https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/03/19/higher_ed_approaches_the_antiracism_training_abyss_145442.html
William A. Jacobson is a clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School and president of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to free expression and academic freedom on campuses.
Free expression and open inquiry in higher education are under attack by ideologues seeking to impose neo-Marxist “critical” theories, most prominently critical race theory, which places race at the center of all political and social issues.
Critical race theory training, misleadingly characterized as “antiracism” training, has spread widely throughout higher education and is often compared to Maoist struggle sessions, where dissent incurs public shaming, job loss, and harassment. This training often turns into race-shaming and Kafka-trapping, using denial of racism as proof of racism. The result is self-imposed racial conflict and systemic retaliatory discrimination masquerading as “equity.”
Claims of “white privilege” and “white fragility” are used to bully people into submission. Columbia University Professor John McWhorter refers to this delusion as “neoracism,” which “teaches that racism is baked into the structure of society, so whites’ ‘complicity’ in living within it constitutes racism itself.”
Rather than lessening racism, these approaches adopt discriminatory racial practices and verbiage that in any other context would be rightfully deemed racist. Instead of focusing on inherent human worth without regard to skin color, race becomes the obsessive focus and measure.
The ubiquitous term “antiracist” thus is one of the greatest linguistic sleights of hand and deceptions of our time, yet it is unmistakably transforming education in America today. As the Manhattan Institute’s Coleman Hughes points out, “the modern antiracist movement is not against discrimination. It is against inequity, which in many cases makes it pro-discrimination.”
The foundational text for this corrosive philosophy is “How to Be an Antiracist” by Boston University professor Ibram X. Kendi, who insists that “[t]he only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination” and foments a perpetual struggle session by artificially dividing people into “antiracists” and “racists.” According to Kendi, it is impossible to be “not racist.” Those who do not actively seek to dismantle systemic racism, including in one’s own psyche, are racist by this definition.
Perhaps worst of all is that the so-called antiracist movement sets up an interracial struggle that never can be absolved. Racial struggle is the entire point of so-called antiracist movement, around which a lucrative industry of authors, consultants, and administrators has been built. Too many people are making too much money from so-called antiracist training for a return to the colorblind ideals of the civil rights movement.
This corrosive ideology has swept American culture, especially on college campuses, where it threatens irreversible damage to academic freedom. Cornell University, where I have taught law since 2007, is approaching this abyss under an “antiracist” initiative launched after George Floyd’s death. Unfortunately, Cornell may become an example of how a desire to address racism can go horribly wrong.
