The original sin of white privilege

Justus Walker was enjoying his Grade 11 class in sociology. Then came the lesson on white privilege. The teacher handed out a checklist with instructions for the students to score themselves on how much of it they had. The questions included things such as: “I can go into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions.” The answers would determine their “privilege points.” After they had completed the exercise, the students were asked to line up in order, from least points to most, and discuss the impact of white privilege on their lives.

Some of the questions were hard to answer, because Justus is multiracial – some Scottish, some Jamaican, some Indian, and so on. Which cultural traditions is he supposed to identify with? He doesn’t self-identify by race, ethnic origin, or skin colour. “I just am Canadian,” he says. As for ethnic food, “I can find Jamaican food in a grocery store but I can’t find haggis.”

White privilege is now a part of the Ontario school curriculum. It is taught in teacher training, and is a routine part of anti-bias education. The idea is that white people benefit from unearned advantages based on race. Canada is depicted as a deeply racialized society where people are automatically advantaged, or disadvantaged, by their skin tone, race and (by extension) gender.

Justus and his mom, Karen, were guests this week on Ontario Today, a CBC Radio call-in show that, to its great credit, dared to tackle this incendiary subject. Among the other guests was Arlo Kempf, who has taught anti-discrimination to teachers at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. “Adding the lens of privilege implicates everyone in the conversation,” he explained. “We have to look at those invisible spaces of whiteness where privilege goes unchecked.”

Karen Walker disagrees. “If you took out the word ‘white’ and used any other race, it would be perceived as racist,” she said. “It’s stereotyping in reverse.”

I spoke with Ms. Walker after the program. Other parents in the school were also uncomfortable, she said, but were reluctant to speak up. As a dark-skinned person, she felt she could stick her neck out. “A lot of people are afraid to say that this is racism,” she told me. “But it is.”

Ms. Walker grew up in a small Ontario town where minorities were rare. Her Jamaican father told her she’d have to work harder and do better because she was a woman of colour. But for her, discrimination wasn’t a problem. “I’ve never really felt outside of the Canadian culture.” She hoped that Canada was becoming “the colour-blind society that Martin Luther King advocated for.” Instead, she says, “we’re trying to force people back into these boxes, to the detriment of our kids.”

Canadian schools have long been preoccupied with social justice. As the schools became secularized, they replaced the old doctrines of morality and Christian duty with the new doctrines of multiculturalism, anti-bullying and environmentalism. The doctrine of white privilege entered the Ontario school system around 2013, according to Mr. Kempf. It is a modern version of original sin, which demands confession and atonement – even from people who are deeply anti-racist. “The term implies that whiteness itself is a problem,” Ms. Walker says. “That’s profoundly hurtful.”

Like many other education fads, this one was imported straight from the United States. The questionnaire, developed by an anti-racism activist named Peggy McIntosh, is known as “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” and is nearly 30 years old. It was not modified for Canada, which, in case you hadn’t noticed, is quite a different country.

Most of the callers to the CBC program were not in an atoning mood. They were angry, defensive and dismayed. They pointed out that not all white people are equally advantaged, and cited their own family histories at length. “I have a labouring job because I don’t have Grade 11,” said one caller. “I don’t have privilege. Professors at OISE have privilege.”

No one would argue that privilege doesn’t exist, or that racism is extinct, or that these things don’t matter. Of course they do. But privilege comes in many forms. One of the most important privileges anyone can have – far more important to life outcomes than skin tone – is an intact two-parent family. Too bad they don’t teach that in school. Maybe they should.

The other day I read a tweet from Sunil Sharma, who manages an elite program for budding entrepreneurs at the Founder Institute in Toronto. “40% of my new class of entrepreneurs are women,” he said. “75% of the entire class are minorities.”

