Jmurman
Veteran Member
By Philip Carl Salzman April 29, 2019
Anti-white hate is now mainstream American culture. Not just by racial extremists such as Black Lives Matter, for whom statements such as “all lives matter” or “blue lives matter” are racist. Our highest leaders sing the same song.
Presidential candidate Barak Obama said of working class, white voters in 2008, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Not to be outdone by Obama, Hillary Clinton castigated half of Donald Trump supporters as “a basket of deplorables” who were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” Clinton was not talking about Trump’s black, Asian, and Hispanic supporters; she was talking about millions of his white supporters and her fellow citizens.
And what could be more mainstream than the New York Times? In 2018 it appointed Sarah Jeong to its editorial board. Jeong was born in South Korea in 1988 and emigrated at the age of three when her parents came to the United States to study. She became a U.S. citizen in 2017. Jeong, a graduate of the University of California Berkeley and Harvard Law School, had expressed publicly many interesting opinions about white people. Here are only a few:
“Dumbass f***ing white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.”
It’s “kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.”
I’m “just imagining being white and waking up every morning with a terrible existential dread about how I have no culture.”
“Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically only being fit to live underground like groveling bilious goblins?”
“Have you ever tried to figure out all the things that white people are allowed to do that aren’t cultural appropriation? There’s literally nothing.”
“The world could get by just fine with zero white people.”
The Growing Threat of Repressive Social Justice]
The Times Explains:
The Times said Jeong did not really mean those mean things she said. Jeong herself said, “As a woman of color on the internet, I have faced torrents of online hate,” so her statements were just a ‘right back at you’ response. Usually, the Times is very tough when employees say things they disagree with. Perhaps vilifying whites is not something it disagrees with. As well, there were many defenses of Jeong by “progressive” writers, such as Beauchamp at Vox, and Reihan Salam at The Atlantic.
It is surprising that Jeong, who has benefitted by taking degrees at two of America’s greatest universities and been hired by the premier American newspaper, should hold whites in such animus. It would be difficult to make a case that Jeong herself has been disadvantaged by racism. Even less justifiable by discrimination are the cases of whites who have made anti-white declarations. A white Rutgers professor, James Livingston, shared on Facebook his feelings about whites:
OK, officially, I now hate white people. I am white people, for God’s sake, but can we keep them — us — us out of my neighborhood? I just went to Harlem Shake on 124 and Lenox for a Classic burger to go, that would be my dinner, and the place is overrun by little Caucasian assholes who know their parents will approve of anything they do. Slide around the floor, you little shithead, sing loudly, you unlikely moron. Do what you want, nobody here is gonna restrict your right to be white. I hereby resign from my race. **** these people.
The debate at Rutgers and beyond about whether Livingston’s words were racism or free speech was not very enlightening, in part because they were both free speech and racism. From his comments, it appears that Livingstone was more irritated by teenagers than by whites. So why did he not complain about teenagers, as most of us parents do, rather than attack them as white? The answer must go deeper than a discussion about racism vs. free speech.
Dreaming of White Genocide
One final example. On Christmas Eve 2016, Professor George Ciccariello of Drexel University in Philadelphia, “was” in the words of CNN “dreaming not of a white Christmas, but of a white massacre.” What were Professor Ciccariello’s words? “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide.”
How did we get to this place, in which hating white people, the majority of Americans, not to mention wishing them all murdered, is deemed a virtue? The answer is that our liberal democratic culture emphasizing individual freedom and equality has transitioned, particularly among university and media elites in large cities and on the coasts, to a new culture that classifies and treats people by race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. Some observers have called this new culture “victimhood culture,” others have called it “diversitarian culture,” but most generally it is referred to as “social justice” culture.
“Social justice” culture replaces the individual with census categories and ranks these categories on a hierarchy of power and a converse hierarchy of virtue. Categories are distinguished between those with power, which are oppressor categories, and those without, which are victim categories. Intersectionism is a tool encouraging the accumulation of credits for belonging to multiple victim categories.
The origins of “social justice” culture are in the 1970s. The Women’s Movement of the previous decade morphed into the ever more radical Feminist Movement, which framed social relations in the gross categories of patriarchal male oppressors and blameless female victims. Understanding and knowledge were deemed to be “positional,” biased by one’s social position, so that no man could understand women, and, as the discussion developed, no middle-class woman could understand a working-class woman, and no white woman could understand a woman of color, no urban woman of color could understand a rural woman of color, and so on ad infinitum reductio ad absurdum.
