Moonbat Author Asks Her Fellow White People To Think About Race

Don’t take the brown acid.

You’re white. You’re educated and open-minded. You’re a good person! And you’re anything but a racist. Right?

You don’t care if someone is pink, purple or polka-dotted. In fact, you were raised to not even see color.

And you need to stop, Robin DiAngelo says. Stop saying things like that, for they are completely insulting. Human beings aren’t purple or polka-dotted, and we should see color.

Doing so is one of the first steps white people can take toward improving race relations, according to DiAngelo, a white, Seattle-based speaker and trainer who focuses on racial justice, and whose third book, “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism,” was released June 26.

I sought DiAngelo out — and read her new book — because I have had my own struggles with racism.

A year ago, I wrote a column about Columbia City that implied the historically black community only hit the map when a Pagliacci Pizza and Rudy’s Barber Shop moved in. I apologized, and have made it my mission to understand that whiteness is something I wear every day. It influences how I interact with the world.

I learned from DiAngelo’s book that my biases began when I was born white. From there, I was raised with a privilege that I never earned, but that came from biological fate, and generations of oppression and segregation — some forced, and some inherent. It is my responsibility to deconstruct those biases.

I don’t even think about my race, DiAngelo said, while people of color are reminded of it every day, be it with slights, discrimination or abuse. They pay for it with stress, health problems and even early death. (The death rate for African Americans was generally higher than whites for heart diseases, stroke, cancer, asthma and diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control.) All this while being asked to explain to white people what they can do to make things better.

And if they try to explain, well, most times well-meaning white people challenge them with talk of polka dots. They get defensive, angry, afraid or go silent — reinforcing the “white equilibrium,” which gets us nowhere.

That’s white fragility.

“Most white people cannot answer the question, ‘What does it mean to be white?’ with any depth or complexity,” DiAngelo said. “(White people) are not raised to see ourselves in racial terms, and bring that inability to answer that question to the table with us.

“And people of color know that (white people) can’t answer that question, that we have no awareness of ourselves as racial beings,” she continued. “That’s part of what they have to navigate with us. If I have no idea how my race shapes me, I am probably not going to be open to any feedback about how your race shapes you. And so we end up minimizing and invalidating them.”

So ask yourself, DiAngelo says: When was the last time you had a person of color at your dinner table? When did you risk “ruining dinner” by challenging a relative who made a racist comment, when the comment itself should do that on its own? And are you aware of the ways in which your whiteness has made your life so easy that the color of your skin barely crosses your mind?

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