When I read Robin DiAngelo’s article How White People Handle Diversity Training in the Workplace, I had the same hostile reaction she described seeing in so many of her workshop participants. I came away from it thinking, “Of course people are going to be angry with you if you try to put the Klansman’s hood on them.”

White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

The article got under my skin in a way few things do, and I was still thinking about it months later when someone on a mailing list recommended White Fragility. So I bought a copy and I read it slowly.

The book painstakingly (and painfully) lays out an argument that boils down to this:

• American culture is fundamentally racist, preserving racial and social hierarchies over centuries through a number of subtle and not-so-subtle means.
• Everyone raised in American culture has absorbed a racist ideology, whether they are aware of it or not.
• People of color are aware of it. Whites are not.
• Unless you make a conscious and continual effort to work against the racist defaults in your thinking, your attitudes, your behavior toward and treatment of others, you are perpetuating and reinforcing the racist system.
• You will not become aware of your racist attitudes and behaviors until you are willing to become aware of them, and a big part of that willingness lies in the ability to listen to others, and to accept their experiences, perspectives, and opinions as legitimate. (This is where “white fragility” becomes the great obstacle.)
• You can never completely unlearn the prejudices and assumptions of the culture that formed you, but you can begin to see when they shape your actions, and when those actions become hurtful.
• The process of becoming aware can be deeply uncomfortable, but as you become aware, you can choose a better path.
• Awareness and choosing are a constant process. You will never be done.

The hardest thing about reading this book was the feeling of being put in checkmate, the sense that by simply being white and male, I was the oppressor and the bad guy, no matter what. DiAngelo’s arguments do box you in if you’re white, and there is no counterargument that will let you out of the fact that you are at the top of a racial hierarchy, that you see the world through an unacknowledged racial lens, and that the perspective you take to be universal and benevolent is often exclusive and harmful. DiAngelo says:

Whiteness rests upon a foundational premise: the definition of whites as the norm or standard for human, and people of color as a deviation from that norm. Whiteness is not acknowledged by white people, and the white reference point is assumed to be universal and is imposed on everyone. White people find it very difficult to think about whiteness as a specific state of being that could have an impact on one’s life and perceptions.

As DiAngelo elaborates on all the subtle manifestations of the white-centric viewpoint that we (whites) see as normal, natural, and beyond question, the inescapable box she constructs around us keeps getting tighter–the box that says You are participating in this unjust system, whether you acknowledge it or not, and you are complicit in it until you begin to actively work against it.

This is where most white people check out. This is where they feel they’re being blamed just for being who they are. The blame feels unjust–I know, because I’ve felt it sharply, not just from DiAngelo, but from others–and it drives a lot of people away. I think the deep resentment that sense of blame engenders showed up in the 2016 election, when many white voters essentially said, If you’re going to make me feel bad about who I am, I’ll never be on your side.

But the point of White Fragility is not to blame or shame anyone. The point is first to open people’s eyes to perspectives they cannot or will not see; second to force them to ask themselves if, in light of these new perspectives, they’re still willing to support the status quo; and finally, for those who say they want change, to call them to action, not by joining some big social movement, but simply by opening up and making changes in how they interact with others in their day to day lives.

The hostile reactions of white fragility constitute a refusal to acknowledge one’s own involvement in difficult problems that affect everyone in our society. Those who won’t acknowledge problems won’t confront them. And many who do acknowledge them won’t take necessary action, in part because they view changes to their own behavior as an admission of guilt. But DiAngelo’s point is “to move past guilt and into action.”

In addressing issues of race with whites, “What [people of color] are looking for is not perfection but the ability to talk about what happened, the ability to repair.”

Unfortunately, many whites can’t even get to the point of talking. Many whites–myself included on a number of occasions–have looked at basic calls for justice and even simple requests to acknowledge injustice as attacks on white people, white culture, white history. This is the response you get when you try to question things that are “beyond question,” when you hit at issues that truly are at the foundation of a person’s and a society’s cultural identity. (Especially if it’s an unacknowledged cultural identity.) DiAngelo does a good job of pointing out how social norms have conditioned whites not to talk about race, and to view the explicit pointing out of racial injustice–especially by people of color–as a social transgression, if not an act of outright hostility.

After reading her book, I see DiAngelo’s work not as attempt to put the Klansman’s hood on me or anyone else, but as an effort to take off our blinders. The author points out repeatedly that racist acts do not necessarily stem from the bad intentions of evil people, but from the unexamined attitudes and uninformed actions of people raised in a racist society. They come from the default behaviors of people who consider themselves good and just, and who can’t stand to be shown that the effects of their actions are often neither good nor just.

This book is politically charged. Its unsentimental analysis of American culture and white psychology is difficult to accept (for whites) and difficult to refute. For white readers, it pushes buttons you didn’t know you had, or wouldn’t admit were there. It risks provoking your hostility, your resentment, and your hatred by asking you to examine deeply held assumptions, by asking you to look at things you were taught not to see, and by pointing out ways you need to change.