Identity and subjectivity became the standard for knowledge, with science, especially biology, rejected, and objectivity derided: “Objectivity is just male subjectivity.” Feminism thus contributed to postmodernism the rejection of objectivity and celebration of subjectivity. “Truth” no longer exists; “each person has her own truth.”
By the 1970s, some of the 1960s counter-culture and anti-war activists had become professors, and some among them became the last people in the world to believe in Marxism. From that time, Marxist anthropology, Marxist sociology, Marxist political science, and Marxist geography became an important fixture in universities, where Marxism remains today, sometimes camouflaged by post-USSR labels such as “critical anthropology” or “political ecology.”
The Marxist idea of opposed economic classes, capitalists and proletarians, which in theory drove history through their conflicts, while not popular with the American public of any class, contributed to “social justice” culture the idea of oppression between category classes.
Assumptions Can’t Be Challenged
Feminism and Marxism in teaching, research, and scholarship sought out illustrations to confirm their unquestioned presumptions. Neither feminism nor Marxism has been open to evidence that might challenge conclusions or raise doubts about their assumptions. In this sense, they are not frames of open research, but self-validating ideologies that cannot be questioned. Both are political programs, and their advocates activists; both are meant not to understand the world, but to change it. Marx was quite clear on this: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in CSqvarious ways. The point, however, is to change it.”
“Social justice” ideology has absorbed the legions of feminism and Marxism, classing people in gross demographic categories: male, female; white, black, other people of color; hetero, homo, bi, trans; Christians, Jews, Muslims, South Asians, etc. Categories are then ranked in power: males, whites, heteros, and Christians have power and are oppressors of those without — females, non-whites, LGBT, Muslims. The point of “social justice” ideology is to undercut the power and oppression structure, to relieve the powerful of their sinful oppression, and the oppressed of their terrible wounds. This is seen as an ethical fight: virtue is with “social justice” activists working for the welfare of the belabored, and against the power of the oppressors. Opponents of “social justice” are deemed to be evil.
However, individuals are regarded as evil not because of their attitudes or actions, but because of the structural position of the category to which they belong. White skin is equated with white supremacism. In fact, it is well documented that individual prejudice has declined remarkably, as shown in repeated surveys, and in interactions, e.g., the rapid growth of interracial marriages.
But this cuts no ice with “social justice” activists who argue that whites are still superordinate and therefore are, by virtue of being white, racist. Sociologists have helpfully invented the concept of “structural racism” to describe the statistical advantages on average that whites have over blacks.
One principle useful to activists that comes from this is that whites are deemed racist even if they are not personally prejudiced and do not discriminate because they belong to the powerful oppressors. In contrast, blacks, Asians, or non-white Hispanics who hate white people are not racist, because they do not have power. Thus, uniquely, whites are evil racists.
“Social justice” theorists have concluded that any statistical differences in status or assets between whites and blacks must be due to discrimination. This is unproven, as there are at least a number of other important influences that have not been taken into account and assessed as alternative explanations. One reason to doubt the discrimination explanation is that other unpopular minority populations are highly overrepresented in universities and prestigious professions. Furthermore, the historical facts are that blacks, Hispanics, and females have for decades received preferential treatment, being granted admittances and jobs at the expense of better qualified white male and Asian candidates.
“Social justice” theorists consider no alternative explanations of racism, and, in their view, denial of racism proves racism. The “social justice” solution is to ensure that all minorities are given preference in all jobs, positions, and organizations, at least until they reach their percentage of the population in every organization, irrespective of individual talent, achievement, merit, and suitability. This forced equality of result is dignified by terms such as “diversity” and “inclusion,” although for everyone included because of his race, someone else is excluded because of her race, for everyone included because of her gender, someone else is excluded because of his gender, and for everyone included because they belong to an “underrepresented minority,” others with superior credentials will be excluded. That is “social justice” “inclusion”!
