Talk about a great gig if you can get it. Being able to quit your day job and travel around the country, getting paid good money
for bashing your own race. It’s possible you don’t even have to really believe it, as long as it sounds sincere and sufficiently vitriolic.
Not many have been afforded this opportunity. The only one I am aware of is Dr. Robin DiAngelo. She has a Ph.D. in Multicultural Education and was a lecturer at her alma mater, the University of Washington in Seattle. She is also white. However, it appears she feels quite guilty about this.
Now she receives invitations to speak at colleges by organizations such as the Public Affairs Alliance for Communities of Color at the University of Texas at Austin.
Many colleges and universities host a variety of speakers on many topics, but naturally one of the most popular has to do with racism and sexism.
Dr. DiAngelo’s specialty revolves around both, but emphasizes a phrase she coined called “White Fragility,” or “why it’s so hard for whites to talk about racism.” She penned a book of the same name. I’m sure it’s a real page turner.
She defines “White Fragility,” as “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.”
One of the reasons whites are so reluctant might be that during her seminar at U.T., she asked the whites in the audience to come to the stage and “read a quote from the projection screen that addresses their ‘internalized superiority,’ ‘racial privilege’ and other deficiencies as whites.”
When they completed this demeaning task, and despite their courage for doing so, she told the audience to “‘not clap’ for the white people as they returned to their seats.”