“They deserve to be cast into hell; so that divine justice never stands in the way, it makes no objection against God’s using his power at any moment to destroy them. .”

– Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”

“lol white tears” – black twitter

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Broad

In the 18th Century, the Christian world that had been sucker-punched by the Enlightenment found new footing. Known as the Great Awakening, the first one mind you, a religious revival began to sweep across the Anglo world as a new fervency rekindled its own fire and regained its sense of urgency to remind people of the fallen state of the world and themselves. In the midst of this, a Yankee theologian from East Windsor, Connecticut, approached the pulpit of his Congregationalist parishioners and began to speak. He did not scream. He did not bleat. He did not pound a Bible and deliver a sermon with sulfur-laden pathos. Jonathan Edwards merely explained calmly, methodically, and point-by-point that “there is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God.” That sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is a classic piece of American theology but its legacy may lie more outside the shuttered doors of hollowed churches and inside the dark Satanic degree mills that churn out Human Resource representatives by the thousands every year.

When I first started to write this, Michigan had only just received its first proper snow of the season, a queerly late phenomenon, and with that January snow it carried with it thoughts of whiteness and death. It seemed fitting then that on that first snowy weekend that I would finally finish a three month slog through the future classic of all freshman orientation classes, White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. Like Jonathan Edwards before her, DiAngelo will join that exalted class of American clerics for it will be through her that nothing will keep wicked whites at any one moment out of racism but the mere pleasure of the new gods.

Robin DiAngelo, it seems to me, is probably not a real person but more of a postmodern Prometheus, stitched together in a lab from the parts of lesser cat-ladies. One need only look at her bio to sense the gravitas of these credentials. She is “an academic, educator, and author working in the fields of critical discourse analysis and whiteness studies. She formerly served as a tenured professor of multicultural education at Westfield State University” and boasts of being a two-time recipient of “the Student’s Choice Award for Educator of the Year from the School of Social Work”. Most importantly, however, to the invisible executives of Globohomo, Inc., “DiAngelo has been a consultant and trainer for more than twenty years on issues of racial and social justice.”

You see, DiAngelo isn’t your run-of-the-mlll boring and square academic, hidden behind stacks of ancient tomes as she writes dissertations titled “The Neo-Kantian Perspective Of Stalin’s Five Year Plan And Its Implications In The Development of Queer Liberation Theory”. Oh no no no no, why lock one’s self up in the Ivory Tower So White when there’s workers to terrorize and checks to cash that Woke Capital is begging to write you.

You may have heard that White Fragility is an academic book. It is not. While you may scan the back of the book and find numerous questionable citations (the persistent problems of replicability and academia covering each other’s tracks), to actually read the book is to discover that DiAngelo’s extra fat pamphlet reads more like the diary of an oversocialized Congregationalist preacher. In page after page, DiAngelo recounts countless anecdotes of things-that-totally-definitely-happened where white employees resisted their company-mandated diversity seminars, the resistance being an insidious venom that DiAngelo calls “white fragility”. Among the personal anecdotes that DiAngelo expects you to take seriously about how unserious white people are about their inherent racism is a text conversation she had with another bourgeois friend of hers who found a black New Orleans neighborhood “sketchy” or the time that a German woman at one of her seminars insisted she wasn’t racist because as a little girl she saw the black American soldiers and thought they were so handsome (she fails to mention if this woman was blonde-haired and blue-eyed too).

I’m not making this up.

It’s in the book.

“I was working with a small group of white participants when a woman I will refer to as Eva stated that because she grew up in Germany, where she said there were no black people, she had learned nothing about race and held no racism. I pushed back on this claim by asking her to reflect on the messages she had received from her childhood about people who lived in Africa…She was furious and said she had been deeply offended by our exchange and did not ‘feel seen’…However, I also held to my challenge that growing up in Germany would not preclude her from absorbing problematic racial messages about black people. She countered by telling me that she had never even seen a black person ‘before the American soldiers came.’ And then when they did come, ‘all the German women thought them so beautiful that they wanted to connect with them.’ This was her evidence that she held no racism.”

With evidence like that it would seem fitting that Robin DiAngelo may be the most insisted upon academic currently stalking the halls of clickbait media.

But what even is white fragility?

White fragility is defined by DiAngelo as any attempt to deny racism or refusal to engage in correct racial dialogue that serves to further prop up the perceived institutional racism and inherent white supremacy of our present neoliberal capitalist society. Not sure if you have it? Why not take their handy-dandy quiz? Fittingly enough, one of the possible answers to how you’ve responded to being told you’re racist is “sought absolution”. Bless me xir, for I have sinned.

