Robin DiAngelo: are universities hotbeds of ‘nice racism’?

Universities are full of “nice racism” they are unwilling to address. That is the claim of Robin DiAngelo, affiliate associate professor of education at the University of Washington and author of a new book titled Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm (Allen Lane).

This builds on her 2018 bestseller White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, which explored defensive and often highly emotional responses of those who were asked to acknowledge the history of racism and particularly their own racial privilege.

The earlier book attracted some fierce criticism.

Reviewing it in The Atlantic, John McWhorter, associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, described it as “a racist tract [that] diminishes black people in the name of dignifying us...I neither need nor want anyone to muse on how whiteness privileges them over me. Nor do I need wider society to undergo teachings in how to be exquisitely sensitive about my feelings. I see no connection between DiAngelo’s brand of re-education and vigorous, constructive activism in the real world on issues of import to the black community.”

Dr DiAngelo’s “misguided notion of white fragility”, argued British columnist Sonia Sodna in The Observer, also offered “a ready-made caricature for the right who use it to pretend that the belief that white people should self-flagellate for their privilege – so counter-productive to solidarity building – is a tenet of mainstream antiracism”.

Yet Dr DiAngelo herself told Times Higher Education that the concept of white fragility “has resonated worldwide and given language to an all-too-familiar dynamic that is now harder to deny or to enact without accountability. It has hopefully helped lead many white people to the voices and work of people of colour who have been calling these dynamics out for decades but not been listened to.” She had now built on these foundations, in Nice Racism, to “take a deeper dive into the particular forms of racism that more progressive white people enact”.

On an everyday basis, the book argues, “black people don’t interact with those who openly agitate for white nationalism” but “do interact with white progressives. We are the ones – with a smile on our faces – who undermine black people daily in ways both harder to identify and easier to deny.”

Asked how these claims played out in universities, Dr DiAngelo replied: “I have not seen whiteness more fiercely protected than in academia.” This could be seen, for example, in failures to address “the resentment and sense of threat many white faculty feel about diversity efforts”. Meanwhile, “institutionally sanctioned efforts proclaimed from leadership [to promote antiracism] are mostly symbolic”, since “they emerged to reconcile a contradiction: it is undesirable for liberal institutions to be portrayed as ‘racist’, but at the same time institutional elites have no desire to change existing racist power structures”.

“If we say we value so-called diversity,” Dr Di Angelo went on, “then we must demonstrate those values in action. We don’t need any more focus groups or data collection to ‘prove’ there is inequity and ask what to do. We have that data and people of colour have told us what they need.”

matthew.reisz@timeshighereducation.com