Core Tenets of Anti-Racist Scholarship-Activism.
- Racism exists today in both traditional and modern forms
- Racism is an institutionalized, multilayered, multilevel system that distributes unequal power and resources between white people and people of color, as socially identified, and disproportionately benefits whites.
- All members of society are socialized to participate in the system of racism, albeit in varied social locations.
- All white people benefit from racism regardless of intentions.
- No-one chose to be socialized into racism so no-one is bad, but no-one is neutral.
- To not act against racism is to support racism.
- Racism must be continually identified, analyzed and challenged. No-one is ever done.
- The question is not Did racism take place? but rather How did racism manifest in that situation?
- The racial status quo is comfortable for most whites. Therefore, anything that maintains white comfort is suspect.
- The racially oppressed have a more intimate insight via experiential knowledge into the system of race than their racial oppressors. However, white professors will be seen as having more legitimacy, thus positionality must be intentionally engaged.
- Resistance is a predictable reaction to anti-racist education and must be explicitly and strategically addressed.
These are the core tenets developed by scholar-activists Heather Bruce, Robin DiAngelo, Gyda Swaney (Salish) and Amie Thurber at the National Race and Pedagogy Conference at Puget Sound University. In the accompanying film, they are announced as guidance for Evergreen State College’s equity plans 573 days before its infamous campus meltdown. Anyone with a religious background will notice that they read very much like a creed.
In fact, that’s exactly what they are. In that this list is composed of statements of unquestionable beliefs accompanied by sacred vows of action, this is creedal by definition. Taken together, these professions comprise a vast, overarching and cohesive system, which is meant to explain how society is structured, how knowledge is formed, and how people work, while providing a moral framework for revolutionizing society, in accordance with an idealized concept of justice. In short, these statements declare and reiterate a commitment to a particular mythology and a doctrine forwarded to service it.
This belief system worked its way into Evergreen State College and destroyed all that it once stood for. In the first installation of a two-part documentary embedded here, filmmaker Mike Nayna examines the ideological fervor that took root there with an aim to explaining how this could have happened at one of the most liberal higher education colleges in the world. He explores the applied postmodern conception of society, as we have called it, and seeks to comprehend and communicate how it and its accompanying moral imperative were able to take hold of a collegiate administration and overrule Evergreen’s commitment to academic freedom, open-ended experimental pedagogies and unparalleled professorial autonomy.
At the center of the Evergreen saga are two of its former tenured biology professors: Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. These two—also married to one another—made the heroic mistake of seeing the problem unfolding in real time and attempting to address it. Nayna’s Evergreen documentary interviews Weinstein and Heying and interweaves their experiences with footage from within Evergreen, in order to show how an experimental liberal college in the Pacific Northwest could be overrun by this sort of impassioned preaching, bizarre rituals, group chanting and mob outrage. This serves as the backstory for what has made Evergreen most famous, the turmoil that followed Weinstein’s decision to take a stand against it as it crept onto the scene.
Nayna also sets out to clarify where these ideas originated. Among the progenitors of these ideas, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (and the academic paper that preceded it by seven years) is a particularly influential text within the discourse analysis branch of critical race theory. Set alongside Peggy MacIntosh’s White Privilege and Barbara Applebaum’s White Complicity, it closes the door on any possibility of arguing against a critical conception of society, as outlined in the confessional creed above. These ideas form a web of theory that understands society as being constructed by a pervasive racial bias, which needs to be continuously uncovered and addressed.
Together, these three ideas shut out the possibility of engaging this theoretical web in good faith unless one agrees with it. MacIntosh’s conception of privilege contains the idea that it always seeks to maintain and justify itself. Applebaum’s notion of complicity insists that remaining silent or stepping away when confronted with what these theoretical priests call racism is to be complicit in racism. Similarly, according to DiAngelo, disagreement indicates a form of fragility:
“Socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves, we become highly fragile in conversations about race. We consider a challenge to our racial worldviews as a challenge to our very identities as good, moral people. Thus, we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling and unfair moral offense. The smallest amount of racial stress is intolerable—the mere suggestion that being white has meaning often triggers a range of defensive responses. These include emotions such as anger, fear and guilt and behaviors such as argumentation, silence and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation.”
If disagreeing, remaining silent and going away are all behaviors which indicate fragility, complicity and privilege, it becomes clear that the only way for a white person not to be fragile or complicit around the subject of racism is to remain present and positively affirm the creed being offered by the hucksters professing this theoretical faith. Far from a benign doctrine of equality and justice, this requires them to agree to the assertion that, by virtue of their inherently privileged identities, their racial worldviews are inherently racist and uphold a system of racism. This is precisely what Nayna shows to have begun to be instituted at Evergreen college. For those who know the story, it was this ideology posing as theory that led to the bizarre and frightening group behavior that came to a dangerous peak after Professor Weinstein objected to a day of racial segregation.
