Racial Justice advocates seem to realise that humanists pose a greater challenge to their world view than do traditional white racists. Robin DiAngelo claims, in White Fragility  (2019, London: Penguin), “White progressives cause the most daily damage to people of colour” and “White progressives can be the most difficult for people of colour.” (p5) without properly explaining how. In fact, throughout that (in many ways excellent) book, Ms. DiAngelo never fully explains the mechanisms, the practical negative impacts, by which liberals’ unconscious attitudes oppress people of colour.

 I’m sure some self-proclaimed progressives are anything but, and this seems to be particularly the case in America, where attitudes to race are deeply entrenched. However, I suspect white progressives cause most trouble not to people of colour, but to Robin DiAngelo herself, by resisting her analysis of society and thus not letting her win the argument. 

The liberal humanist belief in the sanctity of the individual, and its quest for self-fulfilment is the most passionately held article of faith in the Western democratic consumer-capitalist canon. Objections to Critical Race theory, on these grounds, will be the most potent and threatening, and thus need to be dealt with most severely. Robin DiAngelo’s new book is called Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm. (2021, London: Allen Lane)

In White Fragility, Robin Diangelo expresses exasperation at people who claim not to experience racial tension, or who do not wish to experience it. She rejects the idea that individuals may be able to rise above such prejudice. It is only possible, she claims, if you do not encounter people of colour, because “everyone has prejudice and everyone discriminates.” (p20). Anyone who does not feel racial friction is living in blissful ignorance of the reality of race relations. The privilege of being able to do so is what she means by white privilege. She even goes so far as to suggest that it is healthy for white people to experience racial tension (xi). 

This seems a surprisingly deterministic perspective for a diversity trainer. It suggests that we are incapable of change and are wholly incompatible. I agree that everyone is prejudiced, and we should accept that and be vigilant, so we can identify and defeat it in ourselves. However, surrendering to Ms DiAngelo’s gloomy prognosis seems designed to drive a wedge between racial groups, to heighten racial tension and make it more, not less, difficult to overcome our differences and to celebrate what we have in common. 

Perhaps these opinions say more about Ms DiAngelo herself and her upbringing in white, “working-class” California, in the 50s and 60s than it does about modern American, British or European society. In the introduction to Nice Racism, Ms DiAngelo celebrates being able to maintain an “inter-racial friendship”, as if that were a difficult thing to do, and, in White Fragility, she admits to being brought up to feel superior to Black people. This book also includes an astonishing example of racial oversensitivity, when a moment of brusqueness by Ms. DiAngelo, in conversation with a colleague of colour, leads to a gratuitous accusation of racism and a lengthy and elaborate dance of reconciliation. This is presented to us as a successful racial interaction, rather than a time-wasting and unnecessary pantomime caused by people who have weaponised their touchiness and then attributed such behaviour to the rest of us. 

I’m sure sociologists and social theorists are lovely empathetic people in their private lives. However, they are not our therapists and it’s not their job to make us feel good about ourselves. Why should it be? They are professionally concerned with identifying the impersonal forces that influence groups and societies. They deal with socialisation and social conditioning; abstract ideals, trends and tendencies. 

In their discourses, a single signifier can be made to represent whole groups, without concern for individual difference, in a search for general truths. Critical Race theorists deal with the absolutes of group power dynamics, supported by standardised statistics with all the anomalies removed. 

That’s fine in the lecture hall and university library where they attempt to give structure and sense to the multitudinous chaos of societies with millions of independent and wayward inhabitants. It’s wholly inadequate when confronting the tangled knots of privilege and under-privilege, empathy, experience and ignorant innocence, exclusion and need that make up every individual. The personal and the theoretical are different disciplines and should be kept apart. How, for example, could you address white (or gender) privilege in an Anglo-Saxon boy with severe learning difficulties from an acutely impoverished family? What about the autistic son of educated white parents? Both of these examples are real children I have worked with, and who have fallen foul of the new racial tensions and fractures between young people.

Critical Race theorists are absolutely right to abstract and identify sociological forces such as racial prejudice and consider their influence on individuals and on groups of people in society. However, it is unjust and inaccurate to insist that individuals conform slavishly to these generalisations.  It is the personalisation of such concepts as white privilege that leaves many activists open to charges of hypocrisy because they are defining and condemning individual people by race for defining and condemning individual people by race. 

