Commentary
The death of George Floyd in May 2020 set off a nationwide conflagration of riots and demands for “justice” in every corner of America. We were soon to discover that this notion of justice was peculiar. It consisted of an ever-expanding list of demands emanating from non-profits and shady groups such as “Antifa.”
Calls to “defund the police” became a rallying cry, particularly from Black Lives Matter, a self-described Marxist group that has also called for boycotting Israel and the dissolution of the nuclear family. Corporate donations poured into the coffers of this group and of many other groups of this tilt.
As the television pundits tell it, we were in the midst of a “racial reckoning,” a phrase that aged rapidly to cliché and which was never quite explained. Nor was the awkward deification of a felon ever quite explained. Floyd, after all, was the accidental martyr, someone with a vita completely unsuited to the posthumous role thrust on him. But it really didn’t matter. We had already passed through the gates to mob rule, and it would go on for month after fiery month, with death and destruction the real legacy of Floyd, who stumbled his way into martyrdom with fentanyl, methamphetamine, and cannabinoids in his system, and unfortunately fell into the grip of an abusive policeman who is now in prison for his crime.
Justice was done for Floyd, of course. But this meant nothing to the opportunists eager to grab a slice of retribution pie. It’s in the character of opportunists to lurk constantly, watching and waiting for moments like these. They made the most of this one.
Indeed, an entire cottage industry of racialist entrepreneurs sprang into action. The cottage industry of “Diversity and Equity,” already puzzlingly influential, became a booming multi-billion dollar industry of self-styled consultants and counselors.
Authors, both black and white, made their millions with the rise of two literary genres: Black “
J’Accuse...!” and the
White confession. Bestsellers full of black rage and of white contrition hit the streets as fast as presses could churn them out, turning mediocrities into millionaires. For instance, one young woman laboring as a standup comedian and whose only prior book was a self-published feminist coloring book soared up the bestseller list with a racialist screed. The formula was repeated with assembly-line efficiency.
But it was on the nation’s college campuses that the Floyd mania saw its most elaborate expression and lasting impact. Why this should be is no surprise. Assorted left-wing activists have always assembled on the college campuses, tapping into lucrative subsidies, joining with fellow travelers and like-thinkers. But the ugly fact is that Floyd’s murder had nothing to do with America’s universities, the
least “racist” places in the land. To campus opportunist racialists, this didn’t matter.
Floyd’s murder catalyzed a group always poised to put into action its schemes for a better world, and this invariably translates into the acquisition of more personnel, power, privilege, and money in the university. Racialist authors, who happened to be academics such as Ibram X. Kendi cashed in for millions in
donations and hundreds of thousands of dollars in
speaking fees. Sociologist Robin DiAngelo (whose slender credentials appear to morph to the occasion), launched a new career in
white groveling. Unknown scholars like Tema Okun suddenly found a ready market for the most
bizarre speculations.
George Floyd was a bonanza for the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion movement on the campuses, never mind that his unfortunate fate had nothing to do with any university in the nation. The invocation of his name was enough. And it still is, obscenely so.
On campuses nationwide, racialist handwringing became the norm, and seminars and workshops multiplied as a form of garment rending. As if on cue, colleges and universities launched antiracism “task forces” to tackle the assumed problem of racism on the campuses—“institutional racism,” “systemic racism,” “individual racism,” and at least 20 other racisms that are manufactured on-demand, as needed. They multiply even as you read this.
This “racial reckoning” purported to be a noble goal. It gave rise to the phenomenon of antiracism, a repertoire of programs, policies, notions, feelings, and urges that would conquer this scourge of “racisms.” But one problem surfaced time and again.
On virtually every campus and behind every ivy-covered wall ... with entire campuses mobilized to tackle the issue of the 21st century ... with supine college presidents ready to grant any and all concessions, no matter how stupidly brazen or brazenly stupid ...
No racism could be found. None.
Consider that for a moment. All of that campus outrage and no racism or racists to turn it on. Nowhere was this lack of campus racism more embarrassingly highlighted than at Princeton University.
At Princeton, more than 300 faculty signed a
July 4, 2020, letter of more than 40 demands that called the university to account for “rampant” racism. When asked for examples of this rampant racism in the form of “racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication” at Princeton that occurred over, say, the past 15 years,
no faculty signatories could or would provide a single example. In other words, they could offer
not one instance of the problem that they purportedly wished to address and even solve.
This constitutes the elephant in the quad for universities. It’s the elephant that everyone ignores, because it’s too embarrassing. That elephant is this: the problem that antiracism claims to address does not exist in America’s universities.
That bears repeating. The
racism problem that antiracism claims to address does not exist in America’s universities. It’s so nonexistent, in fact, that radical minority students and faculty at times have contrived
hate hoaxes on their campuses to “raise awareness” about the “problem” for which no actual examples can be provided. A “problem” that must be manufactured by
hate hoaxers. A troubling and quite recent example is discussed by Amber Athey in
The Spectator.
Does that mean that folks don’t do racist things occasionally on college campuses? Sure they do, and they are punished, as well they should be. But that’s really not what the antiracism folks are talking about. Not nearly enough of this type of thing happens to justify and generate the massive and influential programs and the bloated budgets the bureaucrats want. They need more racism, not less.
