Bringing on campus people who are specialists in emotional confrontations on race relations is not a practice unique to Whitman College. There is in fact a whole industry of “diversity consultants” or race relations specialists who give talks or conduct seminars on campus, advise administrators on racial matters, participate in freshman orientation programs, hold off-campus retreats for faculty members and administrators, prepare films, videotapes or other materials, hold conferences around the country, and publish newsletters and magazines devoted solely to “diversity.”
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While individual styles vary, a common theme is that
everyone
white is racist, with the only distinction being between those who are overt and those who do not realize their own racism, those who admit it and those who engage in psychological “denial.” To minority individuals, the message is: Racism is pervasive around you, whether you realize it or not. Ambiguous situations should always be interpreted as racial affronts. “Never think that you imagined it,” one speaker at a Harvard workshop said, “because chances are
that you didn’t.” This speaker was an official of the university.
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Colleges and universities across the country utilize race relations consultants. Tulane University, for example, has subjected its administrators to two-day seminars off campus, operated by an Atlanta organization which uses methods described as “confrontational” and based on the usual
a priori
presumption of racism that has to be rooted out by these consultants. This Atlanta organization has also received money from the Ford Foundation to bring together high officials of universities throughout the region for similar sessions.
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Yale University paid several thousand dollars to a New York-based firm to conduct workshops on its campus, with one of the consultants suggesting that students who had chosen to go to class rather than attend the workshops were racist.
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At a week-long series of workshops at Harvard, the presumed breakdown of racism was quantified as 85 percent subtle racism and 15 percent overt racism. Yet, despite this air of scientific precision, an observer found that the atmosphere surrounding the keynote address “resembled a religious revival meeting.”
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This too is not uncommon. Psychological techniques used by old-time itinerant revival-meeting preachers have proved effective in evoking feelings of guilt and repentance in academia. At the University of Wisconsin, for example, an itinerant race relations specialist evoked “the repentant sobs of white students” at one of his workshops, while pushing his message that virtually all white people are racists and all black people are angry.
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Sometimes the old-fashioned revival meeting techniques are combined with modern psychological devices like role-playing.
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The very possibility that self-interest might be involved in consultants’ commercial promotion of polarization on campus never seems to be mentioned, even though these secular Elmer Gantry’s have made a career for themselves by practicing an art requiring little academic qualification and facing no empirical check regarding either assertions or consequences.
As with so many other non-academic intrusions into education at all levels, the problem is not that these activities will necessarily succeed at their avowed purpose, but that they can do enormous damage in the process. Perhaps the most ironic
venue for racial polarization has been Oberlin College, whose long tradition of liberalism (in the original sense) on racial issues goes far back into the nineteenth century, when Oberlin was a stop on the “underground railroad” that helped blacks escape from slavery. Today, while workshops are being held on the Oberlin Campus with such themes as “lighting oppression” and “celebrating diversity,” blacks and whites go their separate ways, letters to the student newspaper are filed with angry recriminations among the various fractionalized groups, and there is a search for “ever more rarefied units of racism,” according to the college’s own president.
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The prevalence of the idea that frequent and sweeping charges of racism are going to improve intergroup relations cannot be explained either by its plausibility or its track record. On the contrary, it feeds the polarization which benefits only those minority activists and apparatchiks who promote this approach. Increasingly, white students are becoming not only hardened against such denunciation but openly resentful of it. As a student at the University of Texas (Austin) wrote:
Racism has become an epithet against which there is no defense. The charge of racism needs little support, is nearly impossible to refute, and is more damaging to a person than any other label. It has become the insult-of-choice to many liberals.
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A University of Michigan student said, “the word
racism
is thrown around so often that it is in danger of losing its meaning.”
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Certainly the term had lost its sting for the
University Review of Texas
, which responded to accusations of racism by calling them “boring and uncreative.”
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A recently graduated Stanford law student referred to “panhandlers for minority representation” on campus and to “minority advocates who greet any opposition to their agenda of quotas and preferences with charges of racism.”
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At colleges around the country, there have been bitter complaints about the double standards used in determining what is and is not racism. A student at the University of Virginia, for example, noted:
Apparently there is a double standard for racism at the University. When a sign was found on Route 29 containing a racial slur, the entire University was up in arms. However, when a
black fraternity distributed a flyer with a picture of a black man holding a sword in one hand and the decapitated head of a white man, entrailes and all, aloft in the other, no one seemed concerned. The same was true when a representative from the Nation of Islam speaking at the University claimed to have words only for black students saying, “to hell with the rest of them.”
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A Stanford undergraduate likewise declared that the racism on his campus was a racism “against whites.” He added:
There is a quiet, powerful resentment growing among whites here who feel that they are paying an increasingly burdensome toll for the crimes of their, or someone else’s, ancestors. The fact that this resentment is not expressed in campus literature or open conversation does not mean it is not there; on the contrary, its lack of expression will ensure that it festers and grows.
