history, but one of questionable results. While it may prove lucrative to consultants, lecturers, academics, and business types, it has done little, in fact, to desegregate institutions-- corporations, foundations, NGOs, etc. In fact, some studies suggest that some institutions have become less diverse after exposure to diversity training. 

DiAngelo’s fast-growing speaking and consulting business places her squarely in this tradition. It is strange-- to say the least-- that this enterprise has encouraged the media to place an academic white woman with no engagement with the long-standing mass anti-racist movement into the role of a leader of anti-racism.

Promoted by the national media, she is an “explainer” of racism in the same way that J.D. Vance and his book, Hillbilly Elegy, were an “explainer” of the Midwestern white working class. In both cases, someone who has “escaped,” who is enlightened, will show the way to understanding for East and West coast urban and suburban elites. Both have profitably opened a book of enlightenment for those uninitiated.

For DiAngelo, the product that she is peddling is “allyship,” a condition won through a rigorous ritual of self-examination and atonement. Supposedly, when white people pass through this ritual, they can then accompany African Americans in the anti-racist struggle.

But not everyone can be your guide: “And it takes years of experience and study and struggle and mistake-making and trust-building to hold a group around race and really hold that group and push them and help them go where they need to go, in ways that are constructive. It takes a lot of experience.” Better call Robin DiAngelo. 

It is profoundly revealing that DiAngelo’s anti-racism is not about Black people and their condition, but about white people and their condition, their conversations, their attitudes, their feelings, their willingness to confess: “And even the confession can be problematic. It can range from just a form of masochism to a form of, ‘Well, I feel bad enough that you can see that I’m actually good.’ And so that also becomes performative —”

DiAngelo’s anti-racism is rigidly individualistic, a kind of mentored self-help in becoming a better ally accepted by Black people-- not a fighter along with Black people against the forces of oppression, not a warrior against the wealth and power of those intent upon keeping the Black working class poor and powerless. This is anti-racism without equality at its core.

In its essence, it fails because it rejects the idea of class. It fails to distinguish between the social discomforts of the upper-middle classes-- both white and Black-- and the plight of the African American working class.

Only a few years have passed since the Obama Presidency brought a smug assurance that we were now in a post-racial era because a Black elite had grabbed the brass ring. The smartphone camera-exposed orgy of police violence largely against poor and working class African Americans challenges that notion. But the DiAngelos and their media promoters give us new hope! We can return to post-racialism if we just get our heads straight!

Meanwhile, the edifice of racism remains intact. Black workers work for lower wages, pay more for the same services, get fewer of the available services, remain segregated, and die sooner. The developers, landlords, petty capitalists, and CEOs continue to super-exploit African American workers.  

The ultimate answer to racism does not lie in exorcism, symbolic gestures, sensibilities, or feelings. If racial injustice is not merely about feelings, then certainly anti-racism is not only about attitudes, either.

The genuine anti-racist warriors-- Black and white--  are crafting answers that enrich and empower Black people. They are attacking the wealthy and powerful who benefit from racial oppression. They are holding the oppressive institutions, their leaders, and their beneficiaries accountable for the material consequences of racist practices. They center anti-racism around winning equality. DiAngelo’s exorcisms touch none of this.

Greg Godels 

zzsblogml@gmail.com