Robin DiAngelo is making bank for her work as a public intellectual on matters of race. The Daily Mail estimated that she makes 3/4 of a million dollars a year peddling her idiotic ideas to corporations and institutions that are obsessed with signaling their racial virtue to one another. 

That's a nice living, selling a form of absolution to White people for their racism by congratulating them for being concerned about race. 

Her book, "White Fragility," zoomed her into stardom, and in its wake her speaking fees became astronomical. They averaged $14,000 according to Ms. DiAngelo, who defends them mightily on her webpage. She is well aware that more than a few people have noticed that she is getting wealthy peddling the idea that Black people are uniquely disadvantaged. 

There is more than a little irony in that, although DiAngelo readily admits that she is privileged as a White Person. Still, in her eyes privilege is a bad thing to be avoided, yet she apparently has made a living off of selling it. 

All this is a prelude to this: Robin DiAngleo is quite stupid, which calls into question the intelligence of people who take her seriously. 

Want proof? Watch this:

“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 claims to have been raised Catholic but somehow missed the fact that God created Adam, not David. David was quite another person. I, having grown up in an atheist household, am aware enough of Western culture to know that. 

Because I am not stupid. 

Ignorance is not necessarily an indication of stupidity, of course. All of us are ignorant of most things, in fact. And I wouldn't think a Chinese person is stupid for failing to know the Christian creation story, nor a Hindu in Mumbai. I am not up on my creation stories from around the world. 

But then again, I lived in the West and got, if not an excellent education (DiAngelo has a PhD, and I only have an MA), at least a decent one. You cannot understand much about the West without understanding that before it became The West, it was known as Christendom, and most people who live here know about the story of Adam and Eve early in life. 

DiAngelo, she who advertises her Ph.D. at the drop of a hat, doesn't know enough about Michaelango's Sistine Chapel to know that its most famous image is of God creating Adam. 

DiAngelo makes her living off her claim to have a unique insight into the Western mind and culture. She knows its deepest secret: White people are so racist that we are emotionally fragile. Our self-image is founded on our claim to supremacy. 

This insight was so profound and so startling that she became an instant star and revered expert who could charge as much as $30,000 for a speech to a corporation. 

And she doesn't know David from Adam. 

There are so many ironies to DiAngelo--ones that go far beyond her making a nice living off the supposed victimization of Black people. 

There is, for instance, her simultaneous insistence that people need to see their racial identity reflected in the faces of authority figures, and her revulsion at the fact that Renaissance Europeans depicted God and Adam as White. 

By her own logic, this is both normal and good. 

When Europeans met up with indigenous people during the Age of Exploration, the natives famously had not seen White people before. One presumes that before those fateful times, the native peoples of the Americas or Pacific islanders saw themselves reflected in their gods. 

It's called being human, not White Supremacy. 

In any case, DiAngelo's claim of superior intelligence is supported in only one way that I can tell: she is smarter than Ibram X. Kendi, who literally cannot define racism, despite having made a living decrying it. 

In which academic discipline is this circular, naive, deer-caught-in-the-headlights response to a basic and urgent question considered insightful or excellent?

A national culture exempting this (which, sadly, is typical of him) from judgment is unintentionally racist itself. pic.twitter.com/n493NpjFmx

— John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) June 1, 2021

There are intelligent analysts of racism, and as with any intelligent argument, we should listen. Racism is real, with real social implications, and you can't understand American history without thinking deeply about it. 

Unfortunately, our preeminent scholars on racism are stupid.