Are DiAngelo and other academics focused on these concepts of problematic whiteness correct about this? Is society in general and Evergreen College in particular dominated by systems of racism, which disadvantage people of color? Are white people who feel very sure they are not harboring deep-rooted racial assumptions they need to dig out of themselves and reflect about publicly (including on their self-evaluations to be further evaluated by university administrators) simply being obstructive due to a need to preserve their own sense of themselves as good, moral people? Do they support racism by failing to divine its presence in every interaction between white people and people of color and within themselves? Must their resistance be countered rigorously with insistence? With anger? With punishment? With violence? All of those responses appear in Nayna’s documentary, and far from being collegiate, these are profoundly fundamentalist attitudes, which have more in common with the behaviors of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church (which infamously protested military funerals as a way of standing against gay rights) than with a liberal higher education—or education at all, for that matter.
Already, many people who have seen this first half of Nayna’s fresh take on the Evergreen story have commented with feelings of bewilderment, alarm and even physical revulsion. The Maoist struggle sessions have been referred to repeatedly by people who would know how bad they were, but how much should we worry about this? Could the events at Evergreen College not simply be one case of collective ideological madness?
It is certainly one very clear example of a problem that we would argue is making itself felt much more widely in universities and activism and increasingly in employment and education. The very purpose of universities is to produce knowledge to be of use in various industries and institutions in society and this seems to be happening with this kind of scholarship into race. Meanwhile, it is entirely unclear that an intense focus on race decreases racism. While surveys show a rapid decrease in racist attitudes throughout white populations in the US over the last few decades, diversity training, which seeks to make people more aware of racial issues, actually seems to make them worse. Our concerns therefore start with the fact that this theoretical faith is deeply embedded in seemingly legitimate scholarship, contains within its own framework the impossibility of legitimate disagreement and is expanding beyond the problem of its systematic institutional incorporation in our institutions of higher education to wider society.
For a deeper understanding of DiAngelo’s White Fragility, these two accessible breakdowns by Jonathan Church give a good grounding in its methodological problems and proselytizing nature.
35 comments
Folks: the horrible has already happened and it seems, increasingly, a generational issue due to the death (mostly) of education in depth in the U.S. Due to that fact, charlatans dominate teaching and public discourse. They, like Mr. Trump — whom many of them despise — are the used car salespeople of critical thinking and rational discourse. They attack all who disagree — and if you need grades from them (or money or employment), you must cleave to their ideology. This has produced at least two generations of young people, many of whom know nothing of actual history. Rather, they know a kind of People Magazine version: purified by political correctness and a lack of critical thinking or intellectual risk-taking.
These young (and no longer so young) folks, more and more, control the sources of funding for all kinds of endeavors — science, the arts, academia. This means that the access to the funding to undertake anything that questions the politically correct ideology is controlled by persons whose thinking is dominated by that ideology. Try applying for a grant and/or grant sponsor. Your project will need to pass the litmus test of having reached out to (what the politically correct call) “feminists”, all “persons of color” — and likely be one that involves well more than 50% non-white non-males — with a chunk of the other 50% being males who are non-white and identify themselves by gender preferences. This kind of stupidity, rather than eradicating gender-bias, misogyny and racism, actually encourages it by making an inspection of projects based upon whether they contain specified (politically correct) classes of people the sine qua non of funding such projects (or hiring decisions, candidates for office, etc.).
By doing that, the skills and talent of individuals becomes secondary to the persons genetic, physical and social characteristics. Imagine being on sports team where the choice of who to pitch is based not upon the ability to put the ball across the plate in a way that avoids it getting hit by the batter — but on the gender or pigmentation or other physical characteristics of the pitcher. Imagine that also for opera singers, surgeons, musicians, painters — you get the picture?
When confronted with a grant request with a broad appeal (international) from an online publication that reaches each of the “communities” (a word these institutions and individuals love to use), a project which involved judging submissions without any identifiers, yet led to the selection of all males (not all white, but a large majority of white males) across the spectrum of ages and locations around the world, the institution denied sponsorship and told the submitters they needed “diversity” training and needed to re-do their project using different “branding/marketing” for the project (to reach the groups the sponsor approves of).
The question arises: even if one “reaches out” to all of these “communities” but, in a completely screened selection process, only ends up choosing males who entered the competition — should it not receive grant sponsorship based upon the sponsor’s displeasure with the apparent gender and pigmentation of the finalists?
