Essay in The Globe and Mail: When Activism Becomes Spirituality

My comprehensive critique of internationally bestselling race author Robin DiAngelo.

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This week I’d like to share one of the essays I’m most proud of: my highly critical review of bestselling progressive race author Robin DiAngelo in The Globe and Mail.

I think it perfectly highlights the dangers of replacing spirituality with political activism.

This portion of the essay directly relates to the project I’ve undertaken in this publication:

In a recent media appearance, [DiAngelo] describes having an “out-of-body experience” when she realized she was “white” at 34 years of age. It’s bizarre how one’s racial identity – the most mundane and superficial part of human experience – can apparently elicit a mystical experience usually associated with mindfulness meditation, psychedelic trips, kundalini yoga, prayer recitations and other transcendental practices.

Full piece:

Robin DiAngelo’s new book Nice Racism misses the mark with idea of ‘racial enlightenment’

By: Rav Arora (08/20/21)

Diversity training expert Robin DiAngelo has targeted a growing demographic of socially conscious readers with her new anti-racist self-help book Nice Racism – an expanded iteration of her international bestselling White Fragility. Last summer, in the wake of international George Floyd protests, Robin DiAngelo’s already bestselling title soared to the top of Amazon’s book charts. Its influence spanned from universities, to corporate America, journalism and pop culture.

DiAngelo’s core ideas of rejecting individualism (which “upholds the myth of meritocracy” and thereby the “superiority of those at the top”) and viewing each other primarily through the lens of race has permeated borders and entered Canadian life. Earlier this year, released documents from Global Affairs Canada revealed diplomats and other federal employees are taught that “individualism,” “colour-blindness,” and “objectivity” are “pillars” of white supremacy – arguments DiAngelo lays out in her first book.

In the current, polarized political zeitgeist, white progressives have committed to fighting systemic racism and acknowledging their racial blind spots. However, rather than addressing real racial and economic inequities, DiAngelo promotes solutions that are far more regressive than progressive.

DiAngelo opens Nice Racism with an anecdote from her college days when she was having dinner with a Black couple. She confesses to having spent very little time with Black people at that point in her life, and in that encounter felt compelled to signal her racial openness, leading her to spend the whole dinner exposing her family’s history of racism: “I shared every racist joke, story, and comment I could remember my family ever making…” “The couple seemed uncomfortable” she notes, later acknowledging the “racial harm” she “inflicted.”

At a time when our culture is increasingly intolerant of past mistakes, DiAngelo’s confession of her view of Black people as fundamentally racialized beings operating in a different social matrix is commendable. However, DiAngelo – committed to promoting racial harmony – takes all the steps in the wrong direction from this starting point, promoting racial essentialism, self-segregation and an ultimately dehumanizing form of condescension towards racial minorities, which she seems to regard as a homogeneous group that would, without exception, benefit from her gestures of help.

Her stated mission in the book is to help white people to stop individualizing themselves and instead identify as a collective mass of unearned privilege and historical guilt. “Suspending individuality for white people is a necessary interruption to our denial of collective advantage,” she writes. She urges her readers to form “white affinity” groups – self-segregated spaces for white people to discuss and reflect on how they commit daily racial harm. Concerningly, DiAngelo does not understand the dangers of encouraging such racial tribalism and universally placing whites at the top of our social hierarchy. Though with entirely different intentions, it is this same group division that real white supremacists such as David Duke thrive on. They too reduce everyone to a racial essence and believe in white superiority – and thankfully they are pushed to the margins of society.

DiAngelo’s lofty list of practical solutions in this self-help guide also includes white people collaborating with minorities. She recommends nominating and hiring “accountability partners of color” – an ethnic minority friend, colleague or relative to help white people confront their inherited racism. Yet all these radical – if morally dubious – efforts are, according to her, apparently futile in the face of the invincible force of racism in the West. Toward the end of the book DiAngelo asserts that, even if we wholly eliminated racism in our society, white people would “still” be “receiving the benefits of whiteness within a white supremacist society.”

In a recent media appearance, she describes having an “out-of-body experience” when she realized she was “white” at 34 years of age. It’s bizarre how one’s racial identity – the most mundane and superficial part of human experience – can apparently elicit a mystical experience usually associated with mindfulness meditation, psychedelic trips, kundalini yoga, prayer recitations and other transcendental practices.

In these mystifying and hyperbolic sentiments, DiAngelo seems to be misguidedly attempting to fulfill a deeper kind of spiritual impulse, rather than remedying real inequities and injustices. It is no surprise many prominent thinkers, such as John McWhorter, have compared progressive anti-racism to religious fundamentalism.

This underlying belief – that all Western societies universally privilege whites to the detriment of ethnic minorities – is the most pernicious, re-asserted fallacy in DiAngelo’s new book. Both in Canada and the United States, the highest-earning groups are not white, but of South Asian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and other non-white extractions. The latest U.S Census data disrupts the white supremacy narrative that Robin DiAngelo advances. Multiple full-time female ethnic groups, such as Iranian, Japanese, Turkish and Taiwanese women, have wholly surpassed the income of white men. How can a society that is white supremacist to the core allow for such incredible minority success?

Instead of acknowledging the cascading complexity of race relations today – where Indigenous communities and Black communities in the inner-city continue to suffer from unequal opportunity but many within South Asian and Middle Eastern communities, for example, exceedingly prosper – DiAngelo paints broad brush strokes, dividing the diverse human race into an inflexibly oppressive “white” caste and powerless, victimized “people of color.” In DiAngelo’s paradigm, prejudice and injustice – as systemic as the legacy of residential schools or as individual as a racist comment made by a white classmate (as I have experienced) – are obscured by these broad colour-coded stereotypes where minorities are invariably oppressed and “all white people are racist.”

Transcendence of one’s identity is a core theme in a number of recent self-help books – from Jay Shetty’s Think Like a Monk to Russell Brand’s Revelation – but DiAngelo’s goal in Nice Racism is the exact opposite: to reify, stereotype and fixate on one’s identity. Her explicitly stated project is that of “racial enlightenment,” for race is the centre of human experience, according to DiAngelo – her most fatal misconception.