The High Church of Wokeism – Tablet Magazine
But DiAngelo did not engineer her own celebrity, nor was it merely an act of fate or chance. Rather, her meteoric rise was aided in large part by her publisher, Beacon Press, the more than 150-year-old storied publishing house that helped popularize such luminaries as James Baldwin, Howard Zinn, Herbert Marcuse, and Cornel West, and which operates as a branch of the Unitarian Universalist Association.
DiAngelo may have been new to the American reading public with the publication of her book, but she was a known quantity to the Unitarian Universalists. Congregations all over the country have employed her services since at least 2017, and various UU-specific guides to white fragility can be found of roughly the same age. Nor were the UUs strangers to the now-vogue concept of anti-racism more broadly: The UUA had passed a resolution in 1997 to form a Journey Toward Wholeness Transformation Committee, tasked to monitor and assess the work of the Association toward becoming a genuinely anti-racist, anti-oppressive, multicultural institution. Anti-racist celebrity Tim Wise has been a regular speaker at UUA events, including at its general assembly in 2011.
I would never have thought of the Unitarians as revolutionaries.