Tag: political correctness

Virginia Tech instructor apologizes for ‘injustice’ of being white and straight

A Virginia Tech instructor’s syllabus for fall students included her apologies for the “injustice” of being white, heterosexual, and middle class.

“I am a Caucasian cisgender female and first-generation college student from Appalachia who is of Scottish, British, and Norwegian heritage,” the “WHO I AM” section of Crystal Duncan Lane’s released Human Development 1134 syllabus read. “I am married to a cisgender male, and we are middle class. While I did not ‘ask’ for the many privileges in my life: I have benefitted from them and will continue to benefit from them whether I like it or not.”

Lane, a human development and family science instructor, said she recognizes the unfair privileges of her having white skin, the documents said.

“This is injustice. I am and will continue to work on a daily basis to be antiracist and confront the innate racism within myself that is the reality and history of white people,” she wrote in the syllabus, according to Campus Reform.

Lane ended her apology by suggesting Caucasian students “join her” on a path to confront implicit racial biases.

“I want to be better: Every day. I will transform: Every day. This work terrifies me: Every day,” she said. “I invite my white students to join me on this journey. And to my students of color: I apologize for the inexcusable horrors within our shared history,” the documents said.

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Bubble-Wrapping History: The National Archives Moves To “Reimagine” The Founding

We are living in the age of reimagination. We are not reducing police, we are “reimagining policing” … not “packing” the Supreme Court but “reimagining justice” … not embracing media bias but “reimagining journalism” … not embracing censorship but “reimagining free speech.”

Conversely, the lack of such imagination can be a career-ending flaw. As a result, many remain silent rather than question the need for the revisions that come with “reimagination.”

That dilemma was evident as a federal task force recently issued a call to “reimagine history” at the National Archives, including adding warnings to protect unsuspecting visitors before they read our founding documents. We are reimagining ourselves out of the very founding concepts that once defined us. Reimagining the founding documents comes at a time when many are calling to “reimagine the First Amendment” and other constitutional guarantees.

National Archivist David Ferriero created a racism task force for the National Archives after last summer’s protests over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Such task forces are created with the expectation that they will find problems, and — once recommendations are made — objecting to “anti-racist” reforms can easily be misconstrued as being insensitive or even racist.

Obviously, documents and spaces can be viewed differently from different backgrounds. There is also a need to contextualize our history to deal honestly with our past. However, the “reimagination” line should not divide the woke from the wicked. Yet that is the fear for many academics who do not want to risk their careers after campaigns against dissenting voices on campuses around the country.

For example, for many of us, the National Archives’ Rotunda – containing the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights – is a moving, reverential place celebrating common articles of constitutional faith. That is not what the task force members saw.

Instead, they declared that the iconic Rotunda is one of three examples of structural racism: “a Rotunda in our flagship building that lauds wealthy White men in the nation’s founding while marginalizing BIPOC, women, and other communities.” They called for “reimagining” the space to be more inclusive, including possible dance and performance art. Even the famous murals in the Rotunda might have to go: The task force noted that some view the murals as “an homage to White America.”

The report objected to the laudatory attention given white Framers and Founders, particularly figures like Thomas Jefferson. It encouraged the placement of “trigger warnings” to “forewarn audiences of content that may cause intense physiological and psychological symptoms.”

The task force report called for “reimagining” the portrayal of founding documents on OurDocuments.gov, the website for America’s “milestone documents.” The task force objected that the “100 milestone documents of American history” included “adulatory and excessive language to document the historical contributions of White, wealthy men.”

The task force called for warnings and revision of racist language but stressed that such language “means not only explicitly harmful terms, such as racial slurs, but also information that implies and reinforces damaging stereotypes of BIPOC individuals and communities while valorizing and protecting White people.” It also called for “the creation of safe spaces” in every facility run by the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA).

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Book burning at Ontario francophone schools as ‘gesture of reconciliation’ denounced

A book burning held by an Ontario francophone school board as an act of reconciliation with Indigenous people has received sharp condemnation from Canadian political leaders and the board itself now says it regrets its symbolic gesture.

The “flame purification” ceremony, first reported by Radio Canada , was held in 2019 by the Conseil scolaire catholique Providence, which oversees elementary and secondary schools in southwestern Ontario. Some 30 books, the national broadcaster reported, were burned for “educational purposes” and then the ashes were used as fertilizer to plant a tree.

“We bury the ashes of racism, discrimination and stereotypes in the hope that we will grow up in an inclusive country where all can live in prosperity and security,” says a video prepared for students about the book burning, Radio Canada reported.

In total, more than 4,700 books were removed from library shelves at 30 schools across the school board, and they have since been destroyed or are in the process of being recycled, Radio Canada reported.

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Portland State University Professor Resigns, Says School Is a ‘Social Justice Factory’

Portland State University professor Peter Boghossian said he’s resigned from his position in an open letter and accused the college administration of creating an environment that imperils dissent.

“I never once believed—nor do I now—that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion,” Boghossian, a philosophy professor, wrote in the letter. “Rather, I sought to create the conditions for rigorous thought; to help them gain the tools to hunt and furrow for their own conclusions. This is why I became a teacher and why I love teaching.”

But over time, he argued, Portland State University—a publicly-funded college—made “intellectual exploration impossible” and has transformed itself into a “social justice factory” with a primary focus on race, victimhood, and gender.

“Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues,” said the letter, which was published on Bari Weiss’s Substack page. Weiss herself previously worked for the New York Times until 2020 when she resigned, accusing her Times colleagues of bullying, and argued that the paper capitulated to Twitter-based pressure campaigns.