Critical Race theorists and old fashioned racists are in no way morally equivalent. The former work hard to make the world a better place; the latter cause misery and hatred to gain or maintain power. However, they have a lot in common. Both believe that society can be divided up into incompatible racial groups and that these groups can be characterised by vast homogenised generalisations, and thus denied individuality or individual volition. Both sides may claim that this is a regrettable truth. It’s just that the white supremacists think it is caused by biology and the Critical Race theorists think it is the consequence of social construction. (And is thus the white supremacists’ fault, even though their own theory ought to deny individual culpability.)

Perhaps, then, the fundamental opposition in this debate isn’t between the Social Justice Activists and The White Supremacists, it’s between the racial theory fundamentalists, of all ethnicities (the racists) and the moderate humanists. Perhaps the most profound difference is between those who believe, inflexibly, in eternal conflict and incompatibility, in total victory or total defeat, and those who try to be flexible and to compromise, who believe in our individuality, yet essential similarity and equality. 

So, online culture allows activists an enormous amount of leverage. However, it also presents them with a problem: in this fevered atmosphere of consumerist individualism and existential angst, activists perform a sort of emotional blackmail on their victims/opponents to coerce or defeat them. And it works very well.  But, in doing so, they are attributing the crimes of the whole society to the individual. 

And jumping to conclusions based on immediate impressions is…, well…, it’s prejudiced. 

Critical Race theorists, for example, make vast, generalised assumptions about their targets’ attitudes, cultural knowledge and experience based on how they look. The argument is that the statistics prove racial inequality persists, despite most white people being apparently innocent of any racialized behaviour. People of colour aren’t oppressing themselves, so white people’s unspoken attitudes and inaction, rather than active participation, and their unwillingness to dismantle a system that benefits them, must be holding this inequality in place. Hence the slogan, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

This is a persuasive theory when expounded by sociologists and written up in books. I suspect there is a lot of truth to it, especially in America. However, when you take this idea out into the streets and try to force it onto real people, you are accusing individuals, who haven’t done anything, of inherited racial guilt. And that is racism. After all, if society conditions our thoughts, beliefs and expectations then why should people of colour be absolved of guilt? They are just as likely to be complicit in their own oppression as their white sisters and brothers. They are also refusing to dismantle the systems they know (and which disadvantage them) because of the advantages these systems also bring them.

In fact, if you take this unforgiving attitude to its logical conclusion, complicity is impossible to avoid. Why single out race? All members of a society must share some measure of responsibility for all manner of crimes. How many flights have you taken, in your life? How much climate change has that contributed to? How much of the food you eat has been flown in from abroad? How many deaths in extreme weather events can be laid at your door? How many droughts, floods and famines? What are the working conditions of the people in the developing countries who manufacture your goods? The clothes you wear? The rare-earth metals in your phones? How much pollution from your waste? 

And what about the increasing inequality in our own societies, or between the rich countries and the developing world? How can we live with even one of our luxuries and indulgences, when other human beings have so much less? How can we justify owning more than one t-shirt, pair of shoes, an i-phone, a bed, a home, when other human beings, our brethren, our equals, don’t have these advantages? 

Or the legacies of the past? Wealth and advantage breed further wealth and advantage, because they gain assets to invest and bequeath. Whatever your racial background, you are benefitting from the British Empire when you attend a university endowed by imperialists like Cecil Rhodes. When you use the road network, or go on the underground, you have blood on your hands, because the country’s wealth, which made these projects possible, was propped up by imperialism, slavery and the exploitation of the poor. And this is true even if you can claim the heritage of an exploited group. 

But we cannot possibly confront all our guilt, head on, all the time. It would kill us. And, anyway, we have to go to work, pick the kids up from school, sort out our council tax, get the boiler fixed. If this is privilege, it doesn’t feel like it, and the guilt tends to get lost in the swirling mix of micro-privileges, -disadvantages, -aggressions and -anxieties  we all experience all the time. 

Of course, it is vitally important that we campaign tirelessly against inequality, discrimination and injustice. But it is unfair to attack and condemn individuals simply for just getting on with their lives, or for holding different opinions to yourself, or for interrogating your assertions. 

And it is hypocritical to accuse your fellow citizens of prejudice, based on your assumptions about their putative racial subgroup, that you admit is a construct, anyway.

And it is cowardly to try to absolve yourself of responsibility by blaming other people. 

People in western democratic nations are deeply conditioned to believe in the value and equality of each individual human being. 

As a result, we are convinced that self-development is the highest possible good and purpose in life. 

