Tag: racism

Students demand firing of liberal Vermont professor for opposing wrong kind of racism

On March 8, a University of Vermont (UVM) professor joined the growing chorus of brave souls willing to risk their careers and public scorn to stand for what is right.  Professor Aaron Kindsvatter, a self-declared liberal, claims that the university is embracing dubious ideological racial policies.  The intolerant backlash against this professor was fast and fierce, but so too have been the expressions of support.

Americans once regarded themselves as sharing agreement on most goals, just differing in desired means.  But “social justice ideology” does not broach dissent: it negates traditional liberalism and free speech protections.  Thus, “liberal” professors will be silenced as readily as conservative speakers such as those at Middlebury College.  “Social justice” ideology behaves much like an institutionalized cult. 

Professor Kindsvatter titled his latest video “Racism and the Secular Religion at the University of Vermont” as an allusion to that religiosity, warning that this ideology will seed future hate and division:

[W]hiteness falls under the umbrella, in the derogatory meaning of the word, of critical social justice.  And whiteness, the thinking that informs it is so crude, and so lacking in falsifiability, and it speaks so eloquently to our tribal impulses that the same logic that informs what’s currently being called whiteness right now can easily find its way to desperate persons who need a group to hate and who will adopt the suppositions that inform whiteness towards their own ends.

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Democrats rush to blame ‘White supremacy’ for Atlanta shootings, but police point to sex addiction

National Democrats rushed to Twitter on Wednesday to blame “White supremacy” and “racism” for the mass shooting spree that targeted massage parlors in the Atlanta area, but police officials say the suspect claimed the deadly shootings were not racially motivated.

Robert Aaron Long, the 21-year-old who authorities said took “responsibility” for the string of shootings Tuesday that left eight people dead, reportedly confessed that he has a “sex addiction” and that he viewed the massage parlors as “an outlet for him” where he could be tempted.

“He apparently has an issue, what he considers a sex addiction, and sees these locations as … a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate,” said Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office Capt. Jay Baker during a press conference. 

Long’s reported motive for the shooting appears to contradict several national Democrats in Congress, including Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, who quickly blamed “white supremacy” while the investigation was still ongoing. Two of the fatalities were White, while the other six victims were Asian Americans, according to police.

“Imagine if he was Black, Muslim or Latino,” Tlaib tweeted. “This is exposing white supremacy in all forms.”

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White farmers blast $5bn promised to minority farm-owners in Biden’s relief bill as discrimination and ‘racism’ with Sen. Lindsey Graham claiming it is a form of ‘reparations’

White farmers have voiced their frustration after President Joe Biden‘s $1.9 trillion COVID relief package this week awarded $5billion to minority farmers while not offering them the same aid.

The Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act was introduced to the relief package by Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock in early February to provide immediate financial relief to black, indigenous, and Hispanic farmers.

The bill provides $4billion in direct payments to farmers of color and has allocated $1 billion to address systemic racism at the U.S. Agriculture Department (USAD), providing legal assistance to farmers of color and grants and loans to improve land access for minorities.

The $4billion will provide direct payments of up to 120 percent of a ‘socially disadvantaged’ farmer or rancher’s outstanding debt as of January 1, 2021.

Yet white farmers believe the add-on to the relief package is discriminatory as South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham blasts the money as ‘reparations’.

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Kew Gardens to Tell Visitors How Racist Its Plants Are

Kew Gardens in London is to change labels on its plants and flowers in order to inform visitors on how racist they are.

Yes, really.

The popular attraction, which welcomes over 2 million visitors a year from all over the world, is set to “change display boards for plants such as sugar cane – previously harvested by slaves – to highlight their ‘imperial legacy’”, reports the Daily Mail.

According to Kew director Richard Deverell, the change is part of an effort to “move quickly to decolonise collections.”

The change happened after managers at Kew consulted with Ajay Chhabra, “an actor with an insight into how sugar cane was linked to slavery.”

This is yet another capitulation to woke mobs who are trying to subvert the United Kingdom and make its population ashamed of their heritage and birthright, despite the fact that Britain was the first major country in the world to end slavery.

Brits like William Wilberforce literally risked their lives to travel to the colonies and free slaves.

The purpose of activist efforts to push for “decolonisation” is actually just reverse cultural colonisation by the woke mob.

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Football Official Suspended, Ordered to Undergo Re-Education After Referring to a Black Guy as a “Black Guy”

A Romanian football official who referred to a black guy as a “black guy” during a Champions League game has been suspended and ordered to undergo a re-education course.

Yes, really.

During a December fixture between Paris Saint-Germain and Istanbul Basaksehir, Sebastian Coltescu was accused of racially abusing Basaksehir coach Pierre Webo by referring to him as the “black guy” or “ala negru” in Romanian.

