Robin DiAngelo is an author, academic, and lecturer who specializes in antiracism. Her work gained attention following the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement, and she became a celebrated speaker and subject matter expert on white privilege. After the May 2020 death of George Floyd, her book, White Fragility, rocketed to the top of the bestseller list.
For DiAngelo, racism is not merely a set of negative attitudes about minorities—it is more akin to a spiritual illness that afflicts virtually all white people. Luckily for DiAngelo, she is selling the cure, in the form of her books, lectures, and other speaking engagements. The work is lucrative: the University of Connecticut, for instance, paid her $20,000 to teach at a seminar, and she reportedly charges between $10,000 and $15,000 for a few hours of work. (Or $320 per phone call!)
Despite many schools, local governments, nonprofits, and even some corporations throwing sacks of money at her, DiAngelo has accumulated some detractors. Columbia University's John McWhorter pilloried White Fragility as evincing a "dehumanizing condescension" toward black people. The Washington Post's Carlos Lozada accused DiAngelo of employing circular logic to argue "any dissent from White Fragility is itself white fragility." Nice Racism, the sequel to White Fragility that no one asked for, was similarly panned.
"There's a sense of deep internal contradiction running through DiAngelo's writing that emerges from such discrepancies and which is at odds with the wealth she has accrued as an authority on anti-racism," wrote The Guardian's Ashish Ghadiali. "It points towards the limitations of a worldview that, however well intentioned, pushes us deeper into the silos of ethnic identity."
That's all a preamble to these astonishingly ignorant remarks made by DiAngelo during a recent podcast appearance. Watch below:
"The perfect convergence of white supremacy, patriarchy…"
Robin DiAngelo explains that Michelangelo's Creation of Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling is the "single image" she uses to "capture the concept of white supremacy."
She also misidentifies Adam as David. pic.twitter.com/qHpXjrYBTg
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) February 6, 2024
DiAngelo describes Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, in which God gifts Adam with the spark of life, as the "perfect convergence of white supremacy and patriarchy." Of course, she fails to correctly identify Adam, admitting that she doesn't know who that figure is and wrongly guesses that it's David. You might expect that a renowned antiracism scholar who has singled out one of the most famous paintings in world history as the pinnacle of white supremacy would be passably familiar with its subject—but no.
Given that she doesn't understand the first thing about the painting, it should come as no surprise that her overall analysis of The Creation of Adam is simplistic. DiAngelo sees a white god reaching out and touching a white man and declares it "white supremacy and patriarchy." But art appreciators who have contemplated the work for more than five seconds have found other interpretations. Some believe the red curtain that surrounds God is meant to symbolize a uterus and the birthing process, a decidedly non-patriarchal interpretation. Another theory—one that features prominently in the first season finale of HBO's Westworld—is that Michelangelo painted the shape of the human brain, perhaps suggesting that what we perceive as god is actually our own consciousness, originating from within the human mind.
To blithely write-off The Creation of Adam as a prominent example of white supremacy is frankly insulting to humankind's collective intelligence. If private groups want to pay money to a so-called expert who has no idea what she's talking about, that's their problem—but taxpayers shouldn't have to subsidize the work she does for public schools and governments.
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