"Neo-Racism" Is The Perfect Term To Describe The Reality Of So-Called "Anti-Racism"
Rav Arora writes in Canada's Globe & Mail about race grifter Robin DiAngelo's new book, which veers into the self-help genre. (He used the term "neo-racist" in a tweet about his piece, though, unfortunately, not in the piece itself.):

Diversity training expert Robin DiAngelo has targeted a growing demographic of socially conscious readers with her new anti-racist self-help book Nice Racism - an expanded iteration of her international bestselling White Fragility.

...DiAngelo's core ideas of rejecting individualism (which "upholds the myth of meritocracy" and thereby the "superiority of those at the top") and viewing each other primarily through the lens of race has permeated borders and entered Canadian life. Earlier this year, released documents from Global Affairs Canada revealed diplomats and other federal employees are taught that "individualism," "colour-blindness," and "objectivity" are "pillars" of white supremacy - arguments DiAngelo lays out in her first book.

In the current, polarized political zeitgeist, white progressives have committed to fighting systemic racism and acknowledging their racial blind spots. However, rather than addressing real racial and economic inequities, DiAngelo promotes solutions that are far more regressive than progressive.

DiAngelo opens Nice Racism with an anecdote from her college days when she was having dinner with a Black couple. She confesses to having spent very little time with Black people at that point in her life, and in that encounter felt compelled to signal her racial openness, leading her to spend the whole dinner exposing her family's history of racism: "I shared every racist joke, story, and comment I could remember my family ever making..." "The couple seemed uncomfortable" she notes, later acknowledging the "racial harm" she "inflicted."

At a time when our culture is increasingly intolerant of past mistakes, DiAngelo's confession of her view of Black people as fundamentally racialized beings operating in a different social matrix is commendable. However, DiAngelo - committed to promoting racial harmony - takes all the steps in the wrong direction from this starting point, promoting racial essentialism, self-segregation and an ultimately dehumanizing form of condescension towards racial minorities, which she seems to regard as a homogeneous group that would, without exception, benefit from her gestures of help.

Her stated mission in the book is to help white people to stop individualizing themselves and instead identify as a collective mass of unearned privilege and historical guilt. "Suspending individuality for white people is a necessary interruption to our denial of collective advantage," she writes. She urges her readers to form "white affinity" groups - self-segregated spaces for white people to discuss and reflect on how they commit daily racial harm. Concerningly, DiAngelo does not understand the dangers of encouraging such racial tribalism and universally placing whites at the top of our social hierarchy. Though with entirely different intentions, it is this same group division that real white supremacists such as David Duke thrive on. They too reduce everyone to a racial essence and believe in white superiority - and thankfully they are pushed to the margins of society.

...Instead of acknowledging the cascading complexity of race relations today - where Indigenous communities and Black communities in the inner-city continue to suffer from unequal opportunity but many within South Asian and Middle Eastern communities, for example, exceedingly prosper - DiAngelo paints broad brush strokes, dividing the diverse human race into an inflexibly oppressive "white" caste and powerless, victimized "people of color." In DiAngelo's paradigm, prejudice and injustice - as systemic as the legacy of residential schools or as individual as a racist comment made by a white classmate (as I have experienced) - are obscured by these broad colour-coded stereotypes where minorities are invariably oppressed and "all white people are racist."

Transcendence of one's identity is a core theme in a number of recent self-help books - from Jay Shetty's Think Like a Monk to Russell Brand's Revelation - but DiAngelo's goal in Nice Racism is the exact opposite: to reify, stereotype and fixate on one's identity. Her explicitly stated project is that of "racial enlightenment," for race is the centre of human experience, according to DiAngelo - her most fatal misconception.