THIS IS REVOLUTION>podcast Ep. 117: The Capitalist Realism of White Fragility w/Charles and Seth

In this episode we take a deep into Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility" and implicit bias training.  Who does it work for? Is it simply a way for not threaten workplace power structures by reinforcing white identity? I discuss it with two young writers.  From the essay: Since the death of George Floyd in May of this year, a new wave of anti-racist consciousness has entered into the national conversation again. To feed this new wave, anti-racist reading lists have popped up and new books have been published to meet the demand. One such book that tops many of these lists is Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. Written in 2018 and now back on the New York Times Bestseller List, White Fragility has become the unofficial guidebook for white liberals to come to terms with their “fragile” and “privileged selves”. Robin DiAngelo’s work is race essentialism masked as milquetoast, self-help, anti-racism that, instead of solving systemic inequality, inverts anti-racist action onto the individual. In doing so, DiAngelo’s work reaffirms the concepts of White Fragility she is supposedly fighting against. Her work is circular in nature, designed to monetize on the anti-racist moment and to expand its marketplace. The double bind her ideas place on the subject of her work (who may be well meaning participants) gaslights them and puts them in the Vampire Castle designed for those who worship at the altar of DiAngelo’s anti-racism, where the only book you will be reading is White Fragility.  In 2013, Mark Fisher wrote a now infamous essay for the website The North Star entitled “Exiting The Vampire Castle”, which was a critique of identity politics and the lack of universality in the current left. In the essay, FIsher describes the Vampire Castle: “The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.   You can read Seth and Charles' work at their Substack here: https://ferocia.substack.com/   You can hear Seth's Music here: https://motherbrainrecordskc.bandcamp.com/album/the-maximal-effect   Thank you guys again for taking the time to check this out.  We appreciate each and everyone of you.  If you have the means, and you feel so inclined, BECOME A PATRON! We're creating patron only programing, you'll get bonus content from many of the episodes, and you get MERCH!    Become a patron now : https://www.patreon.com/join/BitterLakePresents?   Please also like, subscribe, and follow us on these platforms as well, (specially YouTube!) THANKS Y'ALL   YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG9WtLyoP9QU8sxuIfxk3eg   Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/thisisrevolutionpodcast https://ww.twitch.tv/leftflankvets   Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Thisisrevolutionpodcast   Twitter: @TIRShowOakland   Instagram: @thisisrevolutionoakland   Medium: https://jasonmyles.medium.com/kill-the-poor-f9d8c10bc33d