But, in this era of internet-mediated self-expression, where truth and proof are unobtainable, you are what you say you are. Self-development now consists of making statements of your values and claiming your eudaemonic aspirations as achievements. 

These unfalsifiable claims can be made with such ease that they leave us unconvinced and suspicious of each other, but also, most importantly, of ourselves. We know that what we are saying about ourselves isn’t quite true. It’s how we want to be seen. The sense of falsity and fragility in our online personas worsens the crises of identity we all feel as we try to construct ourselves. 

Internet users seem particularly prone to such angst, as the sheer volume of voices online leads, ironically, to the anonymity of nearly everyone. How can we gain the recognition we all crave without exaggerating our claims? If they found out what we are really like, would they ridicule and reject us?

We have become dependent on validatory feedback from our online communities and highly vulnerable to accusations of being hypocritical, or not staying true to our common beliefs, of not being who we say we are and being abandoned, in disgust, by our people. 

It is in this environment that social justice movements have prospered. Precisely because our societies venerate egalitarian principles, we all want to be considered liberal and unprejudiced. Having those characteristics is what makes you a good and valuable member of our societies. 

Accusations to the contrary have enormous power, especially now, when the vast arenas of the internet have amplified public shaming and humiliation beyond our wildest nightmares. Harnessing the power of mass condemnation must be truly intoxicating. Even governments and big business, both concerned with demographics, have to take note. 

Accusations of racism are even more potent as previous generations of social justice campaigners managed to make the term “racist” extremely insulting without addressing the underlying causes of racial inequality and the assumptions that form around these disparities. 

In this atmosphere, accusations are devastating acts of existential destruction. Digital citizens will do anything to disassociate themselves from peers who have been so accused, and will indulge in the most flagrant virtue-signalling to get themselves out of danger. If millions of people feel they have to buy into your moral and cultural pronouncements, just to prove they aren’t worthless, you will wield an enormous amount of power.

There’s an understandable sense of satisfaction, among activists of colour, in using the racial epithet “white” to dismiss the complacent majority. Members of minority groups are never allowed to forget they have that status. Now there’s a sense of “let’s-see-how-you-like-it” revenge about the sudden and abundant use of terms like “White Supremacy”, “White Privilege”, “White Fragility”, “White Tears”, and so on. 

This isn’t helpful. By forcing white people to identify themselves as part of a tribe, rather than as individuals, you are widening the distance between the white majority and minority groups. You are encouraging white people to have primary loyalty to their “own kind” and to feel comfortable only with other white people. 

Yet the whole social justice movement relies on the principle of individual worth. Activists’ grounds for complaint are that they are not being valued on their own merits but instead are dismissed by prejudicial stereotypes. If we display exactly the same attitudes towards white people we not only open ourselves up to charges of hypocrisy, we also justify the racists’ beliefs. 

Robin DiAngelo, in White Fragility (2019), and others, claim that racism cannot be perpetrated by people of colour because they lack institutional power. This is nonsense. Racism is prejudice based in race, no matter who expresses it, although much more damaging if expressed by the powerful or the institutions that serve them. Everybody knows this and agrees. Language meanings are democratically decided by usage and communal understanding. Robin DiAngelo and her friends are attempting to forcibly change language meanings for their own ends. They are stealing our common property and heritage using their elevated social standing to bend us to their will. This is, in its turn, hegemonic, tyrannical and unjust. 

People of colour expressing generalisations about white people aren’t racist because they are oppressing those white people. They are racist because they are supporting the white racists’ world view. They are allowing white racists to say, “Whether it’s biological, or through social conditioning, you think racial groups are incompatibly different, too. You’re blaming us just because we said it first.” 

People of colour who attack white people in general, assuming their skin colour equates to a life of privilege and ignorance, are complicit in their own oppression. If you cannot appeal to a common humanity, the racial group in control have no incentive to relinquish power. In fact, they have every reason to fear you and thus hang on to power. This exact fear is probably the root cause of all the segregation, discrimination and the lynch mobs in the Southern states of the USA. It is of fundamental importance that we, in Britain, don’t let that poison infect our society any further.

