U Conn Paying ‘White Fragility’ Author $20,000 to Train School Administrators

U Conn Paying ‘White Fragility’ Author $20,000 to Train School Administrators

Social justice and bias training is becoming an industry within higher education, and as this story shows, big money is involved.

Robby Soave writes at Reason:

UConn Will Pay White Fragility Author Robin DiAngelo $20,000 To Train School Administrators

The antiracism consultant Robin DiAngelo is having quite the summer. Her 2018 book, White Fragility, shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list after the death of George Floyd brought renewed public attention to racial issues.

She has also come under considerable and well-deserved criticism for her suffocatingly racialized worldview, which reduces every person to a color and posits that their interactions with people outside their race will necessarily be fraught and painful. John McWhorter, a professor of linguistics at Columbia University, called White Fragility a “racist tract” that “diminishes black people in the name of dignifying us.” His was one of many negative reviews to come DiAngelo’s way this year. A New York Times article pointed out the absurdity of one of the central tenets of white fragility training: that positive traits like hard work, individualism, and valuing the written word are characteristics of white culture.

You might think such strongly expressed concerns about her underlying outlook and method would prompt a university to think twice about hiring DiAngelo to train its staff. In most other circumstances, university officials would denounce and flee from a book described as a “racist tract”; Tulane recently canceled a talk by an author whose clearly anti-racist book was unfairly accused of being racially harmful.

But this fall, the University of Connecticut plans to send four dozen top administrators to a three-day workshop where they will study antiracism under DiAngelo’s tutelage. For her services, the author will be paid $20,000.

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