It's a Trap! Robin DiAngelo's Kafkaesque Nightmare
The logic behind white fragility has Franz Kafka rolling in his grave...with laughter
After the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, many people were confused about the state of race relations in America. It seemed like so much progress had been made, yet there was still so much dissatisfaction and anger.
During that summer, people began turning to the academics who had been studying these matters for many years. One of the most famous is Robin DiAngelo, whose book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, experienced skyrocketing sales in 2020. Unsure about the state of affairs at the time, the confused masses rushed to purchase her esteemed sociological analysis to find out what was wrong with them. And the diagnosis was surprisingly simple: white people.
The theory behind white fragility is essentially that white people are racist, and that they do not want to confront this disturbing reality about their nature. Their racism is in full display when they try to argue that they are not in fact racist. Declaring innocence of racism is just a cover of what truly lies within. Rather than fight the urge to defend oneself as a non-racist, white people should just accept the fact that they are in fact racist.
At the root of this theory is the pernicious fallacy that some like to call the Kafka Trap.
In 1915, the prolific author Franz Kafka wrote a strange tale called The Trial. In it, the main character is caught in a nightmarish dilemma. He is arrested for some unknown reason and is brought to trial. The authorities accuse the man of committing a serious crime, but they won’t tell him what it is. The more he assures of his innocence, the more convinced they become of his guilt.
No matter what he does, the accused is pronounced guilty of a crime he didn’t commit. If he defends himself, it is a sign of his guilt. If he pleads guilty, well then of course he is guilty. He is trapped.
This pernicious fallacy and it’s variants are key weapons in the rhetorical arsenal of the social justice warrior. If you try to attribute the cause of some racial disparity to something other than racism, you are a racist. If you fail to voice support for the social justice movement, you are complicit in spreading injustice (“Silence is Violence”). And if you try to defend yourself as being not racist, well, then you just don’t comprehend your own white fragility.
Should you encounter a Kafka Trap, probably the best thing to do is to not engage. It’s called a trap for a reason. As soon as you start defending yourself against an accusation, you have walked into the trap. If you can, expose the accuser for their use of the fallacy, but otherwise, stay away.
Kafka was known for his dark sense of humor. He purportedly laughed uncontrollably while reading excerpts of The Trial to his friends. After all, in what kind of twisted nightmare would people be judged in such a manner?
Yet here we are, where Kafka‘s nightmare scenario regularly plays out in today’s public discourse, from nonsensical social media rants, to scholarly bestsellers like White Fragility. The real world implications are consequential. Many people today feel guilty and depressed for a crime they’ve never committed. Even more people have had to attend diversity trainings at work, where grifters like DiAngelo can make up to $40,000 per session.
Racism is a problem that will never go away completely. Society will yield unfair outcomes among different demographics as it always has. But if we want to alleviate much of the unfairness in this world, we cannot ignore the incredible amount of progress in civil liberties that has been made over the past two centuries. By solely pinning the causes of social ills and racial disparities on racism, we rule out consideration of other potential causes and their solutions.
And the potential causes are many. Labor laws, zoning restrictions, over-criminalization, corrupt legal systems, the welfare state, and yes, culture (gasp!) all play a role. Rather than brush these issues off as red herrings that distract from the One True Problem, we ought to seriously discuss how they affect our society and how we can devise workable solutions.
This is the third of a four part series.
Part 1: Check Your Assumptions