How did Robin DiAngelo get away with it for so long?

To see how debased ‘progressives’ have become, behold Robin DiAngelo stumping up 30 bucks in ‘reparations’ to an African-American gent. It happens in Matt Walsh’s new film, Am I Racist?, a Borat-style mockumentary that sends up race grifters. Walsh interviews DiAngelo while disguised as a self-hating hipster cracker: ponytail, cheap specs, lame blazer. He brings on his producer, Ben, a man of ethnic-minority heritage. He offers Ben cash, as a small gesture of white regret for the ‘400 years of oppression’ Ben’s people have experienced in America. He invites Ms DiAngelo to do likewise. She’s reluctant, but she does it – she skulks over to her purse, fishes out 30 dollars, and hands it to the black man. ‘That’s all the cash I have’, she says, in pained tones.

If one image could capture the moral depravity of the woke left, the weird mix of self-hate and self-love that fuels this new hyper-racial activist class, it’s this. This spectacle of the famed author of such poppycock as White Fragility mournfully handing cash to a young black fellow, who of course is in on the ruse. This vision of a wealthy white liberal giving money to a black man as a kind of financial atonement for ‘white-supremacist systems’, as Walsh comically puts it. It’s a modern version of Indulgences, when the rich would give money to the Catholic Church in order to reduce the punishments they had to suffer for their sins. ‘Here’s 30 bucks, now forgive my whiteness’, DiAngelo is effectively saying.

To be fair, she was somewhat pressured into giving Ben money. ‘I think reparations is like a systemic dynamic and approach’, she initially says when Walsh invites her to compensate Ben for the crimes of white supremacy. Yet all it takes for DiAngelo to go dollar-hunting is Walsh’s utterance of the delicious line that we must allow ‘ourselves to be uncomfortable’. Modern liberals love being uncomfortable. Thirty dollars for the thrill of feeling like shit for being white? Bargain! But here’s the thing: even before raiding her purse for Ben, DiAngelo happily issued him a grovelling apology from honkies everywhere. ‘On behalf of myself and my fellow white people, I apologise’, she said. ‘It is not you, it is us. As long as I’m standing, I will do my best to challenge [white supremacy].’

First of all, speak for yourself. I had no hand in white supremacy, so I won’t be apologising for it. In fact, my ancestors toiled for centuries under the yoke of a racist empire – where’s my 30 dollars? Second of all – have you ever seen anything as cringe as a rich white intellectual doing the patrician liberal head-tilt as she pleads for forgiveness for the transgressions of her race? It’s white guilt on steroids. It’s performative self-flagellation that might be less bloody than the self-whipping of certain Shia Muslims but is equally unhinged. It’s confirmation that what calls itself ‘anti-racism’ these days is no such thing: DiAngelo-style white repentance for black suffering rehabilitates racial thinking, rather than defeating it, returning white people and black people alike to the prison of historical determinism.

Worse, Walsh’s sting on DiAngelo captures the secret vanity of liberal self-hatred. Behind all the showy self-loathing lurks a self-regard that would make Narcissus blush. In denigrating her ‘race’ – ‘It is not you, it is us’ – DiAngelo is in fact honouring herself. She’s singling herself out as an enlightened white, a good white. ‘As long as I’m standing…’, she says, positioning herself as a borderline messianic figure who might hold back the tide of her own race’s bovine bigotries. This is the irony of the white shame that is so à la mode in cultural circles: it hides a new species of white pride, where educated whites fancy themselves as morally superior to both unlearned white people and pained black people. The former they must enlighten, the latter they must repair.

DiAngelo is licking her wounds following her encounter with Walsh. His film is clearly designed ‘to humiliate and discredit anti-racist educators’, she said in a statement yesterday. ‘She couldn’t be more correct’, Walsh quipped on X. I think DiAngelo is feeling fragile – sorry, couldn’t resist – because she recognises her star has fallen. In fact it’s crashed to the ground. The woman who became famous, and rich, on the back of the BLM moment is now having her methods and ideas openly called into question. The woman whose book, White Fragility, graced the shelves of every luxurious pad in coastal America is now the butt of a million jokes online. And I have only one question: why did it take so long?

