By now, you probably already know that nothing you do will ever be good enough for Leftist activists. If you’re a white person, you’re racist no matter what you do. If you’re a man, you’re sexist. If you’re straight, then you’re a homophobe. Born a gender and you want to stay that way? Congratulations, you’re transphobic.
This newest example, though, is repugnant: activists are calling civility itself racist.
Writing at the Wall Street Journal, Steve Salerno — in rejecting the repugnant idea — sarcastically notes: “Civility, you see, is a manifestation of the white patriarchy. Spearheading this campaign are a duo of University of Northern Iowa professors, who assert that ‘civility within higher education is a racialized, rather than universal, norm.'”
Salerno slams the professors’ nonsense:
Their article in the Howard Journal of Communications, “Civility and White Institutional Presence: An Exploration of White Students’ Understanding of Race-Talk at a Traditionally White Institution,” describes a need to stamp out what they call “whiteness-informed civility,” or WIC. The pervasiveness of WIC, it seems, erases “racial identity” and reinforces “white racial power.”
Their thesis can be a tad hard to follow, unfolding as it does in that dense argot for which academia is universally beloved. But their core contention is twofold: One, that civility, as currently practiced in America, is a white construct. Two, that in a campus setting, the “woke” white student’s endeavor to avoid microaggressions against black peers is itself a microaggression — a form of noblesse oblige whereby white students are in fact patronizing students of color. Not only that, but by treating black students with common courtesy and expecting the same in return, white students elide black grievances, bypassing the “race talk” that is supposed to occur in preamble to all other conversations. Got it?
These lunatic activists fail to understand that civility itself is the goal. People will always disagree. But the civil society is a reflection of how people live together better when speech without violence is respected.
Actual racists — like these two professors — will take this as a reason to be violent. They will see this as a green light to harm white people, or white supremacists will see this as a reason to preemptively harm minorities.
This is literally the type of propagandistic fuel that racist movements thrive on. When you fuel resentment, you push people into the arms of racist ideologues.
So many Leftists have claimed that Trump is somehow “empowering racists.” No, claiming “civility is racist” is empowering racists.
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