The Unbearable Whiteness of Being

In “Beyond the Pale,” Charlotte Allen of the Weekly Standard goes beyond the looking glass, into the “Fourteenth Annual White Privilege Conference,” at the DoubleTree Hotel near Seattle’s SeaTac Airport, attended by at least 1500 assorted members of academia who just know that The Man is sticking it to somebody:

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The main premise of “The Color of Empire” seemed to be that white people had created the idea of race, “the sole purpose of which is to rationalize the white race,” Hackman said. Hackman, herself distinctly pale of complexion, maintained that her fellow whites some 400 years ago had created a skin-color-based category called “red” even though there are “500 different Native American nations, bands, and tribes.” They had also devised a category called “brown” for “Latinos,” “even though there’s no ‘Latino’ food and no ‘Latino’ language,” Hackman said.

This actually made some sense: If racial classifications are artificial (“socially constructed” was the way Hackman put it), lumping people together under a skin-color label who may have nothing linguistically or culturally in common, why not just get rid of the classifications altogether? Isn’t that exactly why conservatives like me oppose racial preferences and set-asides? But Hackman in fact focused obsessively on race, race, race, and color, color, color. She showed us a Southwest Airlines television commercial in which there apparently weren’t enough “people of color” among the actors playing crew and passengers. She had us divide ourselves into small groups to discuss “how old we were when we discovered what race we were.” (My answer: about age 30, when I realized that with a Hispanic mother, I could make my employers look attractively diverse on their Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reports.) She drew a U-shaped tube with a plunger that had something to do with white people hogging all the resources that rightfully belonged to other races. When I asked Hackman about why race seemed to be the prime focus of her workshop even though it supposedly didn’t exist, she told me that I needed to read up on “critical race theory.” She added: “We’re talking about a reclamation of racial categories.” In other words, racial categories are an oppressive white fantasy​—​until they prove to be useful for promoting race-based identity politics.

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Ahh Frankfurt School, you’ve poisoned the well so effectively, no one can detect your fingerprints:

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