Campus race-obsession: Proselytizing the alumni By Henry Wickham
I am sitting here thumbing through my newly arrived Kenyon Alumni Magazine. Other than the obits and the class notes, it is rarely worth reading, and is usually nauseatingly predictable as a vehicle for all the conventional campus orthodoxies. As ever, this one is full of all the woke BS that I expect to read from a hermetically sealed echo-chamber that virtually every campus has become.
As does every college alumni magazine, the College publishes these little vignettes on those wonderful alumni/ae who do all those enlightened, smart, successful things.
I see we have “Jane” (name disguised), who is doing good things in Arlington, Virginia. She is working hard to end “systemic racism,” though it is never defined and merely asserted as “must be true.” In 2017 she founded Facing Race in Arlington/White Folks Facing Race, which is designed to “connect community members who are working on becoming more anti-racist.” Are there different levels of anti-racism? Just asking. What could be finer than her continuing personal mission of “unlearning white supremacy”?
We are told that the “survival” of her “colleagues of color” depends on her work. Can those sheeted nightriders who frequent Arlington, Virginia be but a few blocks away? So brave, so inspired; proud to be one of the 300 at Thermopylae on the Potomac.
Note the many unspoken assumptions here.
1) That Arlington, Virginia (as I understand it, now heavily Democratic) must be full of unenlightened bigots, just waiting for the opportunity to threaten the “survival” (yes, the very survival) of anyone “of color.”
2) That those “people of color” need to be protected or even saved by such a wonderfully woke white lady.
3) That it is not only possible but admirable implicitly to confess her sins (“white supremacy”) while simultaneously organizing this defense of progressive virtue.
4) That there is nothing wrong with or even questionable about endorsing a racist screed like that of Ibram X. Kendi, even as she claims to be working against racism.
5) That there is nothing inconsistent with her touting the inspiration of her studies of history while ignoring the sordid history of racial strife fostered by the sort of obsession with race and ethnicity that she demonstrates.
Did she miss the 20th Century?
Yes, it is race and re-education uber alles on campus, and for alumni, it doesn’t end there.
Photo credit: Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 License
Comments are closed.
