White Women's Tears of Laughter
White Women's Tears of Laughter
...at a film that should have been made by liberals
I pitched this piece to NYT, WashPost, Atlantic, Boston Globe, Tablet, and probably some other outlet that I can’t recall. I never give up.
I unofficially became a left-wing heretic one fall night in 2018, when a group of parents from my kids’ elementary school assembled at a local bar for Diversity Committee book club. The book? Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility.
Some of DiAngelo’s points made sense to me. As a white person, I hadn’t necessarily experienced “racial stress,” or reckoned with the concept of whiteness. Although, when I thought about it, the only group reckoning with whiteness that I knew of was the KKK.
But some of her points left me unsettled. DiAngelo insisted that every white person was racist—eliding differences between whites who fought for civil rights and the white-hooded hatemongers who opposed them. White people must confront our innate racism, but not cry about it. That would amount to “white woman’s tears,” which are “driven by white guilt” and “self-indulgent.”
“Don’t you guys think it’s weird that we’re supposed to face our demons but not cry?” I asked the six white women and one woman of south Asian descent. This seemed profoundly dehumanizing, and not celebratory of diversity, our ostensible goal. “What about the idea that we solve systemic racism by facing our personal racism?”—an interpersonal solution to a societal disease.
My questions were met with blinks, head cocks, faces disappearing into glasses of Cote du Rhone. Instead of examining ideas, we participated in a struggle session, taking turns admitting how we’d been unkind to black people. One woman hadn’t invited a black girl to her eighth birthday party—not because of race, she just didn’t know her well. Another had accepted a position as executive director at a nonprofit; maybe she should have turned it down, allowing a black woman to assume the role.
I shouldn’t have been that surprised. At my first Diversity Committee meeting, earlier that year, the order of business had been to ban a book about the Negro Baseball League—not just because the word was offensive, but because it was written by a white, Jewish man.
I left the bar early, but was later informed by another [white] Committee member that I had been perceived as racist. I didn’t point out that, per the book, so was she. But I got the message: Don’t question anything about these ideas, or you will be ostracized.
In the years since, I’ve felt envious of those liberated, or conservative, enough to interrogate these “progressive” ideas about racism: that by using an upper-case B for Black and a lower-case w for white, we’d fix it. Or that what you can say or do should be dictated by skin color. That sounded so…racist? But to point that out was…racist.
So it was with mixed feelings that I watched conservative provocateur Matt Walsh’s new “documentary,” “Am I Racist?” released in theaters earlier this month. Walsh has adopted the Borat-style approach, assuming a costume—in his case, a man bun wig and skinny jeans—and infiltrating inner sanctums of anti-racism, exposing these ideas and the people who profit handsomely by spreading them. He lists fees each DEI expert charges, which reach as high as $50,000; that amount secured him a meeting with a black mom who insisted her six-year-old daughters were harmed when a mascot in a Rosita suit at Sesame Place didn’t greet them.