Coltescu used the term “black guy” to single out Webo because all the other coaches were white.

The game was abandoned and Coltescu, who subsequently protested that he was “not racist,” was immediately suspended for 10 games.

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There Is No Such Thing as “White” Math

Mathematics allowed a young Sergiu, who came of age in Ceausescu’s Romania, to escape to a world where right and wrong couldn’t be fudged, and, ultimately, to a life of freedom in the United States. Without math, his life quite literally would not have been possible.

In the piece below he explains how activists are destroying his discipline in the name of progress. Worse, they are robbing poor children of the opportunity to raise themselves up by mastering it — with untold effects on all of us.

Math, with its seemingly unbiased tools — 2 + 2 always equals 4 — has presented a problem for an ideological movement that sees any inequality of outcome as evidence of systemic bias. The problem cannot be that some kids are better at math, or that some teachers are better at teaching it. Like so much else, the basic woke argument against math is that it is inherently racist and needs to be made antiracist. That is accomplished by undermining the notion of right and wrong answers, by getting rid of the expectation that students show their work, by referring to mathematical testing tools as racist, and by doing away with accelerated math classes.

If that sounds like a caricature, I urge you to read this whole document, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which Sergiu writes about below. As the linguist John McWhorter put it in a powerful piece published yesterday: “to distrust this document is not to be against social justice, but against racism.”

Sergiu wrote me in an email that the situation in his field reminds him of this line from Thomas Sowell: “Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.”

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Critical Race Fragility

The critical race theorists are feeling the heat. Over the past decade, they have had remarkable success in perpetuating the concepts of systemic racism, unconscious bias, white privilege, and white fragility in American institutions, beginning with universities and moving on to schools, government agencies, and multinational corporations. Their campaign began mostly without opposition, as most conservatives were either ignorant of what was happening or dismissed it as a campus fad.

That changed last year. The intellectual movements around the so-called Intellectual Dark Web, Quillette magazine, and the 1776 Unites coalition of dissident black scholars had laid down a theoretical case against critical race theory (CRT). President Trump elevated the debate into the mainstream, denouncing CRT by name at the National Archives, signing an executive order banning CRT-based training programs from the federal government, and sparring on the topic during a televised presidential debate. Since then, investigative journalists, including me, have reported on the negative impact of CRT in government, schools, and corporations; states such as New Hampshire, Arkansas, Iowa, West Virginia, and Oklahoma have introduced legislation seeking to ban CRT programs that promote the concepts of race essentialism, collective guilt, and race-based harassment in public institutions.

This shift in momentum against the new racial orthodoxy, which has now grown beyond America’s borders to England, France, Italy, Hungary, and Brazil, has rattled the American Left. Their first argument against this change is that conservatives are using state power to “cancel wokeness.” New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recently followed this line, attacking my work “leading the conservative charge against critical race theory,” declaring that the Right wants to ban critical race theory because it is afraid to debate it. This is false, of course. For more than a year, prominent black intellectuals, including John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Wilfred Reilly, and Coleman Hughes have challenged the critical race theorists to debate—and none has accepted. After Goldberg published her column, I called her bluff even further, challenging to “debate any prominent critical race theorist on the floor of the New York Times.” Predictably, none responded, catching the New York Times in a fib and further exposing the critical race theorists’ refusal to submit their ideas to public scrutiny.

The second line of attack, advanced by Goldberg and Acadia University professor Jeffrey Sachs, is that the attempt to regulate critical race theory-based programs is an “attack on free speech.” Goldberg and Sachs are attempting to reclaim the mantle of free speech, but on closer inspection, their case is legally and morally groundless. First, as legal writer Hans Bader points out, the Supreme Court has ruled that states and public schools have the ability to control curricular speech without violating free speech. Furthermore, under the Fourteenth Amendment, states and school districts have an obligation to prevent the creation of a learning environment that promotes hostility toward a certain race or sex. The courts have repeatedly ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment outweighs and limits the First Amendment when it comes to government entities adopting policies and programs that perpetuate racial stereotyping, discrimination, and harassment. Despite Sachs’s hyperventilation about threats to academia (i.e., the public-employment program for new racialist ideology), many legislatures have explicitly allowed the teaching of CRT in university classrooms; it is only forbidden to turn these principles into compelled speech, employee-indoctrination programs, and official state curricula for primary and secondary school students.

The most telling limitation in their argument, however, is that Goldberg and Sachs both refuse to deal with specifics. They present critical race theory as a benign academic discipline that seeks “social justice,” while ignoring the avalanche of reporting, including my own, that suggests that, in practice, CRT-based programs are often hateful, divisive, and filled with falsehoods; they traffic in racial stereotypes, collective guilt, racial segregation, and race-based harassment. The real test for intellectuals on the left is not to defend their ideas as abstractions but to defend the real-world consequences of their ideas.

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