This book will get under your skin, which is why you need to read it.

Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude is set in a boarding house in the London suburb of Thames Lockdon during the winter of 1943. A number of Londoners have abandoned the city after the German blitz and taken up residence in the Rosamund Tea Rooms, where they live under the weight of the war and government-imposed nighttime blackouts.

The Slaves of Solitude, by Patrick Hamilton

The book presents a cast of characters forced together by the war who would never have come together on their own. The protagonist, from whose perspective we see most of the action, is the prim, repressed, highly observant and highly sensitive Miss Enid Roach. Her sometime love interest is the heavy-drinking, good-natured American lieutenant Dayton Pike. Her rival and nemesis is the conniving and underhanded Vicki Kugelman, and her tormentor is the hilariously boorish, cringe-inducing bully, Mr. Thwaites.

The overall atmosphere of the book is one of repression, claustrophobia, and forced closeness. But it’s still one of the funniest books I’ve read in a long time. The inhabitants of the Rosamund Tea Rooms have sunk into a toxic atmosphere of sniping and resentment, and the house is dominated by the boastful, pompous, and impossibly obnoxious Mr. Thwaites, a Dickensian comic character whose sole joy in life is to torment everyone around him.

His favorite target is the meek and even-tempered Miss Roach, who tries to maintain a sense of dignity as she absorbs his abuse. This would be depressing if it weren’t so funny. Because no one in the boarding house will stand up to Thwaites, he freely expresses his ill-informed opinions on everything, in the most obnoxious ways possible.

This scene gives a good flavor of the character and the writing. By this point in the book, we know that neither Mr. Thwaites nor any of the other characters has ever been wealthy. They’re are all stuck at the boarding house precisely because they can’t afford to go anywhere else.

The meal was breakfast: the subject, utility clothing. “As for the stuff they’re turning out for men nowadays,” said Mr. Thwaites bitterly, “I wouldn’t give it to my Valet.”

Mr. Thwaites’ valet was quite an old friend. An unearthly, flitting presence, whose shape, character, age and appearance could only be dimly conceived, he had been turning up every now and again ever since Miss Roach had known Mr. Thwaites. Mostly he was summoned into being as one from whom all second-rate, shoddy, or inferior articles were withheld. But sometimes things were good enough for Mr. Thwaites’ valet, but would not do for Mr. Thwaites. Mr. Thwaites’ spiritual valet endowed Mr. Thwaites with a certain lustre and grandeur, giving the impression that he had had a material valet in the past, or meant to have a material valet in the future. Mr. Thwaites also occasionally used, for the same purposes, a spiritual butler, a spiritual footman, and in moments of supreme content, a spiritual stable-boy. He had at his disposal a whole spiritual estate in the country.

In the close atmosphere of the story, the narrator spends a lot of time parsing the statements and subtle actions of the characters, as in the passage above. Sometimes the close parsing is funny, sometimes it’s revealing and insightful, and often it’s all of those things at once.

Though she sees quite clearly, poor Miss Roach is too modest and retiring to assert herself, and life seems to happen to her in confusing ways. She’s as ambivalent toward her American lieutenant as he is toward her, and for a long time, she can’t decide whether or the German provocateur Vicki Kugelman is evil or simply coarse, obtuse, and ill-mannered.

It isn’t until the end of the book that Miss Roach begins to see what the reader sees quite clearly in the beginning and then loses sight of: that the primary causes of her being so stuck in life are first, the impossible, smothering situation into which the war has forced the residents of London and its environs; and second, the fundamental elements of her character that make her so maddening and empathetic. Anyone as observant, sensitive, and unassertive as she will be pushed around by life.

Still, you can’t help liking her, especially when the narrator reveals her thoughts, as in this scene, where she returns home from drinks with Vicki:

The thought of these three drinks, as she let herself into the Rosamund Tea Rooms, accidentally brought to her mind another thought–the thought that whereas she had paid for two out of these three drinks, Vicki had paid for only one, and that this unequal division of payment had taken place, actually, on three other occasions. She rebuked herself for this thought.

She was, she saw, always having thoughts for which she rebuked herself. It then flashed across her mind that the thoughts for which she rebuked herself seldom turned out to be other than shrewd and fruitful thoughts: and she rebuked herself for this as well.

Patrick Hamilton is today most famous for his play Gaslight. Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman starred in the 1944 film version, from which comes the term gaslighting, which means to psychologically manipulate a person (usually a woman) in such a subtle and thorough way that they begin to doubt their own judgment, perception, and sanity. Hamilton was an acute observer of human motives, psychology, and social interaction. The Slaves of Solitude puts a comic twist on his sharp and accurate observations. It’s a wonder, and a shame, that the book is not more widely read.

I picked this up after the New York Times ran a belated obituary for Marthe McKenna in September, 2018. This book reads like a non-stop adventure novel. McKenna (nee Cnockaert) was in her early twenties and studying to be a doctor when the war broke out. The Germans overran her native Belgium before their progress was halted and the front-line trenches formed just past her hometown of Westrozebeke. Her town was destroyed and she and her mother were forced to move a little further behind the lines to Roulers, where the Germans had set up a hospital.

