white people doing anti-racism work capitalizing (again) off of systemic racism

I recently saw the NYT best sellers list for non-fiction. A lot of books on anti-racism are there, which is great to see, but saw that White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo is #1.

DiAngelo does great work, but it’s frustrating to me that because we live in racist society that values white people/lives telling the stories of poc more than poc talking about their own experiences, her book is #1 over works by Ijeoma Oluo, Ibram X. Kendi, Michelle Alexander, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Bryan Stevenson, Michelle Obama, etc.

I know many poc who could have written that book. I could have written that book.

It’s another example of (even good intentioned) white people (doing good work) capitalizing off of racism again, getting speaking gigs and book sales over poc. I don’t believe DiAngelo has malicious intent with her work the way white people who used cheap and/or forced labor from poc (enslaved African people, Chinese railroad workers, Latinx agricultural workers, among others), and her work is good, but that is how deeply racist our society is.

For white women who don’t understand my frustration with this, can you empathize with the situation of saying a really great idea in a meeting, being ignored, then a man says the same idea and gets praised and credited for it? That’s similar to how I feel about DiAngelo.

DiAngelo learned much of knowledge about race/racism from poc. Sure, her knowledge as…