White Fragility, for the uninitiated, may be a term you only recently became acquainted with when you were called out for correcting the Sacred POC. Often used in conjunction with “white tears”, the history of “white fragility” begins with DiAngelo and the incestuous circles of social science pedagogy, filtered down into Tumblr microblogs run by white fourteen-year-olds and their obese woke idols, and then filtered back up academia and the media industrial complex. What was once niche and novelty becomes, as all things do in the culture of the last men, the morally-imperative mainstream.

These pet ideologies, always seriously unopposed, eventually reach their apotheosis in the form of college orientation books. Anyone who has been through these oxymoronic educational seminars knows that whatever the pet ideology that is currently in fashion, that will be the book that will be the required reading. Thousands of parents every year willingly surrender their young to penal re-education without the slightest curiosity as to what new programming will replace eighteen years of love and care. White Fragility will join those ranks, ensuring thousands of more young women hate their weak white fathers, if they even have such a thing. Such as it is in Dark Age America.

What’s interesting, however, is that this book isn’t for us. By “us” I mean the cadre of extremely online posters who chose Internet Racist as their MMORPG class and grind N-word threads one letter at a time. In fact, if you take that above quiz what you will find is that you may score as having very little white fragility or even none at all. It’s the funny little phenomenon of the far-right and the neoliberal left racing to see how much of the center they can destroy. The book is quite clearly designed for those who are apolitical or invested in having a managerial or bureaucratic role in the system, to break them on the spoked wheel of woke and render them pliable for further instruction, with the added benefit that those seeking status get to psychologically terrorize the American kulak.

The notion of progressive leftism as being a religion unto itself is not any kind of new observation. Colleges are the monasteries where neoliberalism’s vanguard have proper bona fides first burnished. The neoreactionary sphere has long called the present system we reside under the Cathedral due to its firm commitment to fashionable dogmas taken on faith and wishes while others have called the persistent inquisition of the left the “Church of No Salvation”. Where Christianity offers the road to salvation in faith, penance, and redemption, the left’s own inverted church offers only perpetual mortification and groveling with not an end in sight. What was once a rhetorical description of the left’s religiosity has now been fully embraced in White Fragility and been made more explicit.

Beyond the example of “seek absolution” in the quiz above, what you will find in the pages of the book itself is what it means to be “doing the work” of unpacking your own white supremacy. To quote from White Fragility:

“The final advice I offer is this: ‘Take the initiative and find out on your own.’ To break with the conditioning of whiteness–the conditioning that makes us apathetic about racism and prevent us from developing the skills we need to interrupt it–white people need to find out for themselves what they can do. There is so much excellent advice out there today–written by both people of color and white people. Search it out. Break with the apathy of whiteness, and demonstrate that you care enough to put in the effort.” (Emphasis mine).

Like all clerical bureaucracies, once one begins to don the robes of the magicians’ Higher Mysteries one changes their knowledge from the exoteric to the esoteric. In practice, this is meant to keep you perpetually off-kilter, to always be unable to challenge the decrees of these new clerics since it means that only they know what is truly going on and forcing more people to defer to them. At the same time though, they’ll fall back on platitudes like “It’s not my job to educate you”, partly because they really don’t know what they’re talking about, partly because doing so would give the game away, but also because it gives them a status over the uninitiated. It leaves the uninitiated vulnerable to be abused because their ignorance is on display, and they lack the time or ability to take the time and ingest the knowledge of their sacred tomes. Finally, it allows them to see who is worthy enough to eventually join them, who will have the constitution to prostrate and make eunuchs of themselves for this new religious order.

Where the soft-spoken Jonathan Edwardses of the world would calmly lay out the reasons for their congregation’s damnation and how one may even have a hope to escape such an eternal fate, these acolytes of the inverted age issue abusive missives behind cloak-and-dagger to keep people frantically searching for an absolution they will never find or receive. This is the reality of what must be called the post-totalitarian ideology, “a labyrinth of influence, repression, fear and self-censorship which swallows up everyone within it, at the very least by rendering them silent, stultified and marked by some undesirable prejudices of the powerful…”

I pondered for a long time what the value even was in reading a work like this. This is a problem that many in our circles run into where the thought of even trying to engage their ideas is as ludicrous as trying to engage someone who doesn’t believe in the correct shape of the earth. I realized that is the brilliance of what they do. Their entire body of work is based on exhaustion and avoidance, of nobody having any time for it and ceding more of the battlefield to a cavalcade of the aggrieved in cat-step formation. They thrive on dismissal because they aren’t even attacking us, they’re attacking the average people who were left behind or missed the memo.