Cnockaert volunteered as a nurse at the hospital, where she treated both German and Allied soldiers. If you’ve ever read accounts from other WWI nurses, you know what a horror that job was. Around the time she moved to Roulers, her aunt, an independent and free-spirited loner, recruited her as a spy for the British Secret Service.

Cnockaert was able to gather quite a bit of information from the German officers billeted in her house. (Every house in Roulers was forced to board German soldiers during the war.) Because Cnockaert worked at the hospital and had to be on call at all times, she was one of the only citizens in town who carried a pass that allowed to violate the German curfew. Her pass allowed her to go anywhere at any time, while her dedicated and extraordinary work at the hospital kept her above suspicion of the German authorities. (Because of her medical training, she was more skilled than the other nurses, and her personality made her a favorite of doctors, patients, and hospital administrators alike.)

Cnockaert recounts a number of fascinating missions, in many of which her life was on the line at every moment. In one of her first missions, she sweet-talks the German officer who runs the railway station, trying to extract information from him about when a munitions train will arrive. She gets the information, in a very clever manner, and as she does so, she comes to recognize the German officer who she has just swindled as a fundamentally decent man forced by his country to do job he may not necessarily like. With deeply mixed feelings, she passes her information on to the British, knowing it will lead to the violent death of the man who has just helped her. Two days later, she watches British planes bomb the munitions train, blowing up not only the train but the entire station, with the German officer inside.

Cnockaert passes on other valuable information to the British, including information about a previously unknown German submarine base, a behind-the-lines telephone from which an unfaithful Brit has been passing secrets to the Germans, and most importantly, plans for the large-scale bombing of London that, thanks to her warning, the British were able to thwart.

Her greatest regret comes from an incident whose significance neither she nor the British understood at the time. She reported that a munitions train had arrived in Roulers carrying large cylinders unlike any she’d ever seen before, and that she had gathered from the talk of local soldiers these were bound for the front lines. The Brits replied that they wanted information about troop movements, and they were not interested in cylinders.

Cnockaert continued to investigate the cylinders, and she also reported that two unusual German officers were now billeted in her house. They spent their days studying weather reports, measuring windspeed and making maps. The Brits again replied they weren’t interested in such information, but she continued to search for details, because the constant chatter of the German soldiers about an imminent turning point in the war told her something big was about to happen.

The last things she reported before that Germans carried those mysterious cylinders to the line was that the officers billeted in her house were not standard army officers. They were university professors who taught chemistry. She also mentioned overhearing a soldier who had unloaded the munitions train saying the canisters contained chlorine. Again, the Brits were not interested. No one understood at the time what was afoot.

The first chemical attack of war came just after her final report, and Cnockaert was the head nurse at the hospital that received the first hordes of choking, chemically burned soldiers. Although the townspeople were used to the sight of soldiers arriving with their arms and legs blown off, even parts of their faces missing, the sight of the gassed, burned and choking soldiers so horrified them that for the first time, they rose up in open protest against the Germans.

This is just one of number of incidents the author recounts. There are many more, and many of them are more harrowing because the author is so bold and forward in her attempts to extract information from the Germans. In many cases, she’s the only Belgian in a room full of male enemy soldiers. And in many cases, she travels great distances on foot, in the dark of night, to distant towns and country farmhouses, avoiding German patrols again and again, while knowing she has to show up at work the next morning looking fresh and clean or she’ll blow her cover.

One of the more striking aspects of this book is the portrait it paints of a long-lost world. Although the Europeans were fighting a twentieth-century war with twentieth-century weapons, they were still living in a nineteenth century culture. Cnockaert, a farm girl, speaks fluent Flemish, French, German, and English. The German officers, while overrunning her country, are unfailingly polite to her, just as she is to them. German and Allied soldiers are treated side-by-side in the hospital. The savage war is playing out in a society that is far more civil than American society is today. In reading of these people who so easily shifted their conversation into another language to accommodate the person they were talking to, I felt a pang of loss for a civilization that once prized cultural knowledge and now scorns it. (America, that is.)

Another striking aspect of the book is how intimately the dramas of the war played out just behind the front lines. The Germans and the Belgian spies slept under the same roof. They ate and drank together. As the war wore on, they commiserated, all of them sick of it and wanting to return to normal life. Cnockaert herself, as a nurse, often treated and rehabilitated the very soldiers whom her information had caused to be wounded, and she always treated them as fully human, not as enemies. Everything is muddled in war.

There is much more to the book than I’ve spelled out here. It’s a fascinating read, and in the four years of the war, Cnockaert did more living than most people do in a lifetime. She may have been the only person in the war to have won the highest national honors from both the Germans and the Allies. She was awarded the German Iron Cross for her work as a nurse, and the both the Belgian and French Legions of Honor, along with special recognition from the British, for her work as a spy.

If you get a chance, read this book. It’s a hard one to put down.