Interesting review of a new book, White Fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism, in The New Yorker. It reminded me of something.

In 2011, DiAngelo coined the term “white fragility” to describe the disbelieving defensiveness that white people exhibit when their ideas about race and racism are challenged—and particularly when they feel implicated in white supremacy. Why, she wondered, did her feedback prompt such resistance, as if the mention of racism were more offensive than the fact or practice of it?

…

In DiAngelo’s almost epidemiological vision of white racism, our minds and bodies play host to a pathogen that seeks to replicate itself, sickening us in the process. Like a mutating virus, racism shape-shifts in order to stay alive; when its explicit expression becomes taboo, it hides in coded language. Nor does prejudice disappear when people decide that they will no longer tolerate it. It just looks for ways to avoid detection. “The most effective adaptation of racism over time,” DiAngelo claims, “is the idea that racism is conscious bias held by mean people.” This “good/bad binary,” positing a world of evil racists and compassionate non-racists, is itself a racist construct, eliding systemic injustice and imbuing racism with such shattering moral meaning that white people, especially progressives, cannot bear to face their collusion in it.

This seems like a perfect description of how Rationalists talk about race. As pith-helmeted explorers they’ll delve deeply, with unshakable disinterested calm, into the mysteries of why some groups’ lot in life might be an inevitable consequence of their genetic inferiority, but at the first mention that racism might also exist, you can expect an inbox full of emotional rebukes. Say something racist and you might get a light tut-tut, boys will be boys; call someone a racist and get a blogorrheic whitesplanation. (Unless that racism was directed against white people, even ironically, in which case they’ll gleefully call someone a racist over and over like they just learned the word.)

In the white Manichean view of racism that DiAngelo apparently describes, people are either full-blown racists or they’re not, thus all you have to do to prove you’re not a racist is be consistently unprejudiced in your explicit, non-coded statements (you’re No True Klansman). This is in contrast to perhaps a view in which group prejudice is a natural human tendency that all people must constantly work to overcome. The kind of thing rationality is for. Imagine if we took the same attitude toward some other human vice, like laziness, and divided the world into a tiny mythical group of lazies and a large group of normals, and then a bunch of corpulent slobs spent all their time sitting at their computers Just Asking Questions about the scientific data on exercise and mercilessly attacking the latest Effort Warrior who had the temerity to call a prominent fitness skeptic a lazy even though he professed a terse disclaimer at the beginning of every YouTube video that he does believe in the value of hard work and he even has several diligent friends. Turning behaviors into group identities is stupid and destructive, but on the question of race it’s not unique to Rationalists.

Previously I’ve wondered whether Rationalists end up with weird beliefs like white nationalism because of their demographics or something about the philosophy. It seems like DiAngelo’s theory suggests that any group made up of almost entirely white people (SSC 2018 survey) is going to lose. its. shit. when anyone brings up the existence of racism. Cross that with a belief that all the real truths can be worked out by a group of specially enlightened amateurs slinging unnecessary jargon at each other in their free time, rather than experts who spend their whole lives studying a thing (including people who have no choice but to spend their whole lives experiencing the thing, like people of color - why ask them?), and you have a group of people who don’t just tend toward exactly the point of view you’d expect them to have, but also convince themselves that they’ve arrived at that point through logic and evidence, and therefore all those people telling them they’re laughably/dangerously wrong must be part of some Marxist-feminist conspiracy that’s compromised academia and the mainstream media.

There’s a third suspect, though: the place. Katy Waldman observes the unusual patience and empathy DiAngelo needs in order to discuss this topic with her white audience:

DiAngelo sometimes adopts a soothing, conciliatory tone toward white readers, as if she were appeasing a child on the verge of a tantrum. … One has the grim hunch that such an approach has been honed over years of placating red-faced white people, workshop participants leaping at any excuse to discount their instructor. DiAngelo, for all the outrageousness she documents, never comes across as anything other than preternaturally calm, patient, and lucid, issuing prescriptions for a better world as if from beneath a blanket of Ativan.

So, exactly the kind of grown-up conversation that never happens on the internet, where patience and empathy go to die and have their graves pissed on for the lulz. That also happens to be the natural habitat of Rationalism. And as other people gradually get fed up and leave, internet communities tend toward homogeneity of the least-offendable common denominator; when it’s a bunch of white people, the last worldview standing will be white supremacism.

I know some people who visit this subreddit are still active participants in Rationalist forums, including the toxic miasma of prejudice-rationalization that is the SSC “culture war” threads, and just come here to replenish your strength before returning to the front line. Even if you think you’re doing something noble or heroic by making a desperate last stand against the armies of hate, do you think you’re actually changing any minds when they’re culturally wired to short-circuit as soon as the topic comes up? Or are you just the punching bags they use to practice their arguments (which are only for convincing themselves that they’re being reasonable, not for changing the minds of any neutral observers anyway), the token dissenters whose presence lets them believe they’re consuming a balanced diet of worldviews? Get out.