Below is a transcript of a segment from “Tucker Carlson Tonight” appearing June 24, 2020.
Tucker Carlson: Well the best-selling book in the country right now, in case you haven’t checked the rankings, is not a spy thriller. It’s not a young adult fantasy novel. It’s a short political book. It’s called “”White Fragility”.” Soon it may be required reading at your children’s school. It may be already. So what does it say?
We read it and we have a report after the break.
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The best-selling book in America last week wasn’t anything by JK Rowling. It was a tract called “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo. It’s a hit and not a small hit. “White Fragility” has sold so many copies that the paperback edition is out of stock on Amazon. Schools and companies across the country are ordering it in bulk.
Deloitte is pushing it, so is NBC and Harvard Business School. The CEO of American Airlines was recently photographed reading the book. This fall “White Fragility” is likely to be required reading at your children’s school. You may soon be told to study it on a corporate retreat. So it’s worth knowing what it is, what it’s about exactly.
We read the book and we’ll sum it up for you in four words: white people are racist. Not just racist white people: all white people, whether they’re six years old or a hundred years old. All of them are by definition racist. They are racist because they are white. Only white people are racist. No one else is.
Robin DiAngelo tells people this for a living. She’s a professional anti-racist educator. She shuttles between schools and boardrooms telling people if their DNA make them evil. She makes big money doing this. Last year, for example, the University of Kentucky, a publicly funded University, paid DiAngelo twelve thousand dollars for two hours of this message. The school could have used that money to give poor black kids an education but instead they handed the cash?—that’s more than a third of what the average American makes in a year?—to a not very bright white lady to tell them they’re racists. In other words, Robin DiAngelo has a very good gig.
Of course, not everyone likes her message. Telling people they’re racists is fine if they actually are racists. But what if they’re not racists, and most people in this country are not.
Well, let’s see, how would you like it if someone called you a child molester or a wife beater? You probably wouldn’t like it very much. In fact you could lose your job for that; you could lose your friends; you could even lose your family. You might feel pretty threatened by that accusation.
Ah-ha, says Robin DiAngelo, that means you’re guilty of racism! Feeling threatened is definitive proof that you’re a racist. You’re defensive: you’ve got white fragility, hence the title of the book.
By the way, if you’re not threatened when someone publicly denounces you as racist, that is also proof that you’re a racist. Either way, my friend, you are a racist. Logic is clearly not Robin DiAngelo’s specialty. Neither is literate writing or clear thinking. She is a complete and total idiot. That’s one thing you learn by the end of her book.
And yet our leaders treat Robin DiAngelo with great respect. They think she’s a genius. That tells you everything about them and also the moment we’re living in. The dumbest people suddenly have the most power.
In the book, DiAngelo goes on to make a number of other ridiculously false claims. laughably false. Some of them are so obviously the opposite of what is actually true you’ve got to imagine she was grinning as she typed the manuscript. “Will they believe this?” Yes.
In America, DiAngelo writes, quote, “we are socially penalized for challenging racism.” Really? Where, and how? The country the rest of us live in the United States of America hates racism. Hating racism is effectively our national religion. Every organization we have is organized to stamp it out. Commit racism and the FBI shows up.
Come on, it’s just too absurd to be real. But Robin DiAngelo isn’t really trying to convince anyone. The real point of her book is to defeat and demoralize you. DiAngelo claims that everything you really want, everything that people of every color really want, in every society in the world, is a sign of white racism.
You want to live in a safe neighborhood? You’re racist for that. You want to send your kids to a decent school? You’re a racist for that. All of your dreams are racism and the only way to atone for this racism is to give up those dreams, to abandon your aspirations, and make sure that your family lives a much worse life.
For white people, DiAngelo writes, quote, “discomfort is necessary and important.” Needless to say, DiAngelo does not address the millions of white people in this country who already live in perpetual discomfort because they are impoverished. She doesn’t mention the entire counties in rural America where virtually no adult man has a full-time job, where there are no dentists, because no one can afford to go to the dentist.
Robin DiAngelo has never met people like that. No doubt she would hate them if she did. Instead DiAngelo’s book is effectively addressed to entitled urban professionals as silly and frivolous and self-loathing as she is: her friends.
In DiAngelo’s world, economics play no role in anything. They don’t matter. Everyone she knows has a high-status job and a secure job. They’re not worried about unemployment. They don’t care about income inequality. They’re on the right side of it. These aren’t problems for them.
Remember, DiAngelo herself gets paid $6,000 an hour to talk. She’s not concerned about paying the rent. And in fact, DiAngelo explains at one point, worrying about economic injustice is just another symptom of, brace yourself here, racism, of “White Fragility.” Get it? Maybe you’re starting to understand why corporate America absolutely loves this book. Why? Because Robin DiAngelo absolves them of their crimes.
Apple and the health insurers and the credit card companies get off scot-free because the real problem Robin DiAngelo tells them is white racism, and what a relief that is for them to learn. 6,000 dollars an hour is a small indulgence to pay for that kind of forgiveness. Thank you, Reverend DiAngelo, we appreciate the house call.
In sum, “White Fragility” is an utterly ridiculous book. It’s ironies are so profound they make your head spin. A book about racism that is far more aggressively racist than anything Louis Farrakhan has ever written. A book that claims to side with black people but instead patronizes them and demeans them like their children. A book about systemic injustice that is in fact itself a sly defense of the very people perpetuating the worst injustices in our society.
Everything about “White Fragility” is poisonous garbage, and it’s not an overstatement. And that will be obvious to you the second your kids bring it home from school. Or the moment the corporate HR director in your office lays a copy of it on your desk. And you should say so when that happens.
Don’t be passive. Speak up loudly. It is your right to disagree with Robin DiAngelo. What she says is wrong, it’s crazy, it’s destructive, and it ferments hatred.
We are Americans. We’re allowed to do that. The second we are forced to accept the premises of “White Fragility,” we won’t be Americans.
By the way, the main reason that a crackpot race tract like “White Fragility” and many books like it spread so rapidly in this country is because of American higher education. It is filled with rot and that rot spreads. Even now our public K through 12 schools are woke propaganda mills promoting racial division and hatred of the country that makes them possible.
Adapted from Tucker Carlson’s monologue from “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on June 24, 2020.
[The above is a transcript of a segment appearing on Tucker Carlson Tonight on June 24, 2020. The views and opinions expressed on Tucker Carlson Tonight are solely those of Tucker Carlson and his show, and do not express the views and opinions of the Barefoot Accountant, William Brighenti, or Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC.}