The progressive left’s angst over the ridiculously simple — and slightly mischievous — “It’s OK to Be White” posters is a case study in racial and cultural myopia.
As documented by The College Fix, there’s been no shortage of educationist outrage regarding the placards; most recently, one academic claimed the fliers’ true purpose is “to find sympathizers to the white nationalists’ cause.” Another said they are “unconsciously racist.”
This week, a student op-ed from the latter’s place of employment, the University of Manitoba, ups the ante even further. Not that we should take it too seriously, mind you (too often, it seems college students take to student paper opinion pages to offer a treatise on what they just learned in some “studies” class), but it offers a glimpse into how the left overreaches, as well as into the generational attitude shift in American race attitudes.
Writing in The Manitoban, Jacob Singleton wants white people to be “race traitors” and to “abolish whiteness.” When racial minorities invoke their racial identities, he says, it is to “advance their identity’s interests”; when white people do it, however, it’s to “reject calls for equality.”
Whiteness is maintained partly by white people’s apathy toward the destructive force of whiteness. Often, it almost seems as though the bulk of white people are entirely unaware of their racial interests — although they are universally and perpetually asserted. But white people erupt the moment white identity is challenged.
Singleton refers to Antifa as “modern John Browns” — those “who seek to violently confront those who most explicitly articulate white dominance through capitalism and governmental policies.”
In addition, capitalism must be vanquished for, in the words of Black Panther Party member Fred Hampton, “racism is an excuse used for capitalism.”
Again, a university student can be forgiven to a degree for such far-left field foolishness; it gets scarier when those with degrees engage in same.
Writing in The Hechinger Report, former dean of urban education at Davenport University Andre Perry elaborates on Singleton’s point about pride in racial (minority) identity. He claims that demonstrations of black and Latinx pride at the annual Association for the Study of Higher Education conference provoked “defensiveness” among some of the non-“woke” attendees … yet provides just one example of such — a (white) North Carolina State professor who says the ASHE has lost its “rigorous standards.”
He proceeds to quote, of all people, Rutgers University’s Brittney Cooper (she of the Clarence Thomas-denouncing speech “The End of Respectability: Black Feminism and Ratchet Politics,” who called Jesus Christ “potentially queer,” and said the 2015 Baltimore riots were “acts of justifiable rage and rebellion” because the US was founded on the premise that “Black people are not fully human”) who lambasted white people’s complaints about rigor: It’s “a code word for anything black people are not doing and every thing white people are doing.”
Cooper added: “Ain’t shit about white supremacy rigorous.” Nor the English language, it seems. (I know — my retort is likely “white supremacy,” too.)
The good news — for now — is that the attitudes of the Singletons and Perrys come from an insulated academic bubble. Few in the real world believe Antifa is a force for justice, that capitalism should be dismantled, and that high standards are synonymous with racism.
The bad news: More and more middle school, high school, and college students are being inundated with such beliefs every day.
We can hope that, upon entrance to said real world, students will reevaluate much of the nonsense those like Cooper had spewed.
It’s quite difficult to believe a society can continue to exist where people are judged by the color of their skin rather than what they can do … and who they are inside.
MORE: Gender inclusive term ‘Latinx’ is ‘clapping back at whiteness’
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