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"Colleges and universities across the English-speaking world are caught up in the enthusiasm of a Great Awokening. Its dogmas are structural violence, systemic racism, racial stress, white privilege, white fragility, implicit bias and microaggressions."
"This spring the Great Awokening finally came to my home institution, Williams College. Administrators and other campus leaders have encouraged white members of the college community like myself to listen. Over the past two months, I have striven to do exactly that...
... In fact, I’ve done quite a lot of listening (and reading). I have spent dozens of hours listening at meetings and reading copious documents produced by activist students and faculty. I have also watched videos and read documents resulting from the racial blowups...
... at Yale University in 2015, Evergreen State College in 2017 and Sarah Lawrence College in 2019. Listening to these views from multiple campuses helped me realize that what seems to be a local discourse responding to local issues...
... is actually a local manifestation of an international social, political and ideological phenomenon. All the accents and cadences of critical race theory can be identified."
"The preachers of the Great Awokening claim to desire racial equality. Is this true? Or are they more interested in casting sinners into the hands of an angry mob? While it is difficult to discern another person’s ends, it is far easier to know her means...
... These involve a wholesale transformation of language, the academic curriculum, standards of judgment, disciplinary content and boundaries, academic freedom, even the definition of knowledge itself...
... This is no passing storm or simple outburst of youthful exuberance. The Great Awokening is a truly revolutionary project. Like all revolutions, it promises considerable destruction on the way to its final destination."
"The foundational claim leveled by anti-racism protestors is that violence is ubiquitous on campus."
"It is said that students and faculty “suffer from the college’s violent practices” as a matter of routine. Dozens of white tenured professors are supposedly “perpetrators of institutional violence” and “fight for a legacy of violence to be maintained” at the college."
"In 2017, psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett expounded this claim in the New York Times, insisting that spending “a lot of time in a harsh environment worrying about your safety … brings on illness and remodels your brain. … A culture of constant, casual brutality...
... is toxic to the body, and we suffer for it.” This is precisely the kind of climate that anti-racist activists say dominates the Anglosphere’s colleges. Hence the insistence that “our very right to speak/breathe” is at stake."
"No surprise then that the language of safety has become ubiquitous among anti-racist protestors. Rather than push for greater police presence on campus, however, students instead demand an expansion of mental health services―usually emphasizing cultural competence...
... or, more crudely, racial hiring. This began with the very first protests of the Great Awokening at the University of Missouri in 2014."
"Charges of violence are the most serious that can be leveled against an institution and a community. Therefore they should be supported by the most clear and compelling evidence possible. It is precisely here that anti-racist campus activists fall woefully short...
... Former Evergreen State College biologist Heather Heying observes “we keep on hearing that we are an incredibly racist institution and we have yet to hear any credible evidence for racism here on campus.”...
... This gulf between personal experience and publicly available evidence is at the heart of the disagreements over racism on campus today."
"Part of the communication problem is rooted in anti-racist discourse. Activists often speak in emotionally charged generalizations. When asked what evidence supports these judgments, an increasingly popular response is to rule such questions out of bounds...
... on the grounds of racism. According to former Evergreen State College biology professor Bret Weinstein, he was told by one of the most radical faculty of color at the college “to ask for evidence of racism is racism with a capital R.” Why? “We must stop asking them...
... because we are inflicting harm on them asking for evidence.” Philosopher Nora Berenstain has invented a name for such evidentiary requests: “epistemic exploitation.” From such a perspective, blind faith is the only acceptable response."
"Thankfully, this seems to still be a minority response to requests for evidence. A more common one is that campus racial violence skeptics listen. [...] So what exactly does listen mean in the context of the Great Awokening?...
"From listening to a great deal of anti-racist discourse, my strong sense is that listen means two rather different things. Its first meaning is eminently fair and consistent with the everyday meaning of the word: to listen means to hear my story...
... Listen does not end there, however. A second meaning is attached to the first and follows in its wake. [...] If Christakis had truly listened to those students at Yale, he would have accepted their definitions of racist and violent...
... He would have endorsed their interpretation of the world as socially normative. Because he refused to do so, one student concluded “all I see from you is arrogance and ego … You are not listening! You are disgusting! I don’t think you understand that.”
"In 2016, the US Department of Education reported 458 on-campus or residence hall hate crimes on the basis of race among some 12.8 million students at the country’s 4945 public and private non-profit, four-year degree-granting college and university campuses...
