The Unbearable Whiteness of Being

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | July 10, 2020 | Bruce Bawer

[karpov]

f you had told me a couple of years ago that a book like Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism would be topping the bestseller lists and receiving accolades from all over, I wouldn’t have believed it.

And I’m speaking as someone who, in my 2012 book The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind, warned about the dire ascendancy of identity studies, which are far less about education than about ideological indoctrination and the promotion of social activism.

Although I focused in my book on Women’s Studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Chicano Studies, I devoted a few pages to DiAngelo’s then-fledgling field, Whiteness Studies, which, given the current preoccupation with white racism, is now poised for prominence on a level outstripping even those behemoths.

There is a key difference between Whiteness Studies and other identity studies: to quote David Horowitz, “Black Studies celebrates blackness, Chicano studies celebrates Chicanos, women’s studies celebrates women, and white studies attacks white people as evil.”

Strangely, Whiteness Studies almost didn’t make it.

The election of Barack Obama made it difficult for practitioners to assert with a straight face that black Americans were still victims of brutal systemic white racism—the discipline’s principal claim. “Having Obama is, in a curious way, putting us behind,” Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, author of White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era and now president of the American Sociological Association, admitted to CNN in 2012.

Charles Mills, a distinguished professor of philosophy at CUNY whose books have titles like The Racial Contract, Blackness Visible, and Black Rights/White Wrongs, agreed, lamenting that Obama’s election had fooled many white Americans into thinking the U.S. was now “post-racial.”

[OpusatFR]

The democrats have nothing left but a dream. They dream whites will launch retaliation against the blaKKK lives matter campaign.

The Caucasian race achieved what it has in creating this civilization by thinking. Once the enemy is known, then a campaign begins. We know the enemy and will not play their game.

[sauropod]

bkmk

[Truthoverpower]

You nailed it on the head they are desperate for a Kent state event

The closest thing they’ve had recently was the guy who hit those two protesters in Seattle and Adham fly like 50 feet up in the air but whoops! The guy ended up being black So the media immediately dropped it

[Altura Ct.]

“Black Studies celebrates blackness, Chicano studies celebrates Chicanos, women’s studies celebrates women, and white studies attacks white people as evil.”

As is everything else in all of this race crap. Why whites tolerate this is beyond me. White are fair game and most white act like that is OK.

[griswold3]

And as they continue to be ignored as the buzzing gnats they are (After all this is nothing new), will they dare to step up the violence for attention?

[Rummyfan]

It’s a shabby way to make a living—mischievous, drenched in hypocrisy. It certainly has nothing to do with serious research, scholarship, or education. It’s social activism, based on grotesque misconceptions about how society works.

Such destructive nonsense has no proper place in an institution of higher learning. Like other identity studies, it’s a waste of time and money, having little or nothing to do with expanding a student’s knowledge of the world; but, even more than other identity studies, it’s malicious and dangerous, designed to sow hatred and intensify racial discord.

One of the biggest problems at our universities is the existence of all the studies departments. They should all be done away with.