Robin DiAngelo's pseudo-radical chic: Is unmasking 'white fragility' corporate America's answer to the critique of the neoliberal police state?

Comment published on New York Times blog, in response to feature article in New York Times Magazine by Daniel Bergner, “White fragility is everywhere, but does anti-racism training work?" July 15, 2020:

Is unmasking 'white fragility' corporate America's answer to the critique of the neoliberal police state?

Why try to end the violence of the police and prison system when we can just blame the attitudes of those who usually escape it?

Fascism grows out of liberalism by finding easy targets and simplifying in the name of moralism. Liberals like DiAngelo aim to give corporate America--she is a corporate consultant giving diversity trainings--a toolkit for policing attitudes, because that is a substitute for meaningful change.

Militant and angry left-liberal politics like hers are well to the right of any more genuine radicalism that wants to move beyond the capitalist neoliberal police state. Their extremist posturing is an affective, rhetorical, performative displacement of an absent politics.

It is tempting to just point out that liberals like her are blind to anyone's being oppressed if they are among the 'privileged'. But a deeper problem is that the liberal-left only thinks the figure of the social/political citizen/subject as 'oppressed'; that status alone counts.

It is a figure of evil, that done unawares by the seemingly innocent, who are 'privileged', and therefore, in the enticing short-circuit of the Manichaean left, 'oppressors'. Those who suffer less benefit, and those who benefit, oppress. The odd logic of this is rarely argued. But then the discourse is performative, and dissenters, made voiceless, can be branded with the very discourse we criticize.

We can unite against the police state, or just confess our sins, wanting nothing.