Robin DiAngelo is the self-proclaimed expert on the evils of “whiteness” and pulls in huge amounts of money for pontificating on how it oppresses everyone who isn’t white.
In this Minding the Campus essay, Professor Alexander Riley subjects her claims (they don’t even rise to the level of arguments) to serious scrutiny and finds them to be entirely empty.
He writes, “With each of these claims, it turns out, DiAngelo is not offering any useful commentary on whether or not whites have accurate beliefs about how racial categorization and identity work in societies like ours. She is simply lamenting what she considers the unfortunate fact that there exist at least some white people who do not share her ideas on race and how it works.”
DiAngelo must be omniscient to know what every white person really believes regarding race. We know that’s not true, so why accept anything she says?
Suppose that DiAngelo claimed that “all Italians regard opera as the highest art form.” People would scoff and say that nobody could know that, and in fact it’s plainly false. And it wouldn’t avail DiAngelo anything to follow up with something like, “If you dispute my statement, it only proves that you don’t understand Italianness.” DiAngelo’s schtick wouldn’t work on any topic except race, where so many people’s brains have been short-circuited by decades of mind-numbing rhetoric.