... 95% of these campuses reported no racially motivated hate crimes at all, which suggests that claims of widespread racial violence have been considerably exaggerated. Just 1% of campuses reported racially motivated hate crimes involving physical harm...
... against persons or property. The remaining 4% reported only acts of destruction/damage/vandalism and/or intimidation. Even if we include intimidation in the category of physical harm, just 3% of campuses had even one such incident in 2016...
... Consider further that, according to political scientist Wilfred Reilly, 15–50% of all hate crimes in the United States are hoaxes or false reports, with campus hate crimes at the higher end of that range. Thus, even the 3% of four-year degree campuses...
... reporting even one racially motivated violent hate crime is almost surely an overestimate. This is not to say that the 400 genuine racial hate crimes each year are irrelevant or simply the price black students, in particular, must pay to be educated...
... However, such rare and almost always anonymous occurrences, vigorously investigated by campus authorities, cannot stand as evidence of an institutional culture of anti-blackness."
"To anti-racist activists, however, reported hate crimes are only the visible tip of the racial violence iceberg. Beneath officially reported hate crimes are the more pervasive bias incidents. In 2016, over 230 US colleges and universities operated bias reporting systems."
"Prior to being sued in 2018 for violating students’ free speech rights, the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor's Bias Response Team claimed “the most important indication of bias is your own feelings,” making agreement on the definition of bias likely impossible."
"A 2016 campus climate survey conducted by the university found that self-reported discrimination on the basis of political orientation was more prevalent than on the basis of either race or sex. The university does not collect incident data on experiences of political bias."
"Racist violence on campus is said to go deeper still. Anti-racist activists claim its foundation is the very curriculum and pedagogy of the university."
" “The question of what counts as ‘good literature’ or ‘good art’ is not easily separable from feelings of exclusion from a majority culture of privilege and ‘value’” (Williams); white privilege is manifested in “white canons of fine art, literature, theory...
..., and scientific thinking” (Evergreen); “research and academia have often emphasized and valued quantitative data, statistical information, and documentation through the written word. Our goals through our research are to push back on this systematic oppression...
... through valuing our personal experiences, oral and creative histories, and the celebration of collaboration and community” (Brown University)."
"If different races have different ways of knowing, then in order to adequately learn, students require instructors of the same race. This is stated explicitly at Sarah Lawrence College where activists recently demanded that "Students of color should not be forced...
... to resort to racist white professors in order to have access to their own history. It is crucial that the College offer courses taught about people of color by people of color so that students may engage in and produce meaningful work that represents them authentically"."
"ecolonization intends to uproot Western academia’s supposed foundational characteristic: whiteness. According to critical race theory, whiteness is the social construction of white culture as socially normative...
... White supremacy, an unequal race-based distribution of power and resources, naturally follows. In the words of well-known activist-scholar of Whiteness Studies Robin DiAngelo, whiteness is a “racist worldview” into which all white people are socialized...
... and effects “an unequal distribution of basically everything between people of color as a whole and white people as a whole”."
"Never mind the superior performance of Asian students on white standardized tests, the strong overrepresentation of Asians in white supremacist higher education...
..., that fact that Indians are the United States’ highest income ethnic group or that Nigerians are one of the most successful new immigrant groups in the country."
"College administrators, too, have taken up the task of decentering whiteness, helping their white faculty and staff in “processing whiteness” (Williams), “unpacking whiteness” (University of New Hampshire), conducting “conversations in whiteness” (University of Michigan)...
..., “understanding your whiteness” (University of Iowa) and “understanding and unlearning whiteness” (Evergreen)."
"In a 2017 article in Harvard Educational Review, DiAngelo and her co-author Özlem Sensoy (both PhDs in Multicultural Education from the University of Washington) lay out what in their view whiteness is and how it operates in US and Canadian academia...
... The focus of their article is how whiteness is supposedly reproduced through faculty hiring and how that process may be interrupted. Thanks to its anti-racist frame, this article has, not surprisingly, become quite popular among American college administrators."
"In ages past, administrators and academics believed the mission of higher education to be the pursuit of knowledge or even truth. Today, they pursue Social Justice."
"Just as critical race theory can destroy knowledge, it can likewise destroy institutions premised upon the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge. Thanks in large part to the influence of critical race theory, Evergreen State College melted down in Spring 2017...
... The concrete results of that meltdown included numerous faculty resignations, a catastrophic collapse in enrollments, layoffs, budget cuts and worldwide humiliation."
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