Robin DiAngelo exposes her ignorance about the Western culture she’s destroying

Robin DiAngelo, a white woman who has achieved extraordinary wealth and fame by insisting that America is inherently racist because white people are threatened by minorities, turns out to know nothing about the West and its culture. Instead, she is the ultimate narcissist and is, in fact, simply offended that the Western canon hasn’t revolved around her.

DiAngelo has an interesting bio that goes a long way to explaining her narcissism and the ideas that flow from it. She was raised by a single mother, with the usual economic instability that accompanies single motherhood. Tragically, her mother died, after which she lived with her father. She then had a child out of wedlock (a child that, to her credit, she didn’t abort), becoming herself an impoverished single mother.

That was when DiAngelo discovered academia. Suddenly, everything made sense as she got a BA in sociology and history from Seattle University and a “multicultural education” Ph.D. from the University of Washington. Her struggles were all the fault of the white culture in which she lived. They had nothing to do with her parents’ choices, her choices, or (as happened with her mother) sheer bad luck and tragedy. DiAngelo had a crusade: She would destroy the Western white infrastructure that had treated her so badly.

For a long time, DiAngelo swam about in academia, spreading her ideas in that little world and pushing them out into corporate America and K-12 education. However, once the left successfully branded Trump a racist, DiAngelo’s moment came. In 2018, Beacon Press published her book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, in which she purported to explain (at great length) that all white people are racist but are too emotionally weak to acknowledge that fact.

Suddenly, DiAngelo was a very rich, very famous, and very powerful warrior against the West’s dominant white culture. Her newfound status is notable given that DiAngelo has revealed (a) that she knows nothing about the culture she seeks to destroy and (b) that her views are grounded in a narcissism even greater than we previously understood.

A clip has emerged of DiAngelo speaking to a black podcaster. During the interview, she explains to him that the “single image I use to capture the concept of white supremacy is Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ‘God Creating Man.’” DiAngelo, of course, is speaking of this image, which is, indeed, deeply embedded in the Western psyche:

Photo of the fresco by Jörg Bittner Unna. CC BY 3.0.

Artistically, it’s dazzling, with its elegant composition and beautiful palette. In terms of storytelling, it vividly brings to life humankind’s creation, as told in Genesis 2.

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel fresco between 1508 and 1512, at the height of the Renaissance. That’s when the West was exploding with ideas, energy, creativity, religious faith, and expansionism.

Of course, it still carried with it all the stuff that came before—the cruelty, the acceptance of slavery as a human norm, and the belief that women, being less physically strong than men, deserved fewer rights than men—but it was breaking free of those concepts, a process that took centuries. When the West ran into Muslim and Asian cultures, it took their ideas (e.g., Arabic numerals, gunpowder, etc.) and expanded on them in ways those cultures had never imagined.  

There is a reason, whether anyone wants to admit it, that the West ended up driving the culture of the entire world. There is a reason that the English, reflecting both Renaissance culture and the concept of individual liberties woven into their fabric by the Angles and Saxons, planted the seeds of liberty in America. And yes, when the British first came to our shores, they carried with them those old ideas about slavery, but they also carried the seeds for our eventual national maturity into a nation without slavery and one that understood that all people deserve equal rights under the law.

Notably, those ideas remained unknown in almost all parts of the world that were untouched by those white, Western beliefs.

But Robin DiAngelo looks at everything that Western culture accomplished, no matter how beneficial, and the only thing she sees is “white supremacy.” That’s bad. What’s worse is that she doesn’t even know what she’s talking about.

Thus, in the same video, when DiAngelo boasts about her denigration of Michelangelo’s Creation of Man, she explains that she has no idea which man God is creating. “You know, where God is in a cloud, and there’s all these angels, and he’s reaching out and he’s touching…I don’t know who that is. David or something?”

DiAngelo is unperturbed by her ignorance because knowing what she’s destroying is irrelevant to her. The destruction is enough. This is a woman whose parents made bad choices and had bad luck and who made her own bad choices. But she’s not interested in or, seemingly, capable of introspection. She can only lash out.

And, of course, at bottom, as with all leftists, it really is all about her. We know that because DiAngelo also explains that, as a Catholic, she was exposed to all this Western Christian imagery growing up, and it offended her. Why? Because it was male-centered and she’s female.

“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 was an impoverished, unhappy child who felt ignored. And now, damn it! No one’s going to ignore her anymore, and she’s going to destroy everybody and everything that didn’t ensure that she had a life of perfection, plenty, and being noticed.