Treatment
Via Critical Mass, here’s a short follow-up film on the indoctrination efforts of Delaware University’s ResLife programme – described by its proponents as a “treatment” – in which students were told, “The term [racist] applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.” The film, embedded here in two parts, is aimed primarily at trustees and alumni, but it deserves wider attention.
Part 1: Wait for the marshmallow “oppression” story around 2:05.
Part 2 : “The immediate effects were to intimidate and humiliate students. The long-term effect is to teach conformity.”
As Erin at Critical Mass points out, the “treatment” prescribed at Delaware wasn’t some bizarre anomaly or distortion, but was hailed as an award-winning exemplar of “social justice education.”
More on Delaware’s attempts at thought correction here. Related: What to Think, Not How.
So (again) no-one got fired for this? Yay, social justice.
As we’ve seen more than once, there’s a remarkable lack of penalty and an imperviousness to shame. Those responsible often find themselves promoted or at least given a new, even grander, job title:
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2008/12/insufficiently-sensitive.html
Of all the incidents of this kind I’ve mentioned over the last two years, I can’t recall anyone being fired or demoted as a result of their behaviour, however egregious it was. The nature of these programmes – the very premise – invites intrusion and abuses of authority. And the situation isn’t likely to spontaneously improve unless those involved face serious penalties.
Who’s this racist at the beginning?
Was this bullshit mandatory? Why didