By Steve Sailer
06/17/2021
From Michigan Public Radio:
Why all white people are racist, but can’t handle being called racist: the theory of white fragility
By DUSTIN DWYER • MAR 25, 2015
Robin DiAngelo was right out of college when she started thinking about it. She’d landed a job leading workshops on racism. And she met a man who became very angry, and pounded on a table. He said white people are the target of discrimination, white people can’t even find jobs anymore.
DiAngelo looked around the office and she saw nothing but white people, all of them with jobs.
“It was unnerving,” she says now. “It was like, ‘This is not rooted in any racial reality that is happening, in this room, in this workplace, or in this man’s life.’ And yet, these feelings are real. His rage is real. How do we do that?”
Meaning: How do white people see themselves as the victims of racism, when the world around them shows something totally different?
… Then, if someone comes along and talks about racism the way DiAngelo does — that racism is a system of oppression. That anyone can be prejudiced, but in America, only white people are racist. And, actually, all white people are racist because, as DiAngelo says:
“Racism comes out of our pores as white people. It’s the way that we are.”
As I wrote in Taki’s Magazine:
The Miasma Theory of White Racism
Steve SailerFebruary 17, 2021
Scientific-minded dissidents frequently compare today’s orthodoxy that the cause of whatever ails blacks is — and, indeed, must be — white racism to discarded scientific constructs such as phlogiston in chemistry and aether in physics. But the most informative comparison might be to the long, unfortunate hold of the miasma theory of disease on medical thought.
In 2021, the conventional wisdom is that while you almost never see white racism, it’s always out there somewhere, everywhere, ruining the lives of blacks, lowering their test scores and raising their murder rates. It’s as if white people implicitly exude a poison from their pores that harms only blacks, due to their being genetically different, although, as everyone also knows, genetic differences, like race, don’t exist. C’mon, man, follow the science!
Similarly, the history of miasma theory shows how resistant poor explanations can be to correction. The notion that malaria (Italian for “bad air”) and other diseases now known to be contagious were caused by poisonous emanations (or miasma — ancient Greek for “pollution”) was common (although not universal) from classical times until the later 19th century.
What exactly miasma was comprised of was not fully clear. It was usually assumed to come from rotting vegetation or dead bodies (which led to the growth in popularity of cremation in the 19th century), or perhaps from the breath of foul creatures like toads. In any case, air was held to be more dangerous at night.Disease was felt to proceed from impurity, corruption, and death. All agreed that smelly air was the most dangerous. That’s why doctors during the Black Death wore scary leather masks with birdlike beaks into which they stuffed sweet-smelling flowers and herbs to protect themselves from the death-dealing smells.
Miasma theory was not ridiculous. It tended to merely get the arrow of causation backward, much like The Establishment now believes that stereotypes cause blacks to behave badly rather than that black bad behavior leads to stereotypes. Similarly, the miasma theorists assumed that smells caused rot rather than vice versa.
… Of course, a fundamental difference between the miasma theory of disease and today’s belief in implicit and systemic intersectional racism is that the old-time doctors were against disease. Because they were on the side of humanity, the medical profession eventually swallowed its pride and dropped miasma theory.
In contrast, today’s exponents of the racism theory of black problems are not against racism in general, the way that doctors were ultimately against disease. Instead, they are just against racism, existent or nonexistent, toward blacks. To battle all the invisible racist emanations besieging blacks, they demand more racism against whites.
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