SO HARD BEING A WHITE SAVIOR:

This movement's journey from obscurity to ubiquity has been neck-snappingly brief--and measurably lucrative for its leading lights. "My average fee for an event in 2018 was $6,200," DiAngelo writes on her website's "Accountability" page. "In 2019, it was $9,200. In 2020 (as of August), it has been $14,000." In the book, she adds that she gives presentations on "whiteness and white fragility" on a "weekly basis."

Taking those numbers at face value, that's $728,000 a year just from speeches and workshops, to say nothing of book royalties and whatever the University of Washington is paying her. By most every yardstick, DiAngelo has achieved runaway success, lodging herself firmly in the top-earning 1 percent of the world's richest country.

But Nice Racism is an unrelentingly sour book, depicting the fight against systemic oppression as a joyless, never-ending slog through minefields of potential missteps, while relying to a comical degree on DiAngelo's exasperated encounters with people who have the temerity to disagree with her approach.

That latter description may sound uncharitable, but it's not. In a chapter titled "We Aren't Actually All That Nice," DiAngelo belatedly berates a (white male) London cab driver for telling her that he was sick of being called a racist and that he feared a group of black men who hung around his neighborhood. "Also worthy of note was his typical white lack of racial curiosity or humility about the limits of his knowledge," she snipped. "He had the author of a New York Times best-selling book who was in town to do interviews for the BBC in his cab, and he did not ask a single question about my thoughts on the matter." The nerve!

If you are a white person who has challenged DiAngelo in one of her seminars the past couple of years, you are probably in this book. There's "Sue and Bob," who reacted to her eight-point talk on "What's Problematic About Individualism?" by telling her that, no, they prefer treating people as individual human beings. "How could Sue and Bob have missed that forty-five minute presentation?" she huffed. "I was left wondering, yet again, what happens cognitively for so many white people in anti-racism education efforts that prevents them from actually hearing what is being presented."

There was "David," a white man who--after being asked to disclose his racial identity--chose an indigenous tribe he had just spent a few months living with. ("David held fast to his opening claim, which had a powerful impact on the seminar and which continued to direct our efforts and distract the group.") There was a white woman who complained that a DiAngelo-led webinar was not "advanced" enough for those who'd been doing such work for years. ("This move demonstrates an inability to think strategically about our own role in anti-racist endeavors.")

Then there were the white progressive participants of one presentation who, even after being told that "silence from a position of power is a power move," nonetheless declined DiAngelo's urgings to speak aloud about their experiences of "white socialization," and then complained afterward. "Given that in the case of racism, the worst fear of most white progressives is that they be perceived as racist, and both myself and the BIPOC people in the room gave them direct feedback that the effect of their silence was racism, how could they continue to hold back? What was going on?"

What indeed?

There's a palpable anxiety gnawing near the heart of DiAngelo's project, one that gives me a bit of hope in our fraught racial times. Sure, people are buying her books, shelling out five figures for her appearances, and being confronted with her ideas at workplace seminars. But are they really getting it?

Clearly, many are not, even among the self-selected group of progressive knowledge-class workers with a professed interest in DiAngelo's brand of anti-racism. 

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