How did an obscure diversity trainer from an impoverished background become one of the most influential thinkers in the world? Last summer, at the pea

Antiracism won’t save you

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2021-07-11 18:00:07

How did an obscure diversity trainer from an impoverished background become one of the most influential thinkers in the world? Last summer, at the peak of the George Floyd protests, Robin DiAngelo’s slim volume White Fragility, which was already a bestseller in America, became the number one selling book on Amazon’s website: it sold so many copies it soon ran out of stock.

By June, every title in the top ten of the New York Times’s bestselling nonfiction list was an anti-racist book. Magazines, newspapers, Instagram influencers, book clubs and bookshops all encouraged readers to educate themselves about racism by reading an approved list of books. The same titles kept reappearing.

A new canon was soon established. It included, among others, Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Ijeoma Uluo’s So You Want To Talk About Race, Akala’s Natives, Layla F. Saad’s Me and White Supremacy and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist. Never mind that these books differ from each other in content, style and genre; they constituted an integral wish-list for any aspiring anti-racist. And DiAngelo’s was top of the pack.

DiAngelo’s latest book, Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm, is released this week. The audience is, of course, progressive white people; she describes her intended “white progressive” readership as generally on the Left, but they can also be moderates, centrists and soft conservatives. They probably read The Root or the New York Times and “listen to NPR or the BBC as they commute to their job at a non-profit or tech company”.

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