The Wages of Woke
How Robin DiAngelo got rich peddling 'white fragility'
Author: Charles Fain Lehman Via Washington Free Beacon
The Views of the Author are not necessarily the Views of Enigmose
Dr. Robin DiAngelo, the bestselling author of White Fragility, claims to believe in accountability. DiAngelo used to list the "racial justice" organizations she donates to as part of her extensive "accountability statement," including a monthly "land rent" paid to the Native American tribe that used to occupy Seattle.
But when the Washington Free Beacon began contacting the organizations she listed as recipients of her largesse, DiAngelo scrubbed the site, removing their names and the dates of her giving from the public domain. Evidence of DiAngelo’s "accountability" has also vanished from the Internet Archive; she did not comment when asked about the removal. The page was edited again as recently as Friday, when DiAngelo wrote she would begin donating 15 percent of her after-tax income, "in cash and in-kind donations," starting next month—suggesting she had not previously, as the page exhorts, given a percentage of her income large enough that she could "feel it."
This about-face is odd for a woman who has made her career demanding white people not respond defensively in hard conversations. DiAngelo vaulted to superstardom upon the 2018 publication of her book, White Fragility, which argues that all whites are racist and any rejection of that fact is only further evidence of it. To address racism, DiAngelo argues, requires the sort of anti-bias instruction she is selling.
The nationwide racial outcry that has followed the killing of George Floyd has supercharged the Diversity and Inclusion industry, and DiAngelo may be its greatest success story. While she has likely made over $2 million from her book, it’s on the speaking circuit where she is cleaning up. One of the speakers bureaus that represents her told the Free Beacon that a 60-90 minute keynote would run $30,000, a two-hour workshop $35,000, and a half-day event $40,000.
Even before the George Floyd protests reinvigorated demand for so-called anti-racist instruction, the New Yorker had dubbed DiAngelo "the country’s most visible expert in anti-bias training." But the eye-popping numbers underscore how she has turned her academic theories about white racism into a multimillion-dollar empire of anti-imperialism. She owns three homes and is an international jetsetter.
DiAngelo’s clients, according to her website, range from Amazon and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to Unilever and the YMCA. DiAngelo reportedly charges up to $15,000 per session—a March 2019 appearance, for example, cost the University of Kentucky $12,000, as well as a $5-a-minute phone-call fee. Recent virtual events run up to $175 a ticket. The eight to ten private events DiAngelo says she speaks at each month likely net her at least $1.5 million annually.
Her book, which made the New York Times bestseller list in its first week and currently occupies the number-two slot, has only added to her success. DiAngelo's publisher said it has sold 1.6 million copies, one million this year alone. Given a conservative 8 percent in royalties, that would mean the book has made DiAngelo over $2 million.
Such lucrative gigs put the white DiAngelo on par with several prominent black commentators on race. Boston University's Ibram X. Kendi, whose book has jockeyed with DiAngelo's on the bestseller list, charges $150 for tickets to public events and $25,000 for a one-hour presentation, his representatives told the Free Beacon. Former Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has charged between $30,000 and $40,000 for public lectures.
DiAngelo has presented herself as a classic American rags-to-riches story, offering vivid details of a childhood spent in profound poverty. Those details are not always consistent—in a 2006 paper, for example, DiAngelo claims she "left home as a teenager and struggled to survive," seeing "no path out of poverty other than education." But in a recent New York Times interview, DiAngelo claimed to have run away from home but says she "didn’t get far," and she didn’t enroll in college until she was in her mid-30s. Neither of DiAngelo’s sisters responded to requests for comment. Full Article @ Washington Free Beacon
The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility
The popular book aims to combat racism but talks down to Black people.
White Fragility was published in 2018 but jumped to the top of the New York Times best-seller list amid the protests following the death of George Floyd and the ensuing national reckoning about racism. DiAngelo has convinced university administrators, corporate human-resources offices, and no small part of the reading public that white Americans must embark on a self-critical project of looking inward to examine and work against racist biases that many have barely known they had.
I am not convinced. Rather, I have learned that one of America’s favorite advice books of the moment is actually a racist tract. Despite the sincere intentions of its author, the book diminishes Black people in the name of dignifying us. Read More @ The Atlantic
We’re all White supremacists now
Refusing to recognize black supremacy
One of the most disturbing things about our already unsettling times is the way that the left is forcing ugly binary choices on Americans. The most obvious example is how the phrase “All lives matter” is being twisted to mean “I hate blacks” or “I’m a white supremacist.” The latest manifestation of the charge that refusing to recognize black supremacy is, without more, proof that someone is a white supremacist comes from San Francisco. Read More
Alex Haleys 1967 Roots saga was popularized by a television mini-series in the 1970s. He claimed it to be a true portrayal of his families History based on his painstaking research. In fact he dedicated the last chapter at the end of the novel describing his so-called research.
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