Review: Robin DiAngelo’s “Nice Racism”

“One thing that sets Nice Racism apart from her other books is the depth of its cynicism.”

Robin DiAngelo’s new book, Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm, is the third installment in what can be termed her “critical whiteness trilogy,” a group of books that attempt to promote white racial literacy and expand upon a discipline known as whiteness studies. As DiAngelo writes in her seminal 2011 paper “White Fragility,” “Whiteness Studies begin with the premise that racism and White privilege exist in both traditional and modern forms, and rather than work to prove its existence, work to reveal it.”

Nice Racism, like all of DiAngelo’s work, is not interested in using science or rational inquiry to prove racism or white privilege exist. Rather, it sets out to reveal their existence through so-called lived experience, an overreliance on anecdotal observations, and the frequent citing of critical whiteness literature, the bulk of which also ignores the scientific method by skipping rigorous data collection and jumping straight to conclusions.

According to DiAngelo, “niceness” is a white progressive’s “silence” or amounts to choosing racial comfort over daring to address the ways in which racism, white privilege, and white supremacy permeate all aspects of society. Niceness is also a kind of progressive phoniness, which manifests as goodwill and denies racism. Whites telegraph their niceness to people of color through “a light tone of voice, eye contact accompanied by smiling, and conjuring affinity such as a shared enjoyment of a music genre,” among other superficial white gestures. Whereas White Fragility was concerned with so-called “white tears” (all the ways white fragility manifests through complaints about how hard racism is on whites), Nice Racism is concerned with a type of facecrime DiAngelo labels “over-smiling,” which “allows white people to mask an anti-Blackness that is foundational to our very existence as whites.”