For years, DiAngelo was the darling of the capitalist and cultural elites. Her books – not only White Fragility but also Nice Racism – were lapped up by the boss class. Business bible Forbes included White Fragility in its list of books every boss should read if he or she wants to be a ‘more inclusive leader’. It was frequently used in workplace ‘diversity training’, too. Which is to say it was gleefully deployed by the managerial class to reprimand and re-educate white workers. Workplace divide-and-rule under the guise of ‘raising racial awareness’.

DiAngelo was paid eye-watering sums to tell other rich white folk about what a pox our ‘race’ is. She was given $12,750 to speak at a diversity forum at the University of Wisconsin, which, as the New York Post pointed out, was more than the $7,500 given to a black female speaker. She was paid $15,000 by Tulsa City County Library for a ‘fireside chat’ that took place over Zoom. Call me a hoary old socialist, but don’t libraries have better things to spend money on? Large-print books for pensioners, say, or play areas for kids? In that Tulsa speech, DiAngelo said white people will always be racist. Nothing better sums up the lunacy of the new elite than their willingness to pay thousands of dollars to be told they’re scum. Sex workers would do it for less.

DiAngelo’s output was always intellectually thin and morally suspect. ‘All white people’, she said, ‘receive, absorb and are influenced by the racist messages continually circulating across the society we live in’. Here, she simply replaced the old racial infantilisation of black people with a new racial infantilisation of white people. Where racialists once viewed ‘low IQ’ black people as uniquely susceptible to natural or cultural messaging, the new racialists view white people in the same way. Replacing moral panics about black deviance with moral panics about white immorality, going from depicting black people as an anti-social scourge to depicting white people as perma-racist ‘fragile’ freaks, simply overlays one form of racial fatalism with another.

Now, finally, DiAngelo’s racialism is coming unstuck. Not only is there Walsh’s comic baiting, but also she’s been accused of plagiarising the work of minority authors in her doctoral thesis. Even liberal papers that once gushed over her – hello, Guardian – are raising questions. It’s good to see. Personally, I’m pleased when anyone who engages in racial politics is critiqued in the public square. And yet, it feels like it’s been a long time coming.

Yes, there have been some solid critiques of her work over the years, including from that inimitable double act of social wisdom, John McWhorter and Glenn Loury, and from observers like Matt Taibbi. Hell, I even did my bit to call her out when she had the misfortune to find herself on the same panel as me on live BBC television a full five years ago, in 2019. But institutionally – in universities, corporations, the MSM – she was given the easiest of easy rides. Which makes their current cries of ‘Hmm, is this lady talking nonsense?’ a little unconvincing.

The truth is that DiAngelo got away with her ‘grift’ because it chimed spectacularly well with the anti-humanism at large in today’s cultural and corporate elites. Her white-bashing both echoed and inflamed the self-hatreds of the modern bourgeoisie. Her identitarian determinism leant itself beautifully to the boss classes’ urge to use the politics of race to control workers. Her dusting down of racial moral panics – with ‘white fragility’ replacing ‘black violence’ – was manna from heaven for those for whom social control trumps every other social concern. And her invitation to educated whites to join her in confessing their racial failings and racial pities was giddily accepted by the movers and shakers of the coastal elites who’d been waiting decades for an opportunity to restore the moral authority they feared they had lost.

The success of DiAngelo’s poisonous racialism was an indictment of the whole establishment. Of its drift from enlightened, properly liberal thinking into the postmodern pit of neo-racialism. Who should feel more offended: the white folk who are branded racist and fragile by this new elite, or the black folk who are offered a few bucks to alleviate their historical pain? We should feel equally pissed off. Black people and white people could find great common cause in opposing this top-down racialism that dehumanises us all. Let’s cross the ‘colour line’ and tell DiAngelo and her dwindling band of acolytes where to stick it.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy