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An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote

I spoke to her after a talk she gave to a bunch of educated (mostly) whites at a university.

(Those whites had been laughing with surprise and dancing to the tune she made as they had all their prejudices uncovered. DiAngelo would say a bunch of stuff and then say,, "and white people in the audience are probably now thinking X, Y, Z!" and they would laugh because they were. In the meanwhile their humourous teachable moment was just a reflection of the fucking ignorance fuelling the hellscape that everyone else was living in.)

Anyway, I used to do free antiracist workshops in high schools, so afterward I went to her to ask for her slides. She went straight for the "it's my intellectual property" card. And from there it was clear she was just a careerist.

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An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote

It's interesting though, because she is the best I've seen working with that model of engagement. I've not seen anybody do the 'antiracist workshop' thing better - she's got it down to a finely oiled machine. She's very good at articulating a bunch of ideas around whiteness, race, and white fragility to 'educated' white 'liberals' whose whiteness has made them not really ever engage these questions, or who think they're relatively ok white people, even though they've never done any work on race.

I couldn't say after just seeing her once, but I suspect her model is incredibly limited. Everybody goes home at the end with nothing but with a better vocabulary for how they're being oppressive. Not one of the over fifty white people I saw there went on to dismantle the university they were working in.

And that would have been the beginner move. OK, we all just heard this shit right now here together, what can we do about it? Let's destroy this institution. Fuck no. Nobody said it because it wouldn't ever be suggested during the talk - or DiAngelo would never have been invited - and nobody did it because they're invested in their whiteness and their jobs, which are separate but co-constituting. So now we have educated people who are good at talking about race but ironically more actively maintaining it.

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deeppurplehazedream wrote (edited )

It reminds me of the 19th century missionaries who came to do good and did well. Some very well.

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