This book is definitely not intended to amuse, but I could not help but be amused as I read; being entertained while being educated is surely no bad thing. Diangelo’s Nice Racism followed on from her 2011 White Fragility, which so many have already drawn on usefully to discuss the defensiveness of white people when confronted with race issues. Nice Racism unpacks the defensive strategies of those who identify as white progressives, debunking their validity and exposing their disingenuousness. Diangelo draws on her extensive experience of running workshops with white and BIPOC people and of taking her message to many countries around the world, and to the reactions she has received. She skilfully analyses and takes apart these encounters to demonstrate the racisms and powerplays at work in those, not sparing herself either in indictment of inappropriate responses.
I was even amused by the title, and of course the word ‘nice’ has a lot of connotations beyond the ones in the contemporary understanding of being pleasant. For example, being nice could have meant being too proper, fussy, exacting. Nice apparently was used even from the 13th century, where it meant foolish or ignorant, before undergoing many sea changes before it took on the more positive connotations we are familiar with today. “Nice can be used to mean lewd, modest, refined, fastidious, trivial, pleasant, enjoyable or even profane, and that’s all before you start layering on the sarcasm.” (https://2newthings.com/not-so-cordial-connotations-nice/) So when I read the title, it made me smile already, anticipating the massive amount of nuance the title contains.
Diangelo explains the problem with nice racisms very thoroughly throughout the book. Here is one of the ways she unpacks the problem:
“Niceness can protect racism in several ways, First, it is difficult to get under the surface of a culture of niceness. To challenge and break through the façade requires conflict, and conflict is forbidden in a culture of niceness. How can we raise an uncomfortable and often contentious issue such as racism when niceness has been established as the procedural norm? In this way the unspoken social agreement of niceness creates a kind of protective force field around racial dynamics. If that force field is broken, white solidarity will rally to protect the status quo. If it is a white person who creates the breach, they become the outsider – deemed too shrill of combative. If a person of color dares to speak out, their outsider status is reinforced, along with the narrative that they are angry, aggressive, and threatening”
p51
So by Diangelo’s argument, niceness is a sort of protocol forced on all others by the white society – which afterall has the power to make rules for others – and the seemingly benevolent and pleasing niceness is actually an insidious control method, a way to stop dissent from being voiced or to stop the challenging justification for the structure of a white supremist society. So suddenly, niceness is not nice at all, and in fact, extremely menacing and dangerous.
DiAngelo tells us of a 3 day workshop with a group of wealthy white women.
“They were so nice! There was lots of head nodding, smiling, politeness, and respectful listening. The women were not debating or appearing to resist the content. Yet niceness in this context actually functioned as a passive-aggressive way to conceal difficult feelings such as anger or numbness. All this niceness may have been more comfortable for the participants, but it also prevented them from an honest accounting and exploration of racism […] In this way, niceness functioned as a shield, protecting the group from the honesty and vulnerability needed for growth and change”
p51
Diangelo identifies and indicts niceness – as the current status quo of society – as being a key obstruction to anti-racist work, and even the opening up of conversations about race. In fact, I think she is even saying that being taught we must play nice is a way of silencing the other quite effectively.
Diangelo’s book is so honest and so searching that I can imagine it can be not just discomfiting but mortifying for some readers. She pre-empts the defensive strategies of white people, collecting and listing those she has already encountered numberless times, and so doing, leaves white progressives in particular nowhere to hid. For example, in chapter 5, she identifies ‘the moves’ of white progressives – these are the section headings in that chapter, each of course followed by excellent examples and case studies and analysis: Credentialling, objectifying, out-woking, rushing to prove that we are not racist, downplaying our advantages, assuming BIPOC people have the same experiences as we do, lecturing BIPOC people on the answer to racism, pretending our preference for segregation is accidental, feeling unfairly accused, explaining away/justifying/minimizing/comforting/co-opting, making sure everyone knows you are married to a black man (or other racialized person, or have adopted racialized children, or have racialized grandchildren), seeking absolution, dismissing the analysis because it comes from the US and your country is different, focusing on delivery, carefulness, silence, marveling at how interesting learning about racism is.
Diangelo frequently quotes the defences verbatim, which makes for almost comic reading, because we can all easily identify with so many of these, and have ourselves heard so many variations of these, and sometimes, not even variations, but exact reproductions of these defences: for example, when she is discussing familiar forms of credentialling, they could, she lists, include claims such as
“I was taught to see everyone the same”
“I don’t see color”
“I work in a very diverse environment”
“My best friend or partner is Black”
“I speak several languages”
“I have travelled extensively”
“I am a minority myself”
“My parents taught me x”
“I was in the Peace Corps”
“I grew up in an activist community”
“I was the only white person in my school”
“I was on a mission in Africa”
“I adopted children of colour”
“My parents were foreign ambassadors”; and so on”
p59
Diangelo’s work is so useful because she always follows up these examples with analysis, driving home the point, so in this example where she discusses credentialling, she points out that while intended to establish a person’s non-racist status, it actually conveys the opposite, that it reveals what the person thinks would/might indicate a racist. Diangelo also points out that all these credentialling, which all try to ‘color-celebrate’, are relying on proximity to BIPOC people to prove anti-racist status, which of course is obviously a nonsense.
Diangelo points out that white people she has workshopped with and worked with can be deeply attached to their various defence strategies, and if called out, can react with aggressive and even with tears. She even calls white women’s tears another symptom of white fragility. Diangelo had explained about how white fragility is this explosion of defensiveness – which is expressed through anger, tears, denial, etc. But she makes the important point that white fragility is not just about the defensive reaction of white people when called out for racism; it is more insidious than that:
“White fragility is refusal. It is white people digging their heels in deeper and protecting their worldview, blocking any further engagement that could expand that worldview. White fragility functions to deter any additional challenge and bully people into backing off. It functions as a protective force field preventing growth.”
p121-2
Diangelo has written this book with tremendous thoughtfulness and care. For example, she tells us why Black is capitalised and white is not. She tells us that she frequently uses the term ‘BIPOC people’ even though she knows it doesn’t really work grammatically, but because it is humanising. She is of course acutely aware of her positionality as a white woman and the positions of power implicit in that. There are a lot of excellent anti-racism books out there, from Eddo Lodge’s to Saad’s to Akala’s, but I must say Diangelo’s Nice Racism tops the list for me in terms of being acutely pertinent, searching, insightful, beautifully written, with great examples, and with deep critical analysis provided throughout. Such a gem in the genre. And inherently quotable too. A great one for the classroom, but not just for academic work; it is one of those books you just wish everyone, simply everyone, would/could read.
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