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LM's avatar

I intend to share this with the people teaching my kids, along with my neighbors, friends and church members, here in our affluent, woke, educated, solid blue-state community, where everyone has a BLM sign on the property, but their kids won't play with the poor kids on the other side of town. This is the crucial passage I want them to hear:

"It seems to me that progressive elites, despite their pieties, don’t really want to live in a more equal society. They prefer the imperfect meritocracy we live under—the rule of the smart, the talented and the rich, most of whom traffic in the fiction that their status was earned.

Still, progressives see themselves as compassionate. What they needed was a way to explain the inequality found in the meritocratic system they hold dear, a way that made them feel they were still on the side of the good without having to disrupt what is good for them."

(And by the way, Harry and Meghan, you two need to hear it as well.)

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dd's avatar

Dear Ms. Ungar-Sargon, thank you for writing this. I am a 65 year-old gay male and have read significant excerpts, and reviews, from "White Fragility".

And from those excerpts it became quickly clear to me that "White Fragility" is in so many ways a racialized version of gay conversion therapy/psychology's pathologizing of homosexuals: the methodology, the pedagogy, the accusations, the shaming. And especially, the intratextuality. So let give you a specific example.

You will recall that to question white fragility as a concept and book's precept is to be the dreaded "fragile". BTW, so what if you are fragile?

And how did the field of psychology justify in part its diagnosis of homosexuality as illness? Well, a big one was from interviews/treatment of homosexuals.....who were drawn from clinical practice. And wouldn't that make that population suspect? I remember reading that in fact, according to many, drawing from that clinical population painted a healthier picture of homosexuals than the non-clinical population. Why?

Because it postulated that the ones in therapy had the moral probity and presence of mind to understand their depravity, hence "healthier". The ones that felt it was ok to be gay? Those were the real sick ones.

In other words, a non-falsifiable proposition bathed in recursiveness. Precisely the type of claim implicit in DiAngelo's notion of fragility.

I will stop there, but could keep going.

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