No Concern for Truth
The epicenter of “social justice” is colleges and universities, which have jettisoned the impartial quest for truth, and replaced it with gender, race, and sexual preferences and advocacy, and restrictions on speech lest someone have to hear ideas that he or she disagrees with or have one’s feelings hurt. It is not an accident that two of the white anti-white haters quoted above are university professors, and that the other anti-white hater has two degrees from elite universities.
There are entire identity “disciplines,” such as women’s studies, black studies, and queer studies, whose raison d’etre is to advocate for females, blacks, and LGBTs. Their narrative has been adopted wholesale in the humanities, especially English and history, and the social sciences, especially sociology, an early adopter, and anthropology. In Canada “Indigenous Studies” rules, with whites labeled “colonialist settlers.”
Ditto the Canadian humanities and social sciences. And since most North American university administrators come from the “progressive” social sciences and humanities, they are fully onside with making “social justice” the priority, even appointing legions of “social justice” administrators, given such titles as “diversity and inclusion officers.” This “progressive” corruption of universities, however, is leaking into the rest of society, undermining liberal democratic values.
“Social justice” advocacy always entails vilification of whites, males, and heterosexuals. In the intersectional sweepstakes, white hetero males are awarded minus three points, which means three points of oppressor evil, while black lesbian females are awarded plus three points, three points of victimhood virtue. White straight females do not do much better than white males, granted minus two points, two steps down into oppressor evil.
Increasingly, courses are offered that focus directly on whites and men, but not to celebrate them. Reformed leftist and culture critic David Horowitz told the Washington Post in 2013, “Black studies celebrates blackness, Chicano studies celebrates Chicanos, women’s studies celebrates women and white studies attacks white people as evil.”
University of Kansas students will soon be able to study the rise of the “angry white male.”
The college course, called Angry White Male Studies, will dive into “the deeper sources of this emotional state while evaluating recent manifestations of male anger” in the United States and Britain since the 1950s.
The course catalog description states: “Employing interdisciplinary perspectives this course examines how both dominant and subordinate masculinities are represented and experienced in cultures undergoing periods of rapid change connected to modernity as well as to rights-based movements of women, people of color, homosexuals and trans individuals.”
Not to be outdone, Webster University plans a re-education camp, a la Communist China and North Korea:
Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri, with the beginning of the spring semester in full swing, plans to operate a “safe space” in the fall of 2019 for recovering white people to admit that they are, by virtue of being white, anti-black racists. Only whites are welcome in these meetings, where students can confess to their racism and their white privilege. Note that it is presumed that being racist is simply part of Caucasian DNA, and since “students of color” can’t be racist, they have no need to go to such meetings.
Vincent Flewellen, chief diversity officer (and by virtue of his being the “chief” officer of diversity at Webster University, it is obvious that there are multiple staff involved in such work, which explains partly why tuition continues to rise at American colleges and universities), is developing a program, based on a book entitled Witnessing Whiteness: The Need to Talk About Race and How to Do It.
At Arizona State University, a course labeled “The Problem of Whiteness” is “concerned with dismantling white supremacy in part by understanding how whiteness is socially constructed and experienced.” The professor expanded on this theme: “White supremacy makes it so that white people can’t see the world they have created.”
Some Whites May Have to Die
The University of Georgia graduate student and teaching assistant has expressed strong views about whites:
Osei-Frimpong is outspoken on social media and on his YouTube series The Funky Academic. In one example of a comment that has since been held against him as racist or violent, Osei-Frimpong said that “some white people may have to die for black communities to be whole in this struggle to advance freedom.” The California native also once said that he feels as if he’s around a “bunch of sociopaths” among whites in the South. [Emphasis added.]
What are the chances that he has not expressed anti-white views in his teaching?
According to the Washington Post, thirty or more American universities, including Princeton, UCLA, New Mexico, U of M Amherst have offered courses in whiteness studies. Teaching and research often overlap with other anti-Western themes, such as postcolonialism and orientalism. Anti-racist activists are prominent in the field.
A central concept in whiteness studies is so-called “white privilege,” which all whites allegedly benefit from, and which makes all whites racists. It is common today for white university students to be told to “check your privilege,” and to defer to students of color. For example, At the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, “the university’s Office of Student Life papered the campus with posters inviting students to “check your privilege” and listing examples of privilege such as being white, male, able-bodied, heterosexual, Christian or a native English speaker.”
