It costs a jaw-dropping $85,536 a year to attend the University of Chicago as an undergraduate and live on campus, but it’s worth every penny. For that money your son, daughter, or offspring of indeterminate gender can tackle some of the real problems that are bedeviling our society today. They can take a course entitled “The Problem of Whiteness,” which is part of the university’s rollicking “Critical Race and Ethnic Studies” curriculum. Yes, $85,536 for this crude racist indoctrination.
As you might expect, the whole thing is couched in gobs of pseudo-intellectual verbiage loaded with the favored campus buzzwords of the day, but it can really all be boiled down to “white people are evil oppressors, nonwhite people are noble victims.” The university’s 2022-2023 Catalog states that “the BA program in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) offers an interdisciplinary curriculum that leads students to examine both the processes through which members of the human population have been constructed as racial and ethnic groups, and the political, historical, social, and cultural effects of this constitution.” See, the idea here is that white people invented racial categories and then used them to oppress those outside the classification they made for themselves.
Studying this, we’re told, “trains students to think critically and comparatively about the varying ways in which race and ethnicity have been constructed in different parts of the world and in different historical periods.” The lurid and salacious part comes next: “Focusing on conquest, subjugation, genocide, slavery, segregation, migration, and diasporas, as well as resistance to these historic and contemporary practices of subjugation, CRES prompts students to examine the political, social, and cultural practices and institutions of minority or marginalized populations in pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial settings.” Needless to say, there will be no discussion whatsoever of any “conquest, subjugation, genocide, slavery, segregation, migration, and diasporas” perpetrated by any nonwhite people.
The colonialism in question is all Western: “These populations include, for example, Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, Australia, and elsewhere who have been subjugated to subaltern positions by colonizers in their own homelands, and populations across the Americas who originated in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America, as well as diasporic communities therein who have been subject to enduring global processes of racialization and its material impact.” Without knowing anything about who will be teaching these courses, I can state with absolute certainty that the Islamic conquest of the Middle East, North Africa and Persia, and the subsequent subjugation of the indigenous people and destruction of the indigenous cultures, will not be discussed. There is only one group that is the target here, and they are the majority population of North America, the focus of evil in the modern world as far as the Left is concerned.
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The ”Problem of Whiteness” course description asserts that “critical race theorists have shown that whiteness has long functioned as an ‘unmarked’ racial category, saturating a default surround against which non-white or ‘not quite’ others appear as aberrant.” Got that? It’s an academic way of saying that “White people look down on non-whites.” The irony of an academic looking down on white people long enough to state this was apparently lost on the University of Chicago. The description continues: “This saturation has had wide-ranging effects, coloring everything from the consolidation of wealth, power and property to the distribution of environmental health hazards.” Yeah, yeah, systemic racism. “Yet in recent years, whiteness has resurfaced as a conspicuous problem within liberal political discourse. This seminar examines the problem of whiteness through an anthropological lens, drawing from classic and contemporary works of critical race theory. Attending to the ways in which various forms of social positioning and historical phenomena intersect in the formation of racial hierarchy, we will approach whiteness as a ‘pigment of the imagination’ with worldmaking (and razing) effects.” What does that mean? Essentially, white people are evil. Keep that in mind, and you’ll get an A.
According to a Wednesday report in the Daily Caller, “Two white women, Assistant Instructional Professor Katie Hickerson and Teaching Fellow Rebecca Journey, recently taught the class, and Journey is set to instruct the course in the upcoming Winter semester.” The Caller included a link to Rebecca Journey’s page in the Global Studies department, but now that page shows only an error message. Journey, says the Caller, “Completed her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2021 and studies ‘how the evolutionary and reformist logics of eugenic ideology animate the aesthetics of green urbanism in contemporary Denmark.’”
Great. And this fall, she’ll be teaching racial hatred and division at a prestigious American university. The thrust of her course will likely be that once white people embrace the far-Left agenda, all will be well, and the evil that they have brought to the world will be eradicated. That’s what virtually all of America’s universities teach these days, as they have become more centers of Leftist indoctrination than anything remotely resembling genuine institutions of higher learning.
Unfortunately, as ridiculous as Rebecca Journey and her course are, they are resoundingly ordinary in today’s academic environment. The packaging is (often, but not always) less lurid and obvious, but the same sort of thing is taught all over. That’s one key reason why we’re in the fix we’re in.
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