There’s an old syllogism used to describe desperate politicians: (1) We must do something; (2) This is something; (3) We must do this. In the wake of mass national demonstrations that followed George Floyd’s murder, many white people — including leaders of businesses, schools, and nonprofit organizations — have grasped for some concrete step they can take to redress systemic racism. They have found that something: the burgeoning anti-racism training industry, whose most famous theorist and practitioner is Robin DiAngelo, whose book White Fragility rocketed to the top of the New York Times best-seller list.

Daniel Bergner has a long profile of DiAngelo and her fellow anti-racism trainers in the New York Times. The story is far more devastating than it might appear at a casual glance. It reveals a business model spreading kooky, harmful, and outright racist ideas.

The anti-racism consulting industry does deserve both some sympathy and some credit. Its intention, to prod white Americans into more awareness of their own racism, is beneficent. And their premise that white people are often unaware of the degree to which racial privilege has enabled their success, which they can mistakenly attribute entirely to merit and effort, is correct. American society is shot through with multiple overlapping systems of racial bias — from exposure to harmful pollution to biased policing to unequal access to education to employment discrimination — that in combination sustain massive systemic inequality.

But the anti-racism trainers go beyond denying the myth of meritocracy to denying the role of individual merit altogether. Indeed, their teaching presents individuals as a racist myth. In their model, the individual is subsumed completely into racial identity.

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