Posted on 03/31/2023 9:42:47 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Last month I wrote about a black professor’s experience teaching a seminar for a group of high school kids about race and the law. Professor Vincent Lloyd had taught a seminar like this before for the Telluride Association and it had been a good experience. But the second time around he found himself “trapped in anti-racist hell” thanks to “Keisha,” the person assigned to be his teaching assistant. Keisha quickly radicalized his students and turned them against one another (two students were voted out by the others) and against him. “The students had all of the dogma of anti-racism, but no actual racism to call out in their world, and Keisha had channeled all of the students’ desire to combat racism at me,” he wrote in his account for Compact Magazine.
Today, Compact Magazine has published a similar first-person account written by another black education professional. Tabia Lee was, for for a little over a year, the faculty director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education at De Anza Community College in California. After getting the job, Lee quickly learned that questioning “the tenets of critical social justice” was unacceptable.
For instance, simply attempting to set an agenda for meetings caused my colleagues to accuse me of “whitespeaking,” “whitesplaining,” and reinforcing “white supremacy”—accusations I had never faced before. I was initially baffled, but as I attended workshops led by my officemates and promoted by my supervising dean, I repeatedly encountered a presentation slide titled “Characteristics of White-Supremacy Culture” that denounced qualities like “sense of urgency” and “worship of the written word.” Written meeting agendas apparently checked both boxes…
As I attended more events and spoke with more people, I realized that the institutional redefinition of familiar terms wasn’t limited to “white supremacy.” Race, racism, equality, and equity, I discovered, meant different things to my coworkers and supervising dean than they did to me. One of my officemates displayed a graphic of apples dropping to the ground from a tree, with the explanation that “equity means everybody gets some of the apples”; my officemates and supervising dean praised him for this “accurate definition.” When I pointed out that this definition seemed to focus solely on equality of outcomes, without any attention to equality of opportunity or power, it was made clear this perspective wasn’t welcome. “Equity” and “equality,” for my colleagues, were separate and even opposed concepts, and as one of them told me, the aspiration to equality was “a thing of the past.”
Lee held a workshop in which she presented two different racial justice outlooks. The first was Ibram Kendi style anti-racism and the second was taken from the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. This second view is one Lee describes as “a more open-ended view of oppression and privilege, wherein human destiny is determined by human choices.” The point of her workshop was to find points in common and to try to bridge a gap which she believed was already present among the staff. Later, during her tenure evaluation, one of her evaluators claimed that her presentation of Kendi’s views was deeply offensive.
Anything short of lockstep adherence to critical social justice was impermissible. “Criticism” was only supposed to go in one direction. Contextualizing my colleagues’ views and comparing them to other approaches to the same issues, much less criticizing them, was “dangerous”; my supposed failure to “accept criticism” was, simply put, a refusal to accept without question the dogmas these colleagues saw as beyond criticism.
Eventually, a group of her colleagues went to the Board of Trustees and demanded Lee be fired. Speaking of her time at De Anza Community College, Lee writes:
For those within the critical-social-justice-ideological complex, asking questions, encouraging other people to ask questions, and considering multiple perspectives—all of these things, which should be central to academic work, are an existential danger. The advocates of critical social justice emphasize oppression and tribalistic identity, and believe that a just society must ensure equality of outcomes; this is in contrast to a classical social-justice approach, which focuses on freedom and individuality, understands knowledge as objective and tied to agency and free will, and believes that a just society emphasizes equality of opportunity. The monoculture of critical social justice needs to suppress this alternative worldview and insulate itself from criticism so its advocates can maintain their dominant position. Protection of orthodoxy supersedes all else: collegiality, professionalism, the truth.
It sounds like a miserable experience though the dogmatism isn’t surprising if you’ve been paying any attention at all to how proponents of Kendi-style critical theory operate. They use the same methods to maintain control that they used to gain it in the first place, ruthless group suppression and deplatforming of critics.
No sympathy
Diversity Inclusion Equity is Marxism Leninism Communism it’s 1984, Animal Farm and so much more.
Danton was never good enough for Robespierre
Them white liberals feel the need to whitesplan to the black folk that the white liberals think that black folks cannot think for themselves.
http://images2.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED76/534ef7596a63a.jpeg
I’m glad I retired. In the real corporate world, you better have an agenda and bullet points for a meeting. These teachers are not preparing students for the outside world. They are going to fail
They all tryin’ to out-woke each other.
As a professor friend once quipped, "The reason the infighting is so bad in academia is because the stakes are so low."
That was then--the 90s. Now, some DEI tsars are getting paid to be fascist dictators.
Top DEI staff at public universities pocket massive salaries as experts question motives of initiatives
A review of salary data shows that the universities of Michigan, Maryland, Virginia and Illinois, plus Virginia Tech, boast some of the highest-paid DEI staffers at public universities, a Fox News review found. These institutions' top diversity employees earn salaries ranging from $329,000 to $430,000 – vastly eclipsing the average pay for the schools' full-time tenured professors.
At one time De Anza and Foothill were very good places to get your first two years done at a very inexpensive cost
I imagine she feels a bit like Dr. Frankenstein when his monster got loose and started terrorizing the community. You made the thing, now what are you going to do about it?
Cultural Revolution, next stop “re-education camps” or ...
“Cultural Revolution, next stop “re-education camps” or ...“
It is the Chinese communist model of the Cultural Revolution.
That is where the term “woke” was coined, for awareness of politically correct thinking, speaking and acting.
Young “Red Guards” energetically cancelled their elders for any slight deviation, in a self-consuming spiral of increasing extremism. The Khmer Rouge modeled their purges on the same inspiration.
Same as the French Revolution, it’s human nature. That’s why anyone who thinks it can’t happen here, is deluding themselves.
All will vanish overnight when the Big War comes. It will be cool with the early victories come Our woke army rides into battle, Pride flags flying in our super tanks. Not so much when they burning hulks. Not so cool when we send up 20 of our F-18’s to support the troops and only two come back. The woke junk will be gone with the first defeat. It will be gone when a sub sinks our super carriers, and they fear to leave port. Even the tin patriotism of Rock stars will not be enough to revive the pride movement. Then the hate and fear of the nation will focus on Biden, Harris, Hillary and the gang. I hope I am wrong.
Except HR depts are going to side with them. Enforcing normal professional standards will be seen as ‘toxic’ and ‘offensive’ as they’re against DEI concepts. Remember, it’s about ‘equality of outcome’, not merit or international competition.
Of course, it is absurd. The whole ‘equality of outcome’ is nothing more than communism wrapped in different clothing. Yes, you will end up with the same ‘equal’ level of living standards, equal misery and poverty. You can either raise all boats through high expectations and competition or lower all boats by limiting everyone by the lowest common denominator.
These people are fools living in an easy age. Do they believe China will follow this garbage? The long term implications are horrifying. It’s really not funny to see them already eating their own, it just tells you how bad it is getting. I know for a fact that I’ve not attained positions due to being a straight white male. Some of the promotions are quietly laughed at. What is ironic is that the liberal white women that have supported all this nonsense are about to be targeted too - just being a woman doesn’t bring enough intersectionality points anymore.
Hail to the disabled black trans-female lesbians!!!
It is ultimately self-defeating. The problem is they’re going to destroy everything in the process and drag us through it too.
Welcome to the world you helped to create.
One Ayn Rand quote that is applicable here:
“The right to agree with others is not a problem in any society; it is the right to disagree that is crucial.”
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