The Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center’s Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project held its annual Truth and Transformation Conference Friday, and it was about as cheerful an affair as you would expect. According to the Harvard Crimson, the thunderingly surprising conclusion of the panel was that “nonprofit leaders and activists argued that non-government agencies and individuals ought to take bold action to promote equity.”
This bold action, according to one panelist, must include working toward ensuring “equality of outcomes.” The only kind of institution that could possibly ensure any kind of equality of outcome, such as universal employment and a universal and common salary rate, would be a totalitarian Communist regime.
It’s not exactly breaking news that our nation’s most respected educational institutions are now for the most part radioactive wastelands of far-Left indoctrination, but open and unqualified calls for the installation of a totalitarian Communist regime are still somewhat rare, and hence noteworthy.
Again, as you would expect, the call to endeavor to erase the natural differences among human beings in ability, initiative, interests, willingness to persevere and everything else came in the context of an orgy of America-hatred and race-baiting, or as the Crimson put it, “this year’s conference covered topics including the history of racism and the economic repercussions of racism.”
Panelists, said the Crimson, “explained how they believe organizations should be held accountable for their promises on diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Among them were John C. Yang, president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, who admitted, as he would in any Maoist self-incrimination session, that he had been enjoying unfair advantages, and duly renounced them: “Speaking as an East Asian American male,” Yang said, I recognize that I enjoy certain privileges. So if I’m saying that we should all be treated equally, that’s not right, because the reality is, different communities have suffered in different ways.”
Leftists are generally so deeply ensconced in their fantasy world that no amount of exposure to reality will dislodge them from it, and Yang’s statements are a quintessential example of this general disconnect from reality. The scenario he paints is wildly bizarre in terms of real life in America today and yet commonplace in Leftist discourse.
He enjoys certain privileges? Really? It would have been helpful if he had provided a list of the institutions that give him special consideration, or financial breaks, or any kind of favor at all because he is an “East Asian American male.” Of course, he would respond that there are plenty of institutions that do this, but they don’t do it openly; it’s all under the table, with a wink and a nod, unmistakeable to the initiated but unintelligible to outsiders.
The evidence for this, Leftists insist, is in the overrepresentation of East Asian American males in certain fields and the underrepresentation of other groups. But here Leftist dogma comes up against the hard edge of human reality. The NBA doesn’t have any guys like me: five and a half feet tall, slow of foot, and pushing sixty. Am I crying discrimination? That would be asinine. The NBA works, at least in most important aspects of player recruitment and development, on a merit-based system: The players in the league are better at playing basketball than I am.
John Yang may very well have gotten his various jobs, and probably did, on the basis of having abilities that were a better match for his employers than those of others. This doesn’t mean that East Asian American males got a special break.
Related: Supreme Court Wants Biden’s View on Harvard’s SHOCKING Bias Against Asians
But one cannot say such things at Harvard today. What you can say is twaddle on the order of that peddled by one Eric K. Ward, director of the Western States Center, who said: “I think that the conversation around equity is much more complicated and nuanced than this society will allow for, and that is why the shifting of leadership structure becomes so important in this moment.” This is because, you see, “inequity arises from institutions of governance,” according to Ward. He added that recognizing systemic racism and sexism is key to ensuring that everyone can “live, love, worship, and work free from fear and bigotry.’”
“Inequity arises from institutions of governance,” that is, we need an all-encompassing totalitarian state that will ensure that everyone makes exactly the same amount of money and that all groups are equally represented in every field, regardless of differences of ability and aptitude. And we don’t need only new “institutions of governance,” either: “Non-governmental institutions, such as news platforms and corporations, are also responsible for ensuring ‘equality of outcomes,’ according to Halima Begum, chief executive of the Runnymede Trust.”
This means that news platforms have to exercise more censorship in order to do their part for what Yang referred to as “combating misinformation.” You see, some people might get the idea that groups that are on welfare are not hard-working, and if we’re going to put everyone on the dole and at the mercy of government commissars, we can’t have that: “Misrepresentations of marginalized groups — such as the notion that people receiving federal nutrition assistance do not work hard — may dissuade people from supporting programs aimed at rectifying structural inequalities, he explained.” So more censorship was needed: “Part of it is responsibility of the platforms, the Facebooks and Twitters — what are they doing to prevent false information from getting out?”
Without a trace of irony, Yang claimed that “one of the fights that all of us need to engage in is against misinformation and disinformation,” which was urgently needed because “there is a campaign out there that is trying to distort a lot of what is happening in society.”
Yes, there is, and a good dose of it came from the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center’s Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project on Friday. The Left’s funhouse mirror world would be laughable, except for the fact that Leftists mean to impose it on the rest of us. Even now, disbelieving in the reality of “systematic racism” can cost some people their jobs. If Harvard is a bellwether, a lot more of that is in the offing.
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