What objections can be raised to “white studies”? The comments quoted at the beginning of this essay show that critiques of white people easily morph into hatred of white people and anti-white hate speech, skating on the edge of inciting violence against whites, even to the point of praising the prospect of white genocide.
There are also legitimate objections to the kind of analysis offered by “social justice” advocates. The use of gross census categories, such as gender and race, to explain social patterns is to ignore both individual and category diversities. Individuals in each category range in characteristics over multiple continua, and to treat men or women or white or blacks as of they were all the same is the erasure of individuals and ludicrously crude.
It is obviously ridiculous to say that a working-class white boy raised by a single, poorly educated parent is privileged in relation to a black boy in a middle-class family, brought up by two educated parents. As one parody of “wokeness” puts it, “Only last weekend we berated a white homeless man sitting outside Taco Bell for his appalling lack of self-awareness regarding not only his own privilege but his flagrant disrespect towards cultural appropriation.”
To treat gross census categories as if the only possible difference between categories is power flies in the face of everything we know about human cultures. Different cultures, or racial and gender sub-cultures, convey different assumptions, beliefs, values, and goals. It is undeniable that some cultures strongly encourage education and entrepreneurship, while other cultures are less oriented in those directions.
The great racial injustice claimed by “social justice” enthusiasts is an artifact of demanding equality of results in all areas of life, and labeling as “institutional racism” the lack of equality of results. But results in each field come from motivations, capacities, and dedication, and the choices that individuals and members of populations make. Claiming that differential results is solely, or even mainly a result of racism is an injustice to people’s choices and contributions, and a denial of truth and reality.
Whites make up the majority in the U.S. and Canada. In a democracy, the will of the majority is supposed to be respected. To vilify, discount, and discriminate against the majority on behalf of much smaller minorities, e.g., blacks make up 13% of the U.S. population, is highly undemocratic. And, for “social justice” advocates who claim the moral principle of absolute equality, how is it an advance of equality and civility to exchange anti-black for anti-white bigotry, and anti-female for anti-male discrimination?
Philip Carl Salzman
Philip Carl Salzman is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at McGill University, Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and a Director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.
https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2019/04/29/the-war-against-white-people/
Anti-white hate is now mainstream American culture. Not just by racial extremists such as Black Lives Matter, for whom statements such as “all lives matter” or “blue lives matter” are racist. Our highest leaders sing the same song.
Presidential candidate Barak Obama said of working class, white voters in 2008, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Not to be outdone by Obama, Hillary Clinton castigated half of Donald Trump supporters as “a basket of deplorables” who were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” Clinton was not talking about Trump’s black, Asian, and Hispanic supporters; she was talking about millions of his white supporters and her fellow citizens.
And what could be more mainstream than the New York Times? In 2018 it appointed Sarah Jeong to its editorial board. Jeong was born in South Korea in 1988 and emigrated at the age of three when her parents came to the United States to study. She became a U.S. citizen in 2017. Jeong, a graduate of the University of California Berkeley and Harvard Law School, had expressed publicly many interesting opinions about white people. Here are only a few:
“Dumbass f***ing white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.”
It’s “kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.”
I’m “just imagining being white and waking up every morning with a terrible existential dread about how I have no culture.”
“Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically only being fit to live underground like groveling bilious goblins?”
“Have you ever tried to figure out all the things that white people are allowed to do that aren’t cultural appropriation? There’s literally nothing.”
“The world could get by just fine with zero white people.”
The Growing Threat of Repressive Social Justice]
The Times Explains:
The Times said Jeong did not really mean those mean things she said. Jeong herself said, “As a woman of color on the internet, I have faced torrents of online hate,” so her statements were just a ‘right back at you’ response. Usually, the Times is very tough when employees say things they disagree with. Perhaps vilifying whites is not something it disagrees with. As well, there were many defenses of Jeong by “progressive” writers, such as Beauchamp at Vox, and Reihan Salam at The Atlantic.