Joe Kay gives an excellent account of the Black Lies Matter movement. Black Protests are a Black klan movement:
Campus Transformation. By the late 1980s or early 1990s, the agenda shifted from increasing the number of blacks on campus to transforming the campus to make blacks feel “at home,” and to correct what was seen as overpowering if not debilitating whiteness. “Diversity” was now official orthodoxy, and was implement top to bottom. Universities also increasingly focused on “retention,” so students who once would have flunked out now stayed on and even graduated, thanks to majors such as Black Studies.
Stage Four: The campus, to use a nuclear physics term, goes “critical.” Intensified recruitment had failed to attract qualified black students and faculty, but to meet quotas for non-whites, recruitment for students, faculty, and administrators moved ever farther toward the left side of the bell curve. Whereas earlier blacks on campus might have been challenged by Math 101, today’s recruits are utterly bewildered.
Meanwhile, since it is impossible to recruit enough competent black faculty, the problem is solved by hiring black administrators who understand that their cushy jobs depend on keeping the racial grievance pot boiling. To this end they invent bogus explanations for black academic failure: structural racism, micro-aggressions, white privilege, and stereotype threat. Further pressure for diversity now comes from white students marinated in the “diversity-is-our-strength” dogma.
Consider a typical set of demands: Students at UCLA want $40 million out of the school’s endowment to fund “a comprehensive effort to address the underrepresentation of African-American students, faculty, and staff at our university.” They also want free housing for black students, campus safe spaces, mandatory cultural awareness training for all students, and sundry other accommodations. These demands are in response to innocuous incidents: The white student body president was caught making black gang signs, or someone posted the rap sheet of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore man who died in an arrest gone bad.
At University of Chicago, “students of color” just issued 50 demands, including the usual stuff: free tuitions for illegals, special club houses for blacks, Hispanics, and Asians; and entirely new departments of Black Studies, African Studies, Caribbean Studies, and Asian-American Studies.
What Explains the Protest Mania?
There are two major factors driving these periodic upheavals. The first is the intellectual deficiency of most of today’s black students. The second are the incentives for school administrators to give in.
Blacks would not protest if they were of the same intellectual caliber as whites and Asians. The wider the average gaps, the more frequent the protests, which can be seen as a kind of “self medication.” After weeks of classroom frustration, it is euphoric to take over the president’s office and watch him squirm when you present 25 non-negotiable demands. Thanks to social media, the cost for organizing a protest is about zero, and who can resist the instant camaraderie and media coverage that comes from waving homemade signs and chanting anti-racist slogans?
It is as if these students believed that administrators have special, almost magical powers that can cause dim students to succeed, so obtaining a diploma just requires putting pressure on white functionaries. Tom Wolfe called it Mau-Mauing the flak catchers. This exaggerated view of white capacity harks back to the slogan “Moon and the Ghetto” of the 1960s—if Washington can send a man to the moon, it can fix the inner-city.
The tip-off to the therapeutic, non-rational nature of these demands is that most are impractical, illegal, or academically irrelevant. Can the administration really double the size of the black faculty in only a few months? Do the UCLA protestors really think they can extract $40 million from the state of California? Do innumerate students even know what $40 million is? And how, for example, will protestors benefit from forcing the colleges to raise the wages of campus food workers or from divesting from firms running private prisons? Other demands are punitive, such as asking for demeaning written apologies from the college president.
Campus protestors are unlike professionally run interest groups that have specific goals and negotiate their demands rationally. Protest feeds on itself, like thrill-seekers who must always find new excitement to sustain their high. Demonstrators become adrenalin–driven “protest junkies.”
But why do school administrators tolerate this nonsense? Why not immediately call campus security? Mainly because these demands, no matter how foolish or expensive, personally cost administrators nothing. These are utterly unlike labor union demands, which could bankrupt a firm and cost the CEO his job. No board of trustees warns the school’s president that hiring more black teachers could mean cutting his travel budget. Expenses may be trimmed but they will be invisible—not filling an empty faculty position in the Classics Department.
In the short run the extra money needed for surrender can be raised by increasing tuition, squeezing a few rich donors, or pleading for more government funding. Universities are not competitive businesses for which soaring expenses must be covered by increased revenue. They are more like public utilities that can meet increased costs by charging more for services
Meeting black demands is actually a bonanza any administrator who measures his status by the size of his budget. Building a cultural center, hiring black psychologists and sensitivity counselors, setting up new departments, adding yet more Deans with titles such as Senior Associate Director of Admission for Access and Inclusion (I have not made this up)—all this means larger bureaucratic empires and even salary increases because of new responsibilities. Protestors and administrators often have symbiotic relationships; black agitators never insist that the school slash the president’s entertainment fund to pay for a new black-themed residency hall.
Furthermore, an administrator who immediately caves in to even the most outrageous demands is likely to be applauded for “managing” potentially violent conflict. The solution is always to spend other people’s money, and college administrators are never fired for being wimps. Any hardliner who ordered arrests would be judged inflexible and insensitive to the plight of blacks on today’s white-dominated campuses. “It’s only money,” and what’s money when it comes to giving hope and making amends for past injustices?
Finally, black protestors are the perfect useful idiots for radical administrators. For social justice warriors masquerading as university bureaucrats, having black students advance your agenda—often with the threat of violence—is a godsend. All the campus brouhaha will intimidate those who might resist today’s cultural Marxism. Fans of ideological indoctrination can always blame protestors for the onward march of campus totalitarianism: The protestors forced me!
Can this Go On Forever?
The short answer is “no,” but it can last for some time. It is not easy to stop empire building or self-medication. Eventually—hopefully—pressure will come from outside, from state legislatures, trustees, or donors, all sick of this embarrassing behavior. What happened at the University of Missouri may be a sign of things to come: the university’s total surrender to of protestors caused thousands of parents to enroll their children elsewhere, and tuition revenue fell sharply.
The real source of the problem—unqualified black students—could be quietly eliminated. Tactics might include substituting immigrant or second-generation African or Caribbean blacks for American blacks, who have a weak work ethic and like mindless protests. Administrators could surreptitiously welcome lawsuits against egregious demands, such as “blacks only” housing. Parody might help, too: White students could demand a Department of Hillbilly Studies. Even better, admissions officers might suddenly discover that although recent court decisions permit racial preferences they do not require them.
Black protest will not end until colleges return to the “Campus at Rest” state, in which a small number of black students are admitted on ability rather than to fill quotas. This will not happen until universities recognize that blacks cannot perform at the same level as whites. Every year, college administrators seem ever more determined to deny the obvious. By Joe Kay

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