It isn’t real common that a controversial book gets
summarized by another writer. Jordan
Peterson summarized his own “12 rules”. No
one has done me that honor with my three “do ask do tell” books.
Izabella Hickle apparently has written these for a few
controversial books. I’ll briefly go
over her “Summary: White Fragility: Why It’s do Hard for White People to Talk
About Race”, 62 pages, ISBN 9798661267184, 12 chapters, paper.
First, as to the writing.
Sometimes it is hard to tell if she is restating what the white person
feels (as an assertion, in subjunctive mood, which is much easier to do in most
foreign languages than in English), or stating Diangelo’s prescriptions.
The sin of the white person is not their own decisions or
actions in the normal sense of individualized personal responsibility; it is the historical fact that they have unfairly
benefited from systemic racism hardwired into the economic and social system
and must now take responsibility to pay something back for this ancestral
wrong. Many examples include segregated schools, redlining real estate, and
especially police profiling, which seems to result from a mental reinforcement
of past ideas.
In Chapter 2 she does provide some interesting detail about
physical attractiveness, mentioning skin color, (scalp) hair texture, and eye
shape. It is not clear from what is
given whether she (or Robin) thinks it is “wrong” to refuse to date out of your
race (if you are white). One artifact on skin color; Caucasian skin is generally not as
thick. The only reason for the difference
in skin color is adaptation to distance from the equator. People who live with a lot of sunlight need
the pigment to protect them from too much ultraviolet light; people with less sunlight need to make Vitamin
D. The hair comment is interesting. Only whites normally (although not always
consistently) have significant differences in body hair between men and women,
as a secondary sexual characteristic. Hickle doesn’t mention that. I’ll find out if Robin did when I read her
book on Kindle (I couldn’t get hers in print, which is easier to follow; I did get Hickle’s in hardcopy.)
My main issue so far is proximity. I do live and work alone
and I don’t really have social situations where these issues come up.
I will review DiAngelo's full book (Kindle) on my featured Wordpress blog as soon as I finish it (next week)
There is one more book I don’t think has been mentioned here,
Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Anti-Racist”, 320 pages, One World Press, 2019.
There is also “Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism”, here, by Layla F. Saad,
258 pages, Sourcebooks, 2020, and this looks more like a personal instruction
manual when looked at on Amazon (mentioned in video). It reminds me of the Perry-Ellis "Do Ask Do Tell" workbooks on gay rights from the mid 1990s.
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