Without God, White Fragility
The best takeaway I can imagine from T. F. Torrance’s Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ is found on a sticky note I recently rediscovered in a stack of index cards. The line reads: “We must learn to think with God always at the center.”
Torrance’s point in the context, at least in my memory, is not how we should think about God, but it’s how we think in general, about everything. We must learn to think, in all our thinking, with God in the picture, at the very heart.
Why should we think this way?
Because God is.
If God is real then it means we can never think about reality as if he’s not, and that’s the biggest problem with Robin DiAngelo’s best-seller, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.
In DiAngelo’s increasingly popular worldview, God does not exist, and all that is left behind are humans in a never-ending racial struggle for power. There are the oppressors and the oppressed, and if you’re white, you’re an oppressor — and there’s nothing you can do about it. The only option is to strive, albeit the impossibility, to be “less white.” Because, as DiAngelo puts it, “To be less white is to be less racially oppressive” (149–150).
And if you’re white and have a problem with what she says here, you’re a prime example of this “white fragility” she describes, this insidious, amorphous ploy among whites to serve their own interests and prevent meaningful dialogue about racism. Ironically, DiAngelo considers whites who disagree with her to be the ones ending the dialogue and thus employing “a powerful means of white racial control and the protection of white advantage” (2).
And there’s more like this in the book, but too much to address exhaustively here. Others have written short reviews targeting various flaws of the book, such as Shenvi’s broader critique, McWhorter’s frustration, Douhat’s theory, Church’s problem, and Yancey’s constructive solution. While I’d like to see more in-depth reviews from Christian readers, I’m going to stay selective in my response for the sake of time (I’ve got children to prepare and sermons to raise). My plan for this review is to give a brief sampling of DiAngelo’s position, and then comment on three ways ignoring God ails her work.
What DiAngelo Says
The book is a solid 12 chapters sprinkled with intriguing chapter titles such as “White Women’s Tears” (Chapter 11), “Anti-Blackness” (Chapter 6), and “Racial Triggers for White People” (Chapter 7). She says that the book is primarily written for white progressives, the group she believes causes “the most daily damage to people of color” (5).
Throughout the book DiAngelo poses new definitions and nuances for several aspects related to the topic of racism, beginning with a foundational explanation of racism in strictly systemic terms. DiAngelo realizes that changing definitions can unsettle people, but that’s precisely what she intends to do. If you thought racism was to consciously dislike people because of race, you’re wrong — that’s discrimination, but only if you take action on it, so as not to be confused with prejudice, which is a thought or feeling projected upon a certain group that comes before an action (19–20). She then explains,
When a racial group’s collective prejudice is backed by the power of legal authority and institutional control, it is transformed into racism, a far-reaching system that functions independently from the intentions or self-images of individual actors. (20)
This is why, according to DiAngelo, only a white person can be a racist. “People of color may also hold prejudices and discriminate against white people, but they lack the social and institutional power that transforms their prejudice and discrimination into racism” (22). But it’s not just that only a white person can be racist, a white person can only be racist. “Individual whites may be ‘against’ racism, but they still benefit from a system that privileges whites as a group” (24). In sum, according to DiAngelo’s definition, only white people can be racist and all white people are racist, and the only way out of this racist system is to push it over or blow it up, and also to have individual whites be less white. This brings me to the first way DiAngelo’s ignoring God ails the book.
Without God, there is no such thing as an ultimate goal.
There’s no positive vision in this book, which, again, is ironic when you consider chapter titles such as the Introduction’s “We Can’t Get There from Here” and the final chapter’s, “Where Do We Go from Here?” DiAngelo leaves us wondering in the book where the “there” is, and her last question is literally stated as unanswered:
So in answer to the question “Where do we go from here?,” I offer that we must never consider ourselves finished with our learning. (153)
In other words, the destination is a state of mind that involves a verb: think of yourself as always needing to learn. At first glance, that doesn’t seem so bad. It actually appears to sound, well, humble. Who would dare say that he or she has nothing left to learn? Of course, humans always have more to learn, but the reality of our finitude is not a destination; it’s not a goal; it’s not a vision that rallies people to sacrificial action, and you shouldn’t expect anything different if one doesn’t believe in God.
DiAngelo’s absence of God also imports a particular view of humanity, and it’s not that humans are, as James K. A. Smith explains, intentional, teleological creatures. Humans, as God has made them, aim at a telos, a goal, and that goal is what you might call “the good life.” It’s a social vision of human flourishing, a picture of what it looks like for humans to live well. For the Christian, this picture should be determined by what the Bible says, that one day God will dwell with his people and his people shall be forever his (see Revelation 21:3) — with “his people” being a multi-ethnic multitude redeemed by the blood of the Lamb (see Revelation 7:9–10). This is the telos of a God-made world. It’s the Christian’s goal, the destination.
