Lemme unpack another Robin DiAngelo quote. Her project arguably relies on driving progressive whites into a state of such despair that they'll accept cultish claims. To do that, she has to argue not only that America continues to suffer from racism, but that there has been

2/ been NO progress. Perceived progress is a mirage. This is bad. The example that Herzog and I discuss on @TheBARPod has to do with Ferguson. A black president had a black AG spearhead a vital federal investigation that uncovered that the Ferguson PD had absolutely been

3/ preying on the the city's black (particularly poor black) residents. To claim this isn't an important moment, and that it wasn't a moment whose likelihood was increased by having a black president and black AG (not that that guarantees anything), is to engage in a pretty

4/ bankrupt sort of historical analysis. A world in which the feds investigated the Ferguson PD is, by any conceivable standard, far superior to one in which they didn't. It goes without saying that such federal scrutiny benefits the poor black people most likely to be hurt by

5/ abusive policing. To wave this away as not "challeng[ing] racism in any way significant enough to be threatening" is just completely ignorant, and an insult to the people who do the hard work of securing even the halting, incremental change that does, at the end of the day

6/ save some lives.