It is surprising that Jeong, who has benefitted by taking degrees at two of America’s greatest universities and been hired by the premier American newspaper, should hold whites in such animus. It would be difficult to make a case that Jeong herself has been disadvantaged by racism. Even less justifiable by discrimination are the cases of whites who have made anti-white declarations. A white Rutgers professor, James Livingston, shared on Facebook his feelings about whites:
OK, officially, I now hate white people. I am white people, for God’s sake, but can we keep them — us — us out of my neighborhood? I just went to Harlem Shake on 124 and Lenox for a Classic burger to go, that would be my dinner, and the place is overrun by little Caucasian assholes who know their parents will approve of anything they do. Slide around the floor, you little shithead, sing loudly, you unlikely moron. Do what you want, nobody here is gonna restrict your right to be white. I hereby resign from my race. **** these people.
The debate at Rutgers and beyond about whether Livingston’s words were racism or free speech was not very enlightening, in part because they were both free speech and racism. From his comments, it appears that Livingstone was more irritated by teenagers than by whites. So why did he not complain about teenagers, as most of us parents do, rather than attack them as white? The answer must go deeper than a discussion about racism vs. free speech.
Dreaming of White Genocide
One final example. On Christmas Eve 2016, Professor George Ciccariello of Drexel University in Philadelphia, “was” in the words of CNN “dreaming not of a white Christmas, but of a white massacre.” What were Professor Ciccariello’s words? “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide.”
How did we get to this place, in which hating white people, the majority of Americans, not to mention wishing them all murdered, is deemed a virtue? The answer is that our liberal democratic culture emphasizing individual freedom and equality has transitioned, particularly among university and media elites in large cities and on the coasts, to a new culture that classifies and treats people by race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. Some observers have called this new culture “victimhood culture,” others have called it “diversitarian culture,” but most generally it is referred to as “social justice” culture.
“Social justice” culture replaces the individual with census categories and ranks these categories on a hierarchy of power and a converse hierarchy of virtue. Categories are distinguished between those with power, which are oppressor categories, and those without, which are victim categories. Intersectionism is a tool encouraging the accumulation of credits for belonging to multiple victim categories.
The origins of “social justice” culture are in the 1970s. The Women’s Movement of the previous decade morphed into the ever more radical Feminist Movement, which framed social relations in the gross categories of patriarchal male oppressors and blameless female victims. Understanding and knowledge were deemed to be “positional,” biased by one’s social position, so that no man could understand women, and, as the discussion developed, no middle-class woman could understand a working-class woman, and no white woman could understand a woman of color, no urban woman of color could understand a rural woman of color, and so on ad infinitum reductio ad absurdum.
Identity and subjectivity became the standard for knowledge, with science, especially biology, rejected, and objectivity derided: “Objectivity is just male subjectivity.” Feminism thus contributed to postmodernism the rejection of objectivity and celebration of subjectivity. “Truth” no longer exists; “each person has her own truth.”
By the 1970s, some of the 1960s counter-culture and anti-war activists had become professors, and some among them became the last people in the world to believe in Marxism. From that time, Marxist anthropology, Marxist sociology, Marxist political science, and Marxist geography became an important fixture in universities, where Marxism remains today, sometimes camouflaged by post-USSR labels such as “critical anthropology” or “political ecology.”
The Marxist idea of opposed economic classes, capitalists and proletarians, which in theory drove history through their conflicts, while not popular with the American public of any class, contributed to “social justice” culture the idea of oppression between category classes.
Assumptions Can’t Be Challenged
Feminism and Marxism in teaching, research, and scholarship sought out illustrations to confirm their unquestioned presumptions. Neither feminism nor Marxism has been open to evidence that might challenge conclusions or raise doubts about their assumptions. In this sense, they are not frames of open research, but self-validating ideologies that cannot be questioned. Both are political programs, and their advocates activists; both are meant not to understand the world, but to change it. Marx was quite clear on this: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in CSqvarious ways. The point, however, is to change it.”
“Social justice” ideology has absorbed the legions of feminism and Marxism, classing people in gross demographic categories: male, female; white, black, other people of color; hetero, homo, bi, trans; Christians, Jews, Muslims, South Asians, etc. Categories are then ranked in power: males, whites, heteros, and Christians have power and are oppressors of those without — females, non-whites, LGBT, Muslims. The point of “social justice” ideology is to undercut the power and oppression structure, to relieve the powerful of their sinful oppression, and the oppressed of their terrible wounds. This is seen as an ethical fight: virtue is with “social justice” activists working for the welfare of the belabored, and against the power of the oppressors. Opponents of “social justice” are deemed to be evil.