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Constitution, Declaration Of Independence Now Have ‘Trigger Warnings’ On National Archives Site

Digital copies of America’s founding documents — as well as other historical documents in the National Archives’ online catalog — now feature “trigger warnings” alerting readers that they may contain “harmful language,” and the change appears to follow the release of a “little-noticed” report from a National Archives racism task force that suggested the agency provide “context” for its historical materials.

Digital copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, most notably, now feature a “Harmful Language Alert,” which appears at the top of the page, and directs users to a National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) statement on “potentially harmful content.”

The NARA does not specify why the Constitution, Declaration, or Bill of Rights received the warning, but the NARA statement indicates that documents and historical materials are marked as having “harmful language” when they:

  • reflect racist, sexist, ableist, misogynistic/misogynoir, and xenophobic opinions and attitudes;
  • be discriminatory towards or exclude diverse views on sexuality, gender, religion, and more;
  • include graphic content of historical events such as violent death, medical procedures, crime, wars/terrorist acts, natural disasters and more;
  • demonstrate bias and exclusion in institutional collecting and digitization policies.

Trigger warnings are listed as just one of a number of solutions to the problem of providing historical documents to an increasingly “diverse community,” the NARA notes, and are part of an “institutional commitment” to “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

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CDC’s new ‘inclusive’ health equity guide tackles anti-vaxxers, smokers

The Health Equity Guiding Principles for Inclusive Communication suggest new descriptive terms for everyone from smokers, to anti-vaxxers, to criminals, according to a report.

Those who puff on cancer-sticks should no longer be called “smokers,” according to the CDC, but “people who smoke.”

The disabled shouldn’t be referred to as “differently abled,” but simply as “people with disabilities.”

And using the word “homosexual” is out in favor of a variety of alphabet soup terms, including “LGBTQ (or LGBTQIA or LGBTQ+ or LGBTQIA2),” according to the guide.

“The way people’s social identities overlap should be considered to better understand, interpret, and communicate health outcomes,” the agency said.

Poor people should be referred to as “with self-reported income in the lowest income bracket (if income brackets are defined).”

And don’t say “the black community.”

“If you are creating an image, do not illustrate the patient as a minority and the doctor as white; likewise do not illustrate a homeless person as a minority,” the CDC now says.

Even criminals are no longer criminals, but should be called “persons in pre-trial or with charge,” “persons on parole or probation,” or “people in immigration detention facilities.”

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Arts Council of Wales finds itself racist for… asking employees to speak Welsh

The Arts Council of Wales spent £51,000 on a report that found its own Welsh language policies “systemically racist.” By asking workers to know the language, the council upholds a “white supremacist ideology,” the report claimed.

The Arts Council of Wales tests its employees on their Welsh language skills every year, while National Museums Wales assesses whether Welsh language skills are “essential” for particular roles. 

However, the arts council recently paid an outside organisation, the Welsh Arts Anti-Racist Union, £51,000 ($69,474) to investigate whether these language policies exclude black people and other non-white minorities. 

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Woke Doctor Apologizes for Using Term ‘Pregnant Women’

A physician teaching a course at a woke University of California system medical school apologized to his class for using the “offensive” term “pregnant women,” Common Sense with Bari Weiss reported Tuesday.

“I said ‘when a woman is pregnant,’ which implies that only women can get pregnant and I most sincerely apologize to all of you,” the doctor said, according to a medical student’s recording obtained by writer Katie Herzog.

The doctor reportedly added:

I don’t want you to think that I am in any way trying to imply anything, and if you can summon some generosity to forgive me, I would really appreciate it. Again, I’m very sorry for that. It was certainly not my intention to offend anyone. The worst thing that I can do as a human being is be offensive.

The medical student explained to Herzog that, at her medical school “acknowledging biological sex can be considered transphobic.”

During a class on transgender health, an instructor reportedly said, “Biological sex, sexual orientation, and gender are all constructs. These are all constructs that we have created.”

But, as Herzog observed, the idea that medical students are being taught biological sex is “a construct” matters when it comes to issues about health since “refusal to acknowledge sex can have devastating effects on patient outcomes.”

For example, the medical student noted that “abdominal aortic aneurysms” are “four times as likely to occur in males than females, but this very significant difference wasn’t emphasized.”

“I had to look it up, and I don’t have the time to look up the sex predominance for the hundreds of diseases I’m expected to know,” she said.

Most medical school instructors, the student continued, “are probably just scared of their students,” likely because of online forums in which students can chastise instructors for saying “breastfeed” instead of “chestfeed,” and petitions that “name and shame” instructors for “wrongspeak” and misuse of preferred pronouns.

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Humorless EU report: It’s not funny anymore. Far-right extremists’ use of humour

Humour has become a central weapon of extremist movements to subvert open societies and to lower the threshold towards violence. Especially within the context of a recent wave of far-right terrorist attacks, we witness “playful” ways in communicating racist ideologies. As far-right extremists strategically merge with online cultures, their approach changes fundamentally. This trend has been especially facilitated by the so-called alt-right and has spread globally. This predominantly online movement set new standards to
rebrand extremist positions in an ironic guise, blurring the lines between mischief and potentially radicalising messaging. The result is a nihilistic form of humour that is directed against ethnic and sexual minorities and deemed to inspire violent fantasies — and eventually action. This paper scrutinises how
humour functions as a potential factor in terms of influencing far-right extremist violence. In doing so, we trace the strategic dissemination of far-right narratives and discuss how extremists conceal their misanthropic messages in order to deny ill intention or purposeful harm. These recent developments pose major challenges for practitioners: As a new generation of violent extremists emerges from digital subcultures without a clear organisational centre, prevention strategies need to renew focus and cope with
the intangible nature of online cultures.

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