The obsession with “White Privilege” seems to have been exported from the United States, via the internet. Jon Sopel, The BBC’s North America Editor, says “race is America’s original sin” (UnPresidented, 2021, London: BBC Books, p59. ), and later, “Race has been the great – and scarring – dividing line in America since slavery” (p94). Robin DiAngelo, a Californian, claims that “racism is unavoidable”, (White Fragility, 2019, London: Penguin, p4); “race as a social construct has profound significance and shapes every aspect of our lives.” (p5) and that the relationship between racial groups is “arguably the most complex and enduring social dynamic of the last several hundred years.” (p8) These quotations are from the British edition of her book. She has clearly seen no need to alter her statements when addressing a British audience. She assumes the issues are identical. Yet Kate Werran, in her An American Uprising in Second World War England (2020, Barnsley: Pen and Sword History) points out how shocked British people were, as far back as the 1940s, at the treatment of black Americans by their white American comrades.  

The World Wide Web, pioneered and developed, if not invented, in America, is saturated with the values and assumptions of its coders, and much of the information and discourse on the web is generated by that most communicative of nations, and then made available to the whole world. This has massively accelerated American cultural Imperialism, already well underway due to its affluence, political power and media output. 

Domineering Imperial cultures impose their values on their colonies, and their colonial enforcers assume all other societies dance to that same tune. What’s more unusual, I think, about internet cultural imperialism is the lack of resistance to it from colonised peoples. My children eagerly adopt every American trend and craze, and their vocabulary and spelling has been thoroughly Americanised. I think this is because the internet, especially social media, sells itself as a tool of agency and empowerment, and, at the same time a way of bringing people together, forming movements of international solidarity, very like the Ummah in Islam. Perhaps minority groups hope to find their majority, and the mythical sense of existential security it promises, online. 

And social media is perfect for international rebellions and channelling the power of mass outrage. Trotsky would have loved it.

Glorying in that power, though, these freedom fighters don’t notice how they have been coerced and enculturated into an American way of seeing and understanding their world. In Britain this has meant that far greater racial tension has been imported from the USA. Racialised assumptions seem to have increased among the very people who suffer most from them. 

Our conscious existence is multifaceted. It is a patchwork of highs and lows, triumphs and humiliations, loss, grief, betrayal, love, acceptance, generosity. We are fully occupied in experiencing life, even when we are bored and everything seems pointless. Especially then.

I think this pre-disposes us to dissatisfaction. It is virtually impossible for us to celebrate not having a disadvantage. There is no urgency in an absence: that space is filled by immediate concerns. Disadvantages, being various and almost infinite in number, make us all almost infinitely advantaged. Any complaint we might make can be countered by pointing out that we aren’t quadriplegic or schizophrenic or drowning or dead.

This is why “White Privilege” is not a helpful concept. Anyone can be accused of any number of privileges if all it means is not experiencing a disadvantage. There’s Male privilege (obviously), affluence, intelligence privilege, youth privilege, beauty privilege, mother-who-loved-you privilege, good-schooling privilege; high-expectations privilege, not-scarred-by-sadistic-bullying-as-a-child privilege, and so on. Not suffering a disadvantage should not disqualify you from thought on any topic. It should not make you a less valuable person or less deserving of respect. 

But, if British racists are an unrepresentative minority of resentful xenophobes and sadistic trolls, and if they have little real power, how can we explain the racial inequality so starkly displayed by the statistics? 

First of all, I think it’s important to remember that statistics are not lived experiences. The data sets are so large, the prohibiting factors so multifarious, that even if most company directors and government ministers are white males, the typical experience of white males is of NOT being a company director or government minister, just as it is for most people of colour. If an unborn white boy was to ask his guardian angel, “what can I expect from this life that awaits me?”, the angel might reply, “Well, you can forget being a captain of industry or a government minister. That virtually never happens to kids like you.” That’s the same message that an unborn black girl would receive. 

At the same time, the occasional Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, Dr David Olusoga or David Lammy (or Barack Obama, in the United States) manages to outwit and outperform the limitations placed on people of colour, although the reasons for their achievements – good fortune, supportive parents, self-confidence, intelligence – could be framed as unfair advantages by begrudgers. In America, blighted by much more overt racism than the UK, many people of colour hold positions of responsibility and respect.  

All this means everyone, whatever their background, can aspire to greatness but most must content themselves with a much more modest level of achievement. To be identified as white does not mean that you will personally experience a life of luxury and ease; to be identified as black does not mean you will automatically be doomed to abject poverty and social marginalisation. 

So, statistics do not reveal any single person’s experience or quality of life. Being white is no guarantee of being socially and financially successful, or of living an easier, more graceful life. It just means that factors other than race are limiting which of them can achieve. Identifying these factors allows white people also to claim to be part of a marginalised group. Perhaps they are women or working class, or have dyslexia or a Northern accent or Polish or Irish names…

For this same reason, while white people cannot, by definition, experience being of colour, most should be able to understand and imaginatively engage with minority struggles. Empathy, imagination and the ability to communicate our profound, interior existence are our greatest assets as we try to build community.

