http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/260875/ ... ck-kerwick
PROFESSOR DECLARES ‘WHITENESS’ A ‘DISEASE’
Preaching hate in higher education.
November 23, 2015 Jack Kerwick 207
I had always looked upon my six-year-old son as a blessing.
But now I realize that he is a disease.
My wife, my parents, my grandparents, and every member of my family, both living and deceased, are likewise a disease.
But if you are reading this right now, and you are white, you should know that your children and all of your loved ones are also a disease.
So implies a University of Colorado education professor, Cherly E. Matias, in the most recent edition of Teaching Education, a peer-reviewed journal.
In “‘Why Do You Make Me Hate Myself?’: Re-teaching Whiteness, Abuse, and Love in Urban Teaching Education,” the author insists that “the racial achievement gap” and other racial disparities are “symptoms” of “the underlying diseases of racism and Whiteness” (italics added).
Whiteness is a disease.
Matias explains that while the “inclusion of socially just philosophies in the curriculum is indeed essential” in order “to meet the needs of a growing urban populace,” such philosophies “can mask the recycling of normalized, oppressive Whiteness.”
Thus, it is imperative, Matias maintains, to “deconstruct Whiteness, abuse, and love in teacher education.”
The problem, Matias assures us, is that by “denying race during white childhood via a color-blind ideology,” whites leave “lasting emotional scars, impressions that perpetuate the institutional silencing of race in teacher education.” Urban students of color are made to “endure a racist educational system and daily racial battle fatigue.”
But the difference between this “racism” and that faced by students and other “people of color” in the past is that the former is “color-blind racism.”
The author maintains that “until teacher education programs make confronting and exploring Whiteness a priority, they cannot truly love their urban students of color as complete beings and so deny humanity full and just consideration” (italics added).
Whiteness is a disease.
And it is a disease that whites spread through their embrace of….color-blindness.
Let this sink in.
Matias is hardly an anomaly in today’s academy. In fact, her thought is quite typical of the hard-left zeitgeist that passes for enlightened thinking among liberal arts and humanities professors at institutions of “higher learning” all over the country (and beyond).
Matias draws on what’s known as “critical race theory” (CRT). Given the heavily politicized nature of the contemporary academy, it should come as no surprise that CRT is a racialized version of Marxism and all of the rage among legions of academics.
Just as Marx and Engels sought to supply a comprehensive vision—an ideology—of the world by explaining (or explaining away) all of history and culture in terms of impersonal economic processes and the relations of “power” that they generate, proponents of CRT as well endorse a similar form of reductionism.
Only here, it is primarily race that serves as the “substructure” of society, and while economics continues to play a vital role in determining asymmetries of “power” between social groups, race and “racism” are the determining factors.
As such proponents of CRT as Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic inform us in the introduction to their Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, CRT differs from more “traditional civil rights” approaches inasmuch as it “questions the very foundations of a liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”
To put it more exactly, CRT holds that “racism is ordinary, not aberrational[.]” It is “the usual way that society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country.” Moreover, “racism” serves the “material” and “psychic” interests of both “white elites” and “working class whites.”
“Racism” is omnipresent.
Yet it is omnipresent not in the sense that all white individuals are consciously “racist”; “racism” is omnipresent in the sense that it is systemic and, hence, largely unconscious.
Another especially noteworthy respect in which CRT reveals both its Marxian impress and its political character is its emphasis on “activism.” Delgado and Stefancic are blunt in expressing their interest in “studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.”
To repeat what was said above, both parents of college-bound children and taxpayers should know that the Cheryl Matiases and Richard Delgados of the world are not only well-represented in academia; their thought saturates the liberal arts and humanities.
It should also be clear by now that, by design, CRT (not unlike every other department that has been invented for the sake of advancing gender and racial identity politics) is self-immunized against the very possibility of refutation. And this is because it is meant to preempt argument. Consider: If whites think as whites or collectively, then they are guilty of “racism.” Yet so too are whites “racist” if they insist upon judging people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, i.e. if they endorse a “color-blind ideology.”
No matter what, the game is rigged in advance to convict all whites of “racism.”
Proponents of CRT, in their singular (obsessive) focus upon distributions of “power,” betray their end game: It is they who seek power. In fact, they seek a monopoly on power.
This is the objective of all who rely upon “Newspeak.” The great philosopher Roger Scruton explains: “Newspeak occurs whenever the main purpose of language—which is to describe reality—is replaced by the rival purpose of asserting power over it.”
While Newspeak “sentences sound like assertions,” the truth is that “their underlying logic is the logic of the spell.” Newspeak is talismanic, not persuasive. Its language is meant to blind us to what’s right in front of our faces, to render us oblivious to reality.
Scruton quotes Francoise Thom, who observed that communists used Newspeak “to protect ideology from the malicious attacks of real things.” Ditto with CRT.
Newspeak is notable, Scruton remarks, for its “use of nominalizations instead of direct verbs, the lack of indexicals, the preference for the passive voice and impersonal idioms, the replacement of predications with comparatives, the ubiquitous imperative mood.”
In other words, Newspeak trades in impersonal, highly general abstractions, i.e. “isms.” Critical Race Theory is a textbook illustration of this: The individual is swallowed up, his or her intentions dissolved before the omnipresence of “systemic racism.”
It is with this, parents, that your children are being inundated. Dear taxpayer, it is for the sake of subsidizing this anti-intellectual drivel that you labor.
But let’s get even more exact: White parents and taxpayers are paying the salaries of faculty and administrators so that the latter can turn around and declare to the next generation that they are a “disease.”
