Liberal colleges today are very concerned about racism. But what is racism, really? It’s unclear how many college students, if asked to describe that in detail, would be able to answer the question coherently. At one point in time, racism was openly discussed in colleges as a set of arguments and policies. The arguments were that other races are demonstrably inferior to whites and those ideas were supported by policies. As such, racism once meant a set of ideas and the policies based upon them.
Today, students are not educated on what the ideas are. They sometimes know what the policies were but those too are long gone. Without knowing what the ideas are and having only a hazy idea of what the policies were, “racism” changed from a set of ideas and policies into a willingness to discuss those ideas or policies. When no one is willing to discuss them they can’t be known. Racism turned into a spiritual enemy that can’t be clearly defined. This means that when something bad happens to black people in America, racism is to blame and no coherent explanation for how racism played a part is necessary.
A good example of this would of course be the Baltimore riots. A black man died while in police custody. The officers who held him included three black people and three white people, the police force is mostly minorities, the city is mostly black, the city has been run by Democrats for roughly fifty years and it’s located in one of the bluest states in the nation. Yet if the victim is black and/or it makes black people look bad, racism is to blame. This is to say that even blacks can now be racist against blacks without a rational argument needing to be in evidence. It’s the culmination of a “snowball effect” that would inevitably lead to insularity and hysteria.
To prove that this snowball effect exists, let’s consider how it is not limited to racial issues. The exact same thing has happened in regards to feminism and the “patriarchy.” Patriarchy once meant a combination of ideas and policies that argued for the primacy of men in life and culture. Once the ideas could no longer be discussed, understanding of the policies became hazy. With the policies themselves mostly forgotten we started to see “feminists” who actually support the same policies that the alleged patriarchy supported because they don’t know what patriarchy is/was. Patriarchy is now understood no more deeply than “promoting the interests of men over women” and even other women can be accused of patriarchy when they take a position on behalf of a male that is at odds with what the other female wants.
When blacks can be racist against blacks just because another black is angry, or a woman can be a patriarch because she disagrees with another woman, something is not right. These absurdities would normally collapse into themselves but instead they are held together by a certain idea, that of “privilege.” When a white wins out over a black, a male over female, rich over poor, free market over socialism, straight over gay, those things are all the result of privilege. Without privilege, the natural order of equality would assert itself. One could surmise that the lack of evidence for equality being natural is why none of these issues can be discussed in detail but it’s actually much deeper than that. The real source of the privilege argument is “class theory” which is basically a quasi-socialist idea that serves to distract college students from identifying the most privilege people they know: their tenured college professors and themselves.
Students in liberal college today are taught “class theory” which is meant to help them identify and combat “privilege.” Privilege is itself identified by who the winner is, since it is wrong to discuss the underlying ideas in any detail. As important as identifying privilege is, the students are taught to have the aforementioned blind spot. The meaning of “privilege” in quotes doesn’t mean privileges it means class identification. This is the difference between Privilege (capital P, singular) and privileges (lower case, plural). So long as Privilege is about class affiliation and not about what is commonly understood as identifiable privileges, the tenured professor is not a privileged person. The laid back, party animal college student is not a privileged person. The blue collar white man however is Priviledged because of his class affiliation, even though he lacks identifiable privileges.
The truth is that no one is more privileged than tenured, subsidized college professors. It’s well known that they basically can’t be fired, they are paid more than their position deserves, they are surrounded by adoring and gullible young people who were sent there to learn from them. They might work twenty hours a week or less and be paid for fifty or sixty while they live on campus with no commute. They can get books they write published even if they can’t write worth a damn and openly stole some of their material from their students. When this class of person does work, there is no guarantee that they will be lecturing on the subjects that were listed in the syllabus. Why talk about boring things like mass communications when you can talk about how enlightening group sex is? If these things aren’t privilege in its rawest form then nothing is.
A truly open analysis and dialogue of privilege would consider the most privileged people nearby. This is to say that the average liberal college’s dialogue on privilege is neither open nor is it analysis. It’s not about fighting against privileges, racism or patriarchy. It might have once been about those things but today it’s about tribalism and the search for justification. To understand how professors let things get this way, we can consider the following three things:
First is the theory-tenure relationship, also called publish or perish and the political liberalization of the liberal arts.
Second would be the government-education complex, where liberal politicians fund politically liberal schools. This is in contrast to how conservative politicians would leave schooling more up to the markets and parents, making the government-education complex a completely one-sided fight.
Third is the “snowball effect” as partly discussed in the opening of this chapter. Insularity breeds more insularity, greed breeds greed, hubris hubris.
When these three points are combined the current situation in the west’s liberal colleges not only makes sense, it starts to seem inevitable.
I’m going to expand on these ideas more when I publish my free ebook, Against Liberal College.
Alexander Fāng 