I’ve sent excerpts of the book to those types of average people and I’ve heard the bewildered tones in their voices. Like a priest who knows his congregation all too well, DiAngelo knows and understands her mark. She takes such delight in abusing them, as can be seen when DiAngelo’s literary agent DMCA’d the screenshot I took of this anecdote she recounts:

“A cogent example of white fragility occurred during a workplace anti-racism training I co-facilitated with an inter-racial team. One of the white participants left the session and went back to her desk, upset at receiving (what appeared to training team as) sensitive and diplomatic feedback on how some of her statements had impacted several of the people of color in the room. At break, several other white participants approached me and my fellow trainers and reported that they had talked to the woman at her desk, and that she was very upset that her statements had been challenged. (Of course, “challenged” was not how she phrased her concern. It was framed as her being “falsely accused” of having a racist impact.) Her friends wanted to alert us to the fact that she was in poor health and “might be having a heart-attack.” Upon questioning from us, they clarified that they meant this literally. These coworkers were sincere in their feat that the young woman might actually die as a result of the feedback. Of course when news of the women’s potentially fatal condition reached the rest of the participant group, all attention was immediately focused back onto her and away from engagement with the impact she had on the people of color. As professor of social work Rich Vodde states, ‘If privilege is defined as a legitimization of one’s entitlement to resources, it can also be defined as permission to escape or avoid any challenges to this entitlement.’” (Emphasis mine.)

Bask in this. Bask in the indignation that the American kulak tried to escape from her NKVD interrogator.

I screenshot many books to provide commentary and have never been DMCA’d. I’m not the first person to do this. I will not be the last person to do this. I have never run into this issue before. That it happened in a book like White Fragility and that this specific passage was the one that was DMCA’d should speak their cognizance of just how fundamentally unlikeable they are. That they go hand-in-hand with the corporate structure is frankly no surprise. These incomprehensible and scaled-up power structures that require diversity indoctrinations are dependent upon the sniveling status-seekers and oversocialized psychopaths to maintain order and compliance and these are the roles that people like Robin DiAngelo and her sycophants are meant to fill-in. They’re meant to find nice, normal people, and abuse them of their own personal dignity, to ensure that there is not an ounce of rebellion left inside of the American worker. They are meant to be stretched on the rack of human resources, and such torture must be left in the hands of people all-too-eager to practice.

The error of these maltheistic annihilationists in the Church of No Salvation, when properly understood and taken apart, is that they want to make these people uncomfortable so that they can both abuse them for fun and profit but also create a few more ravenous acolytes of their eldritch cult. When you do not have the truth on your side, when everything you do is in the service of your own noble lie, the only warriors you’ll ever find on your side are fanatics, and like the blood tax paid by Christian sons under the Ottoman’s devshirme system, it will be rendered unwillingly. There is no hope or salvation or love in the prostration they expect, only willful subjugation.

This will not be a pleasant thing to say, but this may ultimately be necessary. People should be made uncomfortable. They should feel a little pain. The softness and false bravado of American society is inching towards its well-deserved collapse and at that moment the division will occur. Molon labia mindset and beer gut swagger will be put to the test and made to put-up or shut-up. The choice will be put forward for those who want to live and those who want to lie down and wait to die. This can never be a thing for those who do not love life and its truths, and want to see it prevail. The works of White Fragility provide that opportunity, to show them that there’s nowhere left to run to and no they’re never going to leave you or your children alone.

Read this, and read it to people who resist you like you’re Cassandra. Let them see just how damned they are, how much people like Robin DiAngelo want power and want power over them, how the foundational work for the next Inquisition is already being built, how voting for Donald Trump isn’t going to save them when they have to sit in on these diversity seminars led by women who aborted their only children and want to torture yours. Let them see Lovecraft’s twisted church ladies in all their ugliness and let them see how they spill out in these sermons of revenge. Make them open their eyes and stand by their side when they frantically clutch at you looking for answers. They need to understand that we don’t have the government, we don’t have academia, and we don’t even have the businesses. We have nothing and we are nothing. We have each other though, and that’s enough to start.

That which bonds together, clings together, will not be made fragile.