In the words of National Post columnist Barbara Kay, Whiteness Studies teaches that to be white is to be "Branded, literally in the flesh, with evidence of a kind of original sin. You can try to mitigate your evilness, but you can't eradicate it. The goal...is to entrench permanent race consciousness in everyone - eternal victimhood for non-whites, eternal guilt for whites."
Two years ago she published a book, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism, that has been on the bestseller list ever since, making her an eagerly sought-after speaker.
"While a white person may have been picked on - even mercilessly - by being in the numerical minority in a specific context," DiAngelo contends, "The individual was experiencing race prejudice and discrimination, not racism." Hence, even though Barack Obama was president of the United States for two terms, he's still structurally subordinate to some white guy in a shack in the Appalachians.
As he pounds, he yells, "A white person can't get a job anymore!" I look around the room and see forty employees, thirty-eight of whom are white.
He's angry because even though she's accusing him and the other white people in her audience of possessing white power, she's doing so in a context - a workplace seminar - in which she's actually the one with the power.
In her view, that white man's anger is a manifestation of an attribute that, she maintains, all white people exhibit when confronted with their racism.
In his foreword to DiAngelo's book, Michael Eric Dyson has this to say about the concept: "White fragility is an idea whose time has come. It is an idea that registers the hurt feelings, shattered egos, fraught spirits, vexed bodies, and taxed emotions of white folk. In truth, their suffering comes from recognizing that they are white - that their whiteness has given them a big leg up in life while crushing others' dreams."
Two years ago she published a book, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism, that has been on the bestseller list ever since, making her an eagerly sought-after speaker.
"While a white person may have been picked on - even mercilessly - by being in the numerical minority in a specific context," DiAngelo contends, "The individual was experiencing race prejudice and discrimination, not racism." Hence, even though Barack Obama was president of the United States for two terms, he's still structurally subordinate to some white guy in a shack in the Appalachians.
As he pounds, he yells, "A white person can't get a job anymore!" I look around the room and see forty employees, thirty-eight of whom are white.
He's angry because even though she's accusing him and the other white people in her audience of possessing white power, she's doing so in a context - a workplace seminar - in which she's actually the one with the power.
In her view, that white man's anger is a manifestation of an attribute that, she maintains, all white people exhibit when confronted with their racism.
In his foreword to DiAngelo's book, Michael Eric Dyson has this to say about the concept: "White fragility is an idea whose time has come. It is an idea that registers the hurt feelings, shattered egos, fraught spirits, vexed bodies, and taxed emotions of white folk. In truth, their suffering comes from recognizing that they are white - that their whiteness has given them a big leg up in life while crushing others' dreams."
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