However, individuals are regarded as evil not because of their attitudes or actions, but because of the structural position of the category to which they belong. White skin is equated with white supremacism. In fact, it is well documented that individual prejudice has declined remarkably, as shown in repeated surveys, and in interactions, e.g., the rapid growth of interracial marriages.
But this cuts no ice with “social justice” activists who argue that whites are still superordinate and therefore are, by virtue of being white, racist. Sociologists have helpfully invented the concept of “structural racism” to describe the statistical advantages on average that whites have over blacks.
One principle useful to activists that comes from this is that whites are deemed racist even if they are not personally prejudiced and do not discriminate because they belong to the powerful oppressors. In contrast, blacks, Asians, or non-white Hispanics who hate white people are not racist, because they do not have power. Thus, uniquely, whites are evil racists.
“Social justice” theorists have concluded that any statistical differences in status or assets between whites and blacks must be due to discrimination. This is unproven, as there are at least a number of other important influences that have not been taken into account and assessed as alternative explanations. One reason to doubt the discrimination explanation is that other unpopular minority populations are highly overrepresented in universities and prestigious professions. Furthermore, the historical facts are that blacks, Hispanics, and females have for decades received preferential treatment, being granted admittances and jobs at the expense of better qualified white male and Asian candidates.
“Social justice” theorists consider no alternative explanations of racism, and, in their view, denial of racism proves racism. The “social justice” solution is to ensure that all minorities are given preference in all jobs, positions, and organizations, at least until they reach their percentage of the population in every organization, irrespective of individual talent, achievement, merit, and suitability. This forced equality of result is dignified by terms such as “diversity” and “inclusion,” although for everyone included because of his race, someone else is excluded because of her race, for everyone included because of her gender, someone else is excluded because of his gender, and for everyone included because they belong to an “underrepresented minority,” others with superior credentials will be excluded. That is “social justice” “inclusion”!
No Concern for Truth
The epicenter of “social justice” is colleges and universities, which have jettisoned the impartial quest for truth, and replaced it with gender, race, and sexual preferences and advocacy, and restrictions on speech lest someone have to hear ideas that he or she disagrees with or have one’s feelings hurt. It is not an accident that two of the white anti-white haters quoted above are university professors, and that the other anti-white hater has two degrees from elite universities.
There are entire identity “disciplines,” such as women’s studies, black studies, and queer studies, whose raison d’etre is to advocate for females, blacks, and LGBTs. Their narrative has been adopted wholesale in the humanities, especially English and history, and the social sciences, especially sociology, an early adopter, and anthropology. In Canada “Indigenous Studies” rules, with whites labeled “colonialist settlers.”
Ditto the Canadian humanities and social sciences. And since most North American university administrators come from the “progressive” social sciences and humanities, they are fully onside with making “social justice” the priority, even appointing legions of “social justice” administrators, given such titles as “diversity and inclusion officers.” This “progressive” corruption of universities, however, is leaking into the rest of society, undermining liberal democratic values.
“Social justice” advocacy always entails vilification of whites, males, and heterosexuals. In the intersectional sweepstakes, white hetero males are awarded minus three points, which means three points of oppressor evil, while black lesbian females are awarded plus three points, three points of victimhood virtue. White straight females do not do much better than white males, granted minus two points, two steps down into oppressor evil.
Increasingly, courses are offered that focus directly on whites and men, but not to celebrate them. Reformed leftist and culture critic David Horowitz told the Washington Post in 2013, “Black studies celebrates blackness, Chicano studies celebrates Chicanos, women’s studies celebrates women and white studies attacks white people as evil.”
University of Kansas students will soon be able to study the rise of the “angry white male.”
The college course, called Angry White Male Studies, will dive into “the deeper sources of this emotional state while evaluating recent manifestations of male anger” in the United States and Britain since the 1950s.
The course catalog description states: “Employing interdisciplinary perspectives this course examines how both dominant and subordinate masculinities are represented and experienced in cultures undergoing periods of rapid change connected to modernity as well as to rights-based movements of women, people of color, homosexuals and trans individuals.”
