ROME — Robin DiAngelo, the woke white author of White Fragility, has called Michelangelo’s painting of the creation of man in the Sistine Chapel an icon of “white supremacy.”
DiAngelo recently spoke with Jalon Johnson on his “Not Your Ordinary Parts” podcast, in which she slammed Michelangelo’s portayal of God creating Adam as “white supremacist.”
“The single image I use to capture the concept of white supremacy is Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel God creating man,” she said, “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 — and God is white and David’s white and the angels are white.”
“That is the perfect convergence of white supremacy, patriarchy, right?” she added.
“I was raised Catholic so I saw many images like that as a child,” DiAngelo continued. “So I’m sitting in church and I’m looking up and I see these images. I don’t think to myself ‘God is white’ but in a lot of ways that’s power. I don’t need to. God reflects me.”
File/THE TONIGHT SHOW STARRING JIMMY FALLON — Author Robin DiAngelo during an interview on June 17, 2020 (NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty)
According to DiAngelo’s website, her area of research is in Whiteness Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis, tracing “how whiteness is reproduced in everyday narratives.”
In his introduction to DiAngelo, Jalon Johnson stated that she coined the expression white fragility to signify “any defensive response by a white person when their whiteness is highlighted or mentioned or their racial worldview is challenged, whether this response is conscious or otherwise.”
DiAngelo beamed in response, telling Johnson, “You captured that really nicely!”
Writing for the New York Post Wednesday, Rikki Schlott notes that “DiAngelo was an obscure whiteness studies professor at the University of Washington in 2020, when her 2018 book ‘White Fragility’ soared to the number one slot of the New York Times bestseller list following George Floyd’s murder.”
“Her message — that all white people are inherently racist — ignited a scourge of white liberal self-flagellation that enriched her greatly,” Schlott adds, noting that DiAngelo reportedly made more than $700,000 annually from speaking engagements and workshops in the year following George Floyd’s murder, not counting her book royalties.
The optics of DiAngelo’s “rise to antiracist superstardom were astounding,” Schlott observes: “A liberal white woman wagging her finger at other liberal white people, monetizing their guilt, and doing just about nothing to actually fight racism or improve the lives of Black people in America.”
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