Of course, no one should assume they are above generalising and racial bias. There are always going to be divisions, tensions and suspicions in society. We were born to theorise and predict; to form tribal alliances, exclude and fear exclusion. But we should monitor and control these tendencies. To assume anyone’s character or attitudes or experience is the same as a generalised trend you’ve identified across a whole data set is to deny them their individuality and, if done on racial grounds, is racism. And racism is bad: divisive and discriminatory. To use terms like “White Privilege” is to surrender to the mind-set of the oppressors and thus to justify their way of organising the world. You are colluding with racists. You are “part of the problem.”

After the Second World War, the British government invited immigration from its colonies, to solve a labour shortage and thus prop up its ailing economy. This began the first major influx of people of colour into the UK. Rather than being met with open arms, as they had a right to expect^[1], they, and their British-born children, would often encounter horrible abuse. And still do. This must be a most alienating experience.

However, unlike in the United States, the presence of Black people on British streets was not perceived as a testament to an awful, society-wide crime, perpetrated right there on British soil by the British people themselves. It was not seen as a reproach and, crucially, white Britons did not think people of colour nursed a brooding, justified hatred against them, personally.

Modern American culture was established abruptly, by its founding generations, with an unbridgeable chasm between slavers and enslaved already in place. In contrast, British culture and society had been developing for centuries. Modern Western values had evolved from a foundation of Renaissance/ Enlightenment thought into a creed of democracy, human rights, equality and freedom, even if few citizens kept to these tenets. Modern Brits were proud of their country’s (perceived) record of diversity and inclusion. Immigrants were expected to arrive in easily-absorbable numbers, to appreciate the chance of a better life, and to integrate into British communities. They were to serve as tokenistic demonstrations of British tolerance. 

However, the 1948 British Nationality Act allowed vastly larger numbers than expected to arrive in Britain. British racism was resistance to mass immigration, although the idiocies of racial theory were used to justify this resistance. It was the classic fear of foreigners with the added bonus (for the xenophobes) that foreigners of colour were instantly recognisable. The rhetoric of the British far right has always been about “coming over here and stealing our jobs, benefits, resources” and telling people of colour to “Go Home, if you feel that way”, if they complain about being ill-treated.  

So, immigrants to the UK have always faced vile abuse, but of a different type, I think, to that of the United States. American racists seem to treat each ethnic minority differently, reserving their most powerful hatred for African Americans, whose anger they fear most. In contrast, British racists have traditionally made little distinction between immigrant groups, disliking all equally, as foreigners. After the 2^nd World War, with Poland devastated and occupied by the murderous Stalinist Soviet Union, a small majority of respondents to a poll conducted by The Daily Mail (I think) wanted Polish refugees to be repatriated^[2]. Polish soldiers and airmen had fought with outstanding bravery in defence of Britain and British interests in the Second World War; Polish pilots had been perhaps the most effective defenders of the British population in the Battle of Britain. The Katyn Wood massacres, by the Soviets, of over 20,000 Polish officers and intellectuals, was well known. Did any of this matter to the British public? It did not. And these Polish people were white. 

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^[1] They had been invited to come to the aid of the mother country, and the Empire’s only justification was that it was “the white man’s burden”: its purpose was to benefit the indigenous peoples of the colonies.

^[2] See many sources. I just accessed “Why Did We Humiliate the Polish Aces After Their Battle of Britain Heroics?”, The Daily Mail, 29/10/2016.

America’s declaration of independence allowed British people to wash their hands of slavery and its legacy. It became an American problem and Brits didn’t need to concern themselves with it. They were claiming that privilege of innocence, but the claim was fraudulent. No-one is innocent of crimes their society profits from, not even the victims. If a descendant of slaves attends a university endowed by a slaver, they are benefitting just as much as the descendants of the whitest aristocrats. After all, anyone who even uses the roads in a country whose wealth was partly established by slavery, is benefitting from slavery. Any nation that trades with them, including former slave colonies, is profiting from slavery… 

We should probably avoid grievance and self-righteousness. Who knows what terrible crimes our ancestors committed. And presumably we do not want to suggest that guilt is racially inherited. We don’t want to go down that rabbit hole, do we?