My guess is the crowd we are talking about will say, yes, you should not be using the quality of the work submitted as the selection criteria. Instead, you need to break down the submissions by the categories (the sponsor approves of) in order to have persons from their preferred categories x, y, z, etc., as finalists — even if the submissions from persons who fall into each of those categories do not meet the standards of the judge or judges. Or, they may say that you need a different panel of judges — judges from each of the politically correct communities. It is to be seriously doubted that judges who look for the highest quality in submissions they review are, eo ipso, going to choose a diverse group of finalists when the judging is completely screened from any identifiers of the applicants. (Unless, of course, the politically correct crowd believes they each have a special power — much like a Turing-test — to select the pigmentation and gender of a person based solely upon viewing some work product by that person — and if they do have that power, then when they choose such persons over others based upon an initial first preference for work by a particular gender or pigmentation, is that precisely the bias they allegedly want to eliminate?)
This is the exact opposite of the future Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was hoping for — and one created by a form of uncritical thinking and defective practice that will never achieve Dr. King’s dream. Sadly, this shift to a world dominated by this distorted thought and practice – and the destruction of any critical study of history from first hand sources of all kinds (not just those deemed “safe” or “politically correct”) with a replacement of critique by “isms”– leads directly to totalitarianism. Look around. It ain’t just the U.S.
A happy future.
People need to research things they read like the author’s contributing to emags like Areo. The authors of this story were called out by the NYT as publishing numerous false papers. Check it out on the internet by typing in their names (as given in the next paragraph).
Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay shared their input in essay form about Post Modernism and I gave positive response but this essay on Evergreen which keeps popping up on Areo does no good to help matters about racism and only serves to fuel the fire.
Excellent piece and I look forward to the documentary but feel one point should be amended. The statement:
“For those who know the story, it was this ideology posing as theory that led to the bizarre and frightening group behavior that came to a dangerous peak after Professor Weinstein objected to a day of racial segregation.” is technically accurate in a chronological sense and is the general perception but Professor Weinstein has pointed out its’ misleading and incomplete, albeit it unintentionally.
It’s better amended thusly:
>”For those who know the story, it was this ideology posing as theory that led to the bizarre and frightening group behavior that came to a dangerous peak after Professor Weinstein objected to its use to justify sweeping changes to university governance and introduce race-based hiring procedures. His objections significantly pre-dated the day of segregation and it was significantly after the day of segregation that the protests were instigated and used as an excuse to eliminate him as a source of opposition to those changes.”<
Did anyone else notice that the woman in the video reading the “core tenets” does not even know how the word tenet is spelled/pronounced?
It’s amateur hour, folks. It’s like we’re all watching a play by lunatics and pretending the actors are not insane.
My reading of these tenets is that there is no possible end game. That is, the only solution offered against racism is to stop being white.
Or stop being non-white.
The bottom line is that this is my world and you people should count yourself blessed to be allowed to live in it.
Instead of constantly ßitching about the field, why don’t you point-by-point debunk it? Scrolling through the list at the top I was thinking to myself “ok great, here’s a nice concise list of the crit theory’s basic tenants, a perfect opportunity to refute each one, but I see a pic of Bret Weinstein at the top, so my guess is the article will be just another whiny therapy session.”
Crit Theory is horseshit for one simple reason: it is unfalsifiable. That’s it. That’s all any adult needs to know.
The fact that it is wrapped up in $10 words by people less educated than me is not relevant. The fact that racism exists (and it does) is also not relevant, because Crit Theory offers almost nothing insightful, measurable or falsifiable on that important topic.
Crit Theory is unfalsifiabe nonsense for semi-educated poseurs.
This is becoming a tired hobby horse to keep trotting out. Evergreen is a unique problem child unto itself and both sides here have exhausted me to the point of numbness with their exaggerated sense of self-importance. No, Evergreen is not a canary in the coal mine. No, I am not feeling the groundswell of some techtonic sea change in our institutions. Evergreen has always been a freak of nature and will likely remain one, if it manages to remain anything at all. Can we move on please…
I suppose Yale is a unique problem child as well. How about Covington Catholic? I am friends with radical race ideologues on FB and even after the whole video was released they still hold those kids guilty. We can’t move on, because the canoe has left the dock and the racist race baiters hold the paddles.
Congratulations, you took the “Atheism is a religion” and replaced it with the humanities so original.
++To not act against racism is to support racism++
That actually means, that everyone who doesn’t agree with youryour conclusions, is racist.
Maybe. But is it wrong?
