The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

by Andrew Doyle

In White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (2018), Robin DiAngelo rejects as ‘simplistic’ the notion that racism is best understood as ‘intentional acts of racial discrimination committed by immoral individuals’. Rather, racism is ‘a system’ or ‘a structure, not an event’. Furthermore, the ‘prejudice plus power’ formulation explains why the new puritans believe that only white people can be racist. So when two Indian teenagers were arrested at a football game in New Jersey having verbally abused and urinated on a group of black schoolgirls, the New York Times claimed that the perpetrators were ‘enacting whiteness’. What we might perceive as racism between ethnic minority groups is known instead as ‘colourism’. Furthermore, it is supposed that a white person cannot experience racism. DiAngelo even offers the theoretical scenario of a white person being ‘mercilessly’ bullied due to the colour of their skin, but resorts to a definitional fudge to explain this away as an example of someone ‘experiencing race prejudice and discrimination, not racism’. As a linguistic gymnast, DiAngelo often ends up face-down on the mat.