RUTHFULLY YOURS

At the Consortium of Higher Education for LGBT Resource Professionals, one learns that at an upcoming webinar, “queer and trans people of color are welcome to join and engage in or observe the space.  However, we do want to provide a content warning that in these spaces we hope white folks will process our thoughts and behaviors in a learning environment so we can address them and discuss and [sic] tactics of decentering whiteness.”

The topic is “How our institutions center whiteness as a dominant narrative and how we can decenter whiteness at an organizational level.  Facilitators: Jesse Beal, they/them, Director, Women’s and Gender Center, Amherst College” and “Kayla Lisenby, they/them or she/her, Assistant Director, LGBTQ Center, Wake Forest University.”

Under the social justice rubric, being born white makes one evil, plain and simple.  In fact, according to Dr. Kathy Obear, one can either be a good white ally or a bad one.  Thus, everything is seen through the prism of race.

If white people ask people of color to teach them how to say things correctly to avoid racism, this actually results in a burden on people of color to constantly educate.  Thus, you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

In fact, calling on someone to check his so-called privilege is an ad hominem attack.  In particular, this logical fallacy is guilt by association.  Being a part of the Caucasian race automatically makes a person guilty.

In actuality, white privilege is predicated on the idea that there needs to be “universal white guilt on the one hand and universal black innocence on the other.”  For example, at the Crunk Feminist Collective, one learns that in 2012 Arizona governor Jan Brewer should have kept her fingers to herself when she confronted President Barack Obama about his immigration policies.  Brewer was engaging in white female privilege and was “being disrespectful as hell.”  Rather than explaining that she was incensed that a president of the United States could trample over the rights of American citizens, this episode is seen only through the prism of race and gender.

In fact, even saying “illegal immigration” proves one’s racism, according to the purveyors of this ideology.  We are told that “white privilege conditions white people not to see white rage,” which is clearly never warranted.  It will never be described as righteous indignation over Obama’s animosity toward a state that was, in fact, upholding federal law.

White privilege works in perverse ways.  While being Christian results in “unearned benefits,” those undergoing training about their alleged white privilege are invited into “sacred spaces” to admit racist attitudes.  How quaint that spirituality is brought to bear while Christianity is crucified as a means of eliminating racism.

According to Mikhail Lyubansky at Psychology Today, “institutional racism” appears to be prevalent at colleges.  But he is not addressing the skewed affirmative action programs that are clearly discriminatory against whites and Asians.

On many campuses, there is a return to the days of segregation, where students of color hold separate graduation ceremonies.  On the other hand, Lyubansky maintains that “there is such a thing as racial-minority privilege.  In marginalized spaces (also called counter spaces), this means that people of color generally have the privilege of speaking about race without having their point of view challenged solely on the basis of their racial identity or racial appearance.”

At this point, the jabberwocky of the above becomes evident.  Everything is racial by their own admission, but it shouldn’t “be challenged solely” on race!

Moreover, “anti-racism activism by Whites … makes the statement that racism is not a ‘people of color problem’ but an ‘American problem’ or ‘human problem’ and that the solution will not come from the work of people of color … but from the collaborative efforts of all Americans and, on the international stage, all human beings.”

How, then, do they explain that the slave capital of the world is found in Mauritania, where Africans have enslaved other Africans for generations?  Either it is a problem based on behavior and not on racial characteristics or it isn’t.

There is a cult-like atmosphere to these groups.  They are zealous about their belief system, and they clearly manipulate and exploit people to “pay homage to their finely tuned morality and superior knowledge of intersectional hierarchies.”  Also, “questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged[.]”  Notably, the group has an “us-versus-them mentality,” and it often “induces feelings of shame and/or guilt in order to influence and control members.”

While Obear claims that shame is rarely useful, she certainly lays a guilt trip on white people.  Thus, when a white woman starts to cry when confronted about her purported racist behavior, many people of color “feel deeply frustrated.”  Why?  Because, again, the white person has co-opted the space, thus marginalizing the concerns of people of color.

One of the “Guiding Resources” at this consortium is “White Supremacy Culture” by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun.  Written in 2001, this is “a list of characteristics of white supremacy culture[.]”  With the resources encased in feel-good ideas that espouse a “culture of appreciation,” one would be hard pressed without additional research to know the depths of animus toward whites.

It would be easy to dismiss these people, but they have enormous influence on gullible students.  Moreover, white privilege is sustained by diversity offices.  In fact, students at the University of Colorado can earn up to three academic credits in a course requiring attendance at the annual White Privilege Conference.

Thus, “[p]osters inform students that if they can use public bathrooms without ‘stares, fear or anxiety,’ they have ‘cisgender privilege.’  Or that if they can expect time off from work to celebrate their religious holidays, they have ‘Christian privilege.'”  Then there is the poster that states that “[i]f you’re confident that the police exist to protect you, you have white male privilege.”  Under the heading of social justice, students in middle school are also being inculcated with these ideas.  This potent left-wing indoctrination is now mainstream.

As Joanna Williams writes, the concept of privilege merely “reinvents discrimination as a fixed condition rooted within the biological differences between individuals rather than a social problem.”  Thus “dominant groups [are] told to shut up.”  Ultimately, the idea that “privilege can be tallied based on gender, skin color, sexuality, hair type, or body shape” should be called out for the racism and sexism it is.

Those who engage in the white privilege argument merely perpetuate racism under the spurious umbrella of compassion.  They are not to be trusted, believed, or promoted.

Hat tip: PC