DiAngelo presents no such destination in her book, and none at all for that matter, because she doesn’t have one. So the whole “never consider ourselves finished with our learning” glib is not humble, but depressing. It’s an atheistic hamster wheel. No heaven is in sight. Because God isn’t.
Without God, there is no moral order to the universe.
In Chapter Three, DiAngelo introduces the category of an “aversive racist.” These are the white people who enact racism but want to maintain a positive self-image, and their behaviors include “attributing inequality between whites and people of color to causes other than racism” (44). In other words, racism must be the only explanation for every inequality between whites and people of color. To suggest that inequality is related to any other factor besides race is to be racist (and if that sounds like suspect reasoning to you, then DiAngelo might remind you what the NMAAHC has concluded: that objective, linear thinking is actually a white thing).
In Chapter Five, “The Good/Bad Binary,” DiAngelo attempts to free racism from its immoral connotations. She believes that equating “racist” with “bad” is what causes many whites to strive for, and to understand themselves as, being not racist. It is “bad” to be “racist” and “good” to be “non racist” — and DiAngelo says that such a “worldview” is problematic. DiAngelo mentions “worldview” several times in the book, and often in reference to a white worldview, but in this case it appears to refer simply to morality. Is it really problematic to view the world with a moral order that says to be a racist is wrong and therefore worthy of rejection? Doesn’t the absence of a moral order undermine DiAngelo’s entire project? It should, but it doesn’t, because DiAngelo’s worldview centers around the struggle for power, not the pursuit of virtue that requires moral valuation.
On the one hand, though, I understand DiAngelo’s concern here. She says that possessing the ability to claim yourself as “not racist” makes racism not your problem, and therefore, if racism is not your problem you won’t do anything about it, and therefore, racial inequality and white supremacy stays the same. DiAngelo appears to be largely utilitarian at this point, deploying her entire position as a subversive tactic for a lack of motivation among whites. She wants white people to resist racism, not because it’s evil, but because it’s high time to topple the race with power, which requires white cooperation. For whites to consider themselves not racist is terribly uncooperative, also a power move, also fragile, and, again, a dialogue-ender for DiAngelo. Her strategy is to remove the possibility of being not racist, which awakens guilt in whites and makes them vulnerable to steering. If individuals can’t be motivated by a moral order, they must be manipulated by emotions.
But my question is: Can whites recognize that racism, personal and systemic, is a problem because it is an affront to God’s glory, denying the God-given dignity of humans, and therefore, on that basis, it compels our work for justice?
Of course this is possible — no, it’s necessary. But not for DiAngelo, because she has shunned God and, along with him, any moral order to the universe.
Without God, there is no savior.
This is a related point to the absence of an ultimate goal, but the effect is different. Without a positive vision, a telos, there is no destination to which you may aspire. And no savior is needed to take you nowhere.
But although there’s nowhere to go and no one to take you, that doesn’t mean your current situation isn’t despairing. DiAngelo turns the knife of guilt at every opportunity, espousing, it seems, a brand of total depravity. When it comes to white identity, meaning the cultural heritages of European ethnicities, DiAngelo says there’s nothing positive to be found.
… a positive white identity is an impossible goal. White identity is inherently racist; white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy. This does not mean that we should stop identifying as white and start claiming only to be Italian or Irish. (149–150)
According to DiAngelo, again, to be white is to be racist, and any attempt for whites to salvage positive aspects of their heritage, or even to prefer identifying with one’s European ethnicity over the social construct of whiteness, is also racist. In other words, whites are totally racist — oppressors in the hands of an angry Critical Theorist. And what else should one expect if there were no God, no sinners, and no savior?
As I’ve said elsewhere, if racism is satanic and this whole world lies in the power of the evil one (see 1 John 5:19), then how can we expect the thinking of a devil-influenced world to solve the problem of the devil’s work?
It won’t happen, and White Fragility is a case in point. Far from offering guidance on how to overcome the evil of racism, DiAngelo exacerbates it by promoting a racialized view of the world as damned despite all efforts, but one where efforts are required. There is no goal, no savior, but you’d better keep working to prove yourself as sufficiently enlightened. Run, John, run, DiAngelo commands, but gives us neither feet nor hands…
And that’s it. That’s the book. This staple within the so-called “anti-racist” canon is actually anti-gospel at heart, which is what you get when you forget God.
We must learn to think with God always at the center.
