The Ugly Racism Of Teaching "White Fragility" -- And How It Harms Kids Of Color
In the New York Post, Rav Avora, a 19-year-old Vancouver, Canada, based writer, whose family is from India, writes:

My 15-year-old brother told me he is learning about the concept of "systemic racism" in his English class. His teacher instructed her students that white people in our society are privileged and people of color are marginalized and disadvantaged. She went on to divide the class into groups and told them to discuss "white fragility" -- the feeling of discomfort white people experience when forced to confront racial inequality.

But the lesson actually left my brother, one of five people of color in his class, feeling awkward and discomforted. What he had been raised to see as a trivial and unimportant trait -- the color of his skin -- was suddenly spotlighted and politically charged, and all his white classmates were implicitly being told to see him as different from them, and vice versa.

...In the wake of protests after the police killing of George Floyd, the influence of Robin DiAngelo's 2018 book "White Fragility" has spread far and wide. It has dominated Amazon and New York Times bestseller lists. It has been discussed on late-night TV, in workplace diversity seminars, and now even in children's classrooms. Seattle Public Schools held training for teachers in which they were told the US is a "race-based white-supremacist society" and white teachers must "bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgment of [their] thieved inheritance," according to documents recently obtained by journalist Christopher Rufo.

This summer, KIPP schools -- the network of free, open-enrollment college-prep schools in low-income communities in America -- abandoned their classic slogan "Work Hard, Be Nice" because it "supports the illusion of meritocracy," which "is not going to dismantle systemic racism."

...The most troubling aspect of the White Fragility doctrine -- and the broader "anti-racist" movement -- is that race is considered the defining feature of human experience. The opening words of DiAngelo's book encapsulate her reductionist philosophy: "I'm a white woman." DiAngelo seems to see the world through an anachronistic black-and-white television set from the 1940s. Whites and minorities live in two separate, irreconcilable dimensions. Complexity and nuance are alien concepts. The best whites can do is become baptized in DiAngelo's anti-racist program of eternal guilt and atonement.

...DiAngelo paints western society as more akin to the racial caste system in India -- in which darker skinned people are rendered "untouchable" and lighter skinned people are seen as superior Brahmins -- rather than one of the most inclusive and progressive cultures on earth. Her belief that "individualism," "objectivity" and "rationalism" are pillars of "whiteness" is functionally indistinguishable from a Ku Klux Klan member's white supremacist handbook. Both progressive "anti-racists" and those we would conventionally define as "racist" see people as members of racial tribes rather than as individuals with unique circumstances, values and merits.

One of the worst things you can tell young people of color is that they are fundamentally different from their white counterparts and they are powerless victims in a system that is built to limit their success.

...Martin Luther King once wrote that "the important thing about a man is not the color of his skin or the texture of his hair but the texture and quality of his soul." By today's perverse standards, King's sentiment would be considered racist in itself -- antithetical to the progressive pursuit of "racial justice." But, until we re-route to a more humanistic approach, grounded in respect for the common qualities that bind us all, we will continue to be stratified along racial lines. And my brother and my sister will not grow up believing that they are equal members of society or that they can fully flourish within it.

via ifeminists