[wpietri]

If you have studied America's history of race, you give very little indication.

You then shift your objection to modern activism. I think you're also wrong about its aims and methods. Since offering you resources on the previous topic didn't seem to prompt much but a change of topic, so I won't bother here.

I suggested you immerse yourself in America's history and present of race to understand America's present situation because you said you couldn't fathom that situation. That you now disdain the details as "minutia" [sic] goes a long way to explaining not only why you can't fathom it, but why you probably never will. Your choice, of course, but you shouldn't expect anybody to take your wilful ignorance as somehow meaningful.

I'll again suggest you read DiAngelo's book on white fragility, though, as she covers a lot of the points you explicitly raise here.

[axlprose]

Forgot to respond to this particular point:

> I think you're also wrong about its aims and methods.

I once again very well might be, but I should highlight the fact that "good intentions" alone are not enough to produce beneficial results, and my statements about peoples' aims were to reflect the mismatch between many of these peoples' intentions and the practical outcomes of their actions.

I recommend looking into the work of Paul Bloom to see the arguments for why such endeavors tend not to work out, and to get an idea of the possible implications of relying too heavily on methods/ideologies whose central goals tend to revolve around empathy and good intentions.

[axlprose]

> That you now disdain the details as "minutia" [sic] goes a long way to explaining not only why you can't fathom it, but why you probably never will.

It could be that, or it could be that I simply disagree philosophically with the entire premise, and opt instead to take a broader scale look at the dynamics involved. Surely you can acknowledge that would lead to the same outcome, and you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell the difference without looking for it; just as surely as you wouldn't be able to immediately deduce the cause of a fire simply from observing the fact that something is on fire.

If these theories were simply lenses for literary analyses of history that resulted in something akin to movie reviews, then it wouldn't be a big problem, but people like yourself seem to be holding up these philosophically unsound theories as "truths". And all this simply because these ideas are promoted by academics, despite them originating from questionable fields of social science that have suffered the most from the ongoing replication crisis and publication bias. Racial politics have always been justified by "credible" sources in the past, whether it be from biologists or theologians, so I don't see why modern sociologists would be any different.

There's a relevant saying that goes "the map is not the territory", and it implies that there are serious consequences when you start believing that your map is literally an accurate description of reality. Similarly, the saying "all models suck, but some are more useful than others" also applies here, except I'm failing to see the use of this particular model of 'white fragility' and the 'progressive stack', because if anything, it seems to have mostly served to drive racial tensions in this country to an all-time high, and most of it only within the last decade.

If we start finding "white fragility" an acceptable concept, what's to stop anyone from claiming "black/hispanic/asian/etc fragility" later? The problem is that the whole idea is founded upon things that aren't philosophically rigorous enough to prevent it from devolving into a slippery slope, and history has shown that murphy's law is very applicable in these cases. For example, what if I were to frame what's happening here as you "whitesplaining" to an oppressed minority, and that in reality you just can't handle the idea of being wrong because of your own "white fragility"? Would that not simply foment strong feelings of resentment in you, because it implies that you're simply belittling my views because you unconsciously view me as being part of an inferior race? If everything else I've read here goes, I'd think that interpretation would actually be perfectly valid. And if that pattern happened enough times, soon enough my own race would be labeled as "fragile", because that would be a perfectly natural human response to feeling attacked. Luckily, I don't feel inclined to label you a racist here, but realize that this is a power that's completely and arbitrarily under my control, and has been granted to me in this country simply because of the way I was born.

> I'll again suggest you read DiAngelo's book on white fragility, though, as she covers a lot of the points you explicitly raise here.

I watched the talk you linked from her originally, and I found it completely lacking in rigorous explanations. I'm a personality psychology researcher myself, so from my perspective, the whole argument hand-waves away too many individual psychological phenomena/dynamics (actually, worse, she doesn't even cite/reference any to build up her theory), and doesn't seem to propose any falsifiable claims, nor did it even seem to make any cases for its explanatory power at all either. It rather reminded me a lot of astrology: a lot of speculation and projection of ambiguous grand theories onto observable entities, to "explain"/predict various mysterious phenomena in the world. Instead of elaborating about why or how the worldview is derived, she just plainly asserted "this is how the world works" with no justification or possible alternative explanations whatsoever. If that kind of research doesn't scream "replication crisis", I'm not sure what does. As a "scientist of color", this strikes me as pure pseudoscience.

And this isn't even getting into the fact that she seemingly can't help but speak for the views of us "people of color" in completely warped terms. Not everyone that isn't white thinks about (or wants to think about) white people in racial terms, nor attribute all their flaws to their skin color. She literally promotes viewing minorities as harboring resentment, and prejudiced, bigoted thoughts, like it's just our natural state because we're non-white, as if it's some kind of casual fact. Yet she simultaneously claims to "not speak for all of humanity". That is incredibly disgusting.

I'll check out her book anyway, if only to try and understand it the same way I tried to understand Mein Kampf, but my expectations are even lower now after having watched that talk.

[wpietri]

It could be all sorts of things. But given your absurdly voluble dodging of points, and give that you're now on to "the anti-racists are the real Nazis", I think stick with my previous understanding.