Not to be outdone, Webster University plans a re-education camp, a la Communist China and North Korea:
Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri, with the beginning of the spring semester in full swing, plans to operate a “safe space” in the fall of 2019 for recovering white people to admit that they are, by virtue of being white, anti-black racists. Only whites are welcome in these meetings, where students can confess to their racism and their white privilege. Note that it is presumed that being racist is simply part of Caucasian DNA, and since “students of color” can’t be racist, they have no need to go to such meetings.
Vincent Flewellen, chief diversity officer (and by virtue of his being the “chief” officer of diversity at Webster University, it is obvious that there are multiple staff involved in such work, which explains partly why tuition continues to rise at American colleges and universities), is developing a program, based on a book entitled Witnessing Whiteness: The Need to Talk About Race and How to Do It.
At Arizona State University, a course labeled “The Problem of Whiteness” is “concerned with dismantling white supremacy in part by understanding how whiteness is socially constructed and experienced.” The professor expanded on this theme: “White supremacy makes it so that white people can’t see the world they have created.”
Some Whites May Have to Die
The University of Georgia graduate student and teaching assistant has expressed strong views about whites:
Osei-Frimpong is outspoken on social media and on his YouTube series The Funky Academic. In one example of a comment that has since been held against him as racist or violent, Osei-Frimpong said that “some white people may have to die for black communities to be whole in this struggle to advance freedom.” The California native also once said that he feels as if he’s around a “bunch of sociopaths” among whites in the South. [Emphasis added.]
What are the chances that he has not expressed anti-white views in his teaching?
According to the Washington Post, thirty or more American universities, including Princeton, UCLA, New Mexico, U of M Amherst have offered courses in whiteness studies. Teaching and research often overlap with other anti-Western themes, such as postcolonialism and orientalism. Anti-racist activists are prominent in the field.
A central concept in whiteness studies is so-called “white privilege,” which all whites allegedly benefit from, and which makes all whites racists. It is common today for white university students to be told to “check your privilege,” and to defer to students of color. For example, At the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, “the university’s Office of Student Life papered the campus with posters inviting students to “check your privilege” and listing examples of privilege such as being white, male, able-bodied, heterosexual, Christian or a native English speaker.”
What objections can be raised to “white studies”? The comments quoted at the beginning of this essay show that critiques of white people easily morph into hatred of white people and anti-white hate speech, skating on the edge of inciting violence against whites, even to the point of praising the prospect of white genocide.
There are also legitimate objections to the kind of analysis offered by “social justice” advocates. The use of gross census categories, such as gender and race, to explain social patterns is to ignore both individual and category diversities. Individuals in each category range in characteristics over multiple continua, and to treat men or women or white or blacks as of they were all the same is the erasure of individuals and ludicrously crude.
It is obviously ridiculous to say that a working-class white boy raised by a single, poorly educated parent is privileged in relation to a black boy in a middle-class family, brought up by two educated parents. As one parody of “wokeness” puts it, “Only last weekend we berated a white homeless man sitting outside Taco Bell for his appalling lack of self-awareness regarding not only his own privilege but his flagrant disrespect towards cultural appropriation.”
To treat gross census categories as if the only possible difference between categories is power flies in the face of everything we know about human cultures. Different cultures, or racial and gender sub-cultures, convey different assumptions, beliefs, values, and goals. It is undeniable that some cultures strongly encourage education and entrepreneurship, while other cultures are less oriented in those directions.
The great racial injustice claimed by “social justice” enthusiasts is an artifact of demanding equality of results in all areas of life, and labeling as “institutional racism” the lack of equality of results. But results in each field come from motivations, capacities, and dedication, and the choices that individuals and members of populations make. Claiming that differential results is solely, or even mainly a result of racism is an injustice to people’s choices and contributions, and a denial of truth and reality.
Whites make up the majority in the U.S. and Canada. In a democracy, the will of the majority is supposed to be respected. To vilify, discount, and discriminate against the majority on behalf of much smaller minorities, e.g., blacks make up 13% of the U.S. population, is highly undemocratic. And, for “social justice” advocates who claim the moral principle of absolute equality, how is it an advance of equality and civility to exchange anti-black for anti-white bigotry, and anti-female for anti-male discrimination?
Philip Carl Salzman
Philip Carl Salzman is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at McGill University, Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and a Director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.
https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2019/04/29/the-war-against-white-people/
