'White Fragility' supporters will effectively deny the opinion of anyone who is White, because of course, 'how could they possibly know?' and 'they are guilty of perpetuating racism by virtue of their Whiteness'. This is 'race war': you are 'guilty' and you 'must apologize profusely and enduringly'.
In Scientology, anyone who is against the group is labelled as 'suppressive' - that means, among other things that they don't take the 'suppressive' person's arguments or actions at face value. Don't get into argumentation or rhetoric with a 'suppressive' - just undermine them and destroy them by any means possible.
The 'White Fragility' ideology gives people with grievances a very powerful, fascist ideology to validate their anger: "my opponents are wrong by their very nature, and their arguments can have no value". I mean, that's a pretty powerful rhetorical tool, just invalidate whatever anyone else says because of who they are.
The Guardian has an article right now about this [1] i.e. White women paying Women of Colour to tell them all the ways that they are racist. It's not without controversy even among attendees.
The thing is - most people are willing to examine racial issues on some level. 85% of Republicans believe that racism exists in America. Obviously, these things vary, some narratives are more broadly acceptable than others, but by and large, people are willing to listen at the right time and right occasions. But this kind of toxicity draws some pretty hard battle lines, upon which many otherwise 'allies' will join the other camp or ignore entirely.
I've personally become very cynical about the issue, and I believe most popular figures talking about the issue are interested mostly in how people perceive them and not much more, i.e. just enabling the ratcheting.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/03/race-to-dinner...
"People who are part of the Normative or Dominant Group may inadvertently or unconsciously think or act in a manner that may be insensitive to people in Non-Normative groups" - that's a conversation to be had.
But ... "White people are by virtue of their Whiteness guilty of propagating oppression and therefore cannot contemplate otherwise, ergo those who attempt to disagree with any of our rhetoric are 'fragile' or 'Nazis' and their arguments should be dismissed out of hand merely as further attempts to deny or oppress" - is not a conversation, it's totalitarianism.
'Purity' within groups derives systematically from the latter approach.
Is it? We've identified at least enough people in the knitting community that think it isn't obvious. How can we be sure our definitions of where the line is are consistent with even the general population?
For another, and I believe this to be invisible from the inside, the reaction begins to be completely out of proportion to the alleged crime. Speaking as someone who decided that knitting wasn't for him because counting is hard, is racism in the knitting community really a big problem? One that requires an emotional response? I mean, I know people who in casual conversation seem to relate skin color to intelligence and common sense. I know people who seem to equate wealth or income to personal worth, or culture, religion, job, or interests with value to society. Whether someone's knitting is too insensitive is way down the list.
That line seems reasonably clear in a lot of cases, like the author's Puritans in the American colonies, various communist flaps, young adult books, and yes, knitters.
The author's spiral is pretty obvious, too: at some point, if the community doesn't disintegrate first, eventually any difference becomes intolerable (which is spectacularly ironic for a "diversity" issue), all the wheels come off, and the lack of self awareness in many if not most people comes out in all its glory.