Oops. I posted this below the wrong post, and I don’t seem to be able to delete it.Sorry.
If the goal in these rules is to reduce racism (which I doubt), then these rules will fail by design.
The rules implicitly concede one racial group are obviously have more moral capacity than the other, and that the other lack the capacity to every achieve such moral capacity.
The reality of why racism is bad, is that is a denial of the individual.
The above rules deny every person of every race their individuality – and are thus the worst kind of racism.
I am looking for a robust scholarly critique of Critical Whiteness Studies. Would anyone know of any academic work in this field?
The now-deceased Leftist scholar Judith Stein wrote some great critiques of whiteness: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/judith-stein-historian-obituary-1940-2017
Adolph Reed, Vivek Chibber, Kenneth Warren, and Walter Ben Michaels have also critiqued it in varying degrees from Leftist/Marxist stance.
I think it’s pretty obvious critical whiteness theory is purely transitional in that it is riding shotgun on feelings of sinfulness from vestigial Christianity. Without this sin/guilt, the whole thing falls apart.
Ironically the thing that stands out more than anything else is the racism of this supposedly ant–racist creed.
You can’t be racist against white people, didn’t you know? Since SJWs completely ignore what racism is, they can define it however they like, and now they roll with “prejudice plus power” with the assumption that “white = power” regardless of the context or whether or not the white person wields any power or harbors any prejudice.
No, if you treat people differently based on their race, offering advantages to some based on their race, and disadvantages to others based on their race, you’re only racist if you mix up the order of races in their victimhood hierarchy.
Wait – a bunch of white women just stood up and tried to define racism? And insisted it’s an always-and-everywhere phenomenon?
If they honestly believe that, then why didn’t they resign their posts and publicly campaign for a Woman of Colour to replace them? Seriously? Why not?
I had the privilege ( was it white???lol) to have an online discussion with the newly appointed Director of Libraries at MIT , Chris Bourg. In her inauguration speech ( it is online) Chris mentioned how we have to get more POC in the field that is mostly white. I called him out and asked ” Then why did you, a white person take the job? Were there no suitable POC candidates? Image the statement you would make if upon taking the job you quit and state ” thank you but no thank you , I want the job to go to a POC”. Chris knew she was caught and to her credit replied but it was evident in her reply she knew she was stumped. I’d bet my house she is still the director at MIT.
Yep. Still there 4 years later.
It’s hard to take these people seriously. They are just poseurs.
I had the privilege ( was it white???lol) to have an online discussion with the newly appointed Director of Libraries at MIT , Chris Bourg. In her inauguration speech ( it is online) Chris mentioned how we have to get more POC in the field that is mostly white. I called him out and asked ” Then why did you, a white person take the job? Were there no suitable POC candidates? Image the statement you would make if upon taking the job you quit and state ” thank you but no thank you , I want the job to go to a POC”. Chris knew she was caught and to her credit replied but it was evident in her reply she knew she was stumped. I’d bet my house she is still the director at MIT.
Behold the pathological racist vindictive clouds of swarming gnats hovering in the air, poised to strike at anything that has the scent of ( white ) sin.
The medieval inquisition has reawakened and the vicious self righteous inquisitors hold the match in their trembling fingers and can’t wait to burn the whole heretical edifice down.
people always make a big deal about the racism benefits all white people receive, but at this point in history those annual racism benefit checks have dwindled to about $3.75 each. most of us don’t even bother cashing them. most of us don’t even bother cashing them.
I would nominate Helen and James for a bravery award if there was one.
In Christianity there is sin but there is also forgiveness. In the racism racket you can never be forgiven: your whiteness is your sin and can never be erased. At a time when so much progress has been made, when blacks have occupied the highest positions in government and military, when all Jim Crow laws have been swept away, and when inter-racial marriages have been rising, this ideology claims that racism is worse than ever, is ubiquitous. Yet they never offer any evidence for this claim. It is simply asserted. Some of the “proof” has to do with police violence against blacks but statistics show that in an encounter with police (an arrest) a white criminal is actually more likely to be killed (percentagewise). Other that this mythology, it is all assumptions and claims.
Unsure that I agree with that. Penance in the Social Justice religion takes the form of guilty parties admitting their wrongdoing publicly and other acts of self-abasement.
Questioning any of this dogma, as the authors have, is perceived as the worst kind of heresy and will give rise to public shaming and accusations of racism
«All white people benefit from racism regardless of intentions.» Pure Nazi statement, sorry. Friedrich Hayek was right, only targets are changed, Jews for Hitler, urban population for Pol Pot, Whites for modern “academics”