So diversity teams have found a way to generate racial “incidents” by way of the “racial microaggression.” This is a brilliant confection that artificially inflates the number of incidents on a campus to create the impression of a problem that demands a solution. But in fact, the “racial microaggression” is an artificial construct that codifies the symptoms of paranoid personality disorder into a structured conspiracy. Persons are encouraged, in fact, to behave as if they have paranoid personality disorder, displaying hyper-sensitivity, extreme suspicion, and acceptance of a delusional fixity of persecution by a contrived
pseudo-community of enemies. The goal is to ferret out or even imagine nonexistent racial slights.
Another method of conjuring the needed “racism” is to simply manufacture it as needed. Racism is desperately needed so that bureaucracies can be staffed, budgets inflated, control increased, and bombastic pronouncements of “antiracism” can be issued by public relations.
Let’s look at this growing phenomenon.
The ‘Rescue Racisms’ of Pseudoscience
The list is long and growing even now as the occasion demands, with much of it emerging from something called “antiracist pedagogy,” a coarse construct bequeathed to us from “critical race theory” and the work of crypto-Maoist Paulo Freire.The cavalcade of racisms begins with “laissez-faire racism, color-blind racism, symbolic racism, cultural racism, aversive racism, racial resentment, modern racism, and subtle racism” found in the book “
The Changing Terrain of Race and Ethnicity,“ as well as “ideological racism, hi-tech racism, identity racism, environmental racism, and police racism” found in the journal article ”
Racism: Origin and Theory,“ and followed by “racist nativism,” “monoracism,” “anti-blackness,” and “everyday racism,” found in the book ”
Rethinking College Student Development Theory Using Critical Frameworks.”
In the philosophy of science, these multiplying racisms constitute what are called “
rescue hypotheses.” These are ad hoc explanations ginned-up to explain anomalies that don’t fit the pseudoscientific paradigm and published in fake academic journals to keep the fraud alive. It’s twaddle, of course. You know it and I know it, and only the faithful of a cult or of someone afflicted with paranoid personality disorder would constantly revert to the base reflexive response that the paranoid conspiracy theory demands. Anything less would require a rethinking of the entire rickety racialist paradigm, and that won’t be permitted. In fact, the ideology of antiracism
explicitly forbids the questioning of its assumptions. This is called “resistance,” and it’s a
key marker for conspiracy and conspiracy theorists.
And yet, this pseudoscientific mash-up of paranoia and conspiracy is not only given credence on the campuses, it’s lavishly subsidized and it’s enforced by a constantly growing legion of modestly educated and malignly motivated bureaucrats, which I describe in my book “
Brutal Minds.” If we understand the personnel involved and their animating paranoid doctrine—and all of them subscribe to it, because their positions require it—then what we get comes as no surprise.
When the president of Antiracist University assembles his staff, he sees a coterie not just of yes-men and yes-women, but rather a groupthink phalanx of paranoid racialist ideologues, unable to render objective decisions about anything in the university because of their adherence to a toxic doctrine of paranoid antiracist conspiracy. They have adopted what they believe to be a winning rhetorical position with their god-term Antiracism and their devil-term White Supremacy. But the only power this rhetorical device carries is that which people invest, either through embrace, or from fear or from coercion. Once this performative fraud is exposed, it becomes vulnerable to ridicule and to legal challenge across a range of issues as well as vulnerable in the same way any pseudoscientific nonsense is vulnerable to reason, logic, evidence, and disrepute. Antiracism becomes the god-term that failed.
But even as many faculty and students recognize antiracism as the scam it is, few dare to comment on what is obvious—that America’s universities have been duped, snookered, taken. What could be gained by such a revelation, and by whom?
While the penalties in academia are not so severe as what one finds in, say, North Korea, what might be the upside to pointing out the fraud that is antiracism, especially when grant money, bureaucratic cachet, and power over one’s peers is at stake?
What is to be gained by pointing out the multiplicity of programs and the many hucksters that are suddenly on college payrolls distilling diversity hooch under the rubric of antiracism?
What is to be gained by pointing out that antiracism in the university constitutes a
pathology of paranoia and prejudice supported by primitive pseudoscience and offering a simple Manichean worldview of villains-and-victims?
What is to be gained by pointing out that university administrations, their offices of diversity, and their entire “student affairs” apparatuses are in the business of teaching students, faculty, and staff to behave towards each other as if they are afflicted with paranoid personality disorder?
The answers to these questions are all, unfortunately, the same: “Not much.” And so we watch as the bureaucrats conspire with the grifters, divvy up the loot, and drag the university as an institution of learning, research, and knowledge creation steadily down.
In here resides a lesson for us. There is a deep truth captured in many of the tales we all find familiar—the 1837 tale of the “Emperor’s New Clothes” is one such fable.
We all imagine that we would be the boy voicing the obvious, that the finery of the Emperor is actually a clever scam that plays on his vanity and inflated intellectual self-image. But in fact, we are not the ingenuous lad.
Instead, for reasons that are personal, professional, social, and even survivalist, we cheer the Emperor. We voice lusty huzzahs for the empty slogans of “diversity and inclusion,” and we recite the propaganda pledge to “do the work” to become an “ally” and to be the first one to shout “equity!”
We collude daily in the campus diversity racket. It’s time we stopped. All of us.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