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An observer at an “anti-racism” seminar at Oberlin reported:
Throughout the three-and-a-half hour session, no participant raised an objection, yet I subsequently heard that many were dismayed. Why had they not spoken out? “It’s not worth it,” one senior told me. “You just get attacked.”
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A professor at Kenyon College said:
Black students … are regularly permitted the most outrageous expressions of anti-white racism and, increasingly, anti-semitism, while white students must be extraordinarily careful in their choice of words and in their actions lest they be accused of racism and punished accordingly.
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The student newspaper at Bryn Mawr and Haverford reported a “backlash” at these colleges against the
a priori
charges levelled against white students:
From the moment they arrived on campus, they have been called racist, sexist or classist.
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Not all the students take it. A white student at Haverford, responding to a complaining and accusatory article by a black classmate, said:
You come off in your article as a most embittered person—“pity me” you write: “pity me more because I am Black.” Though you make good points about disadvantages Blacks have, I found your letter offensive to me as a person who happens to be white. I did not chose to be this color any more than you chose to be Black; and I respect that which is distinct in the Black culture, but I refuse to be ashamed because I am white.
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Some white students at Berkeley complain that it is a problem just to avoid setting off criticism by not being up to date on ever-changing names for different groups:
It’s Chicano now, or Chicana, or Mexican, Latina, Hispanic, I mean … every year it changes…. If you say the wrong thing you’re either racist or they yell at you…. But we’re always the white honky … we don’t get to change our name every year.
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Another Berkeley student complained of “whites hearing all year they are racists.” He said:
I grew up with white, yellow, black. I mean hall my buddies on the football team were black, and I come here and read every other day in the paper I’m a racist. It irritates me.
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Neither whining nor breast-beating are sounds that anyone wants to hear incessantly. Nevertheless, the search for grievances over racism remains unabated. In some cases, charges are fabricated. The Tawana Brawley hoax in New York has had a number of campus counterparts. A black instructor at Ohio Dominican College resigned after claiming to have received racial hate mail from one of her students—and after detectives found evidence suggesting that she had forged the letters herself.
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Other reports of racial incidents at Tufts University, at Smith College, at Emory University, and at the University of Texas have also turned out to be false, and an incident at Columbia University was described by more than 20 eyewitnesses very differently from the way it was first reported in the media. The attorney for the black students in the Columbia University case was C. Vernon Mason, who was also an attorney for Tawana Brawley.
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Both false and true racial incidents reveal something of the
atmosphere on college campuses, an atmosphere whose complex cross-currents derive ultimately from the needless pressures generated by double standards and double talk, both of which poison the atmosphere required for people to get along. As race relations have worsened in the wake of policies designed to make them better, there has been no re-thinking of the original assumptions on which these policies were based. On the contrary, there has been a renewed insistence on more of the same dogmas. In addition, the escalating racial and ethnic strife has generated some new dogmas as well, based on the same general vision as the old.
NEW DOGMAS FOR “NEW RACISM”
Three responses to the growing backlash of insulting, harassing, and violent incidents against blacks and other minorities across the country have been common among academics:
What these three explanations have in common is that they wholly ignore
the very possibility
that the policies and practices of the colleges themselves may have been responsible for the hostile racial climate on campus. They also completely ignore facts which go counter to each of these three explanations. In addition, the “remedies” suggested or taken extend or accentuate the racial double standards which have been so much resented. Moreover, the “experts” consulted in such matters have often been ethnic studies professors and minority affairs administrators, who have the most blatantly obvious vested interest in continuing and expanding these double standards.
Typical of the closed mind on such issues in academia was a long feature article in
The Chronicle of Higher Education
of January 27, 1988, focusing exclusively on the views of those
with the three explanations already noted. Of the thousands of words in its story, not one was from anyone with a different perspective, challenging the prevailing social vision or the policies based on it. According to
The Chronicle of Higher Education
, “black students are finding that white campuses are often hostile environments in which vestiges of the ‘old’ racism persist.”
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But the “vestige” argument is contradicted by the fact that the racial outbreaks on many campuses are both more numerous and more severe than anything witnessed in past decades on these same campuses, even though minority students have been attending such colleges for generations. By definition, a vestige is not larger or worse than what it is a vestige of. Nuclear bombs are not a vestige of bows and arrows. Moreover, the geographical distribution of racial incidents also belies the “vestige” argument.
In the 1960s, there were many violent resistances to the racial integration of colleges and universities in the South, while today such violence is far more prevalent in the North. Tabulations of outbreaks of racial or ethnic violence by the National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence in 1988 and 1989 both found more such incidents in the state of Massachusetts alone than in the entire region of the South. Yet the “vestige” doctrine is by no means confined to
The Chronicle of Higher Education
. It is part of a far more general dogmatism in academia, which refuses even to consider the possibility that its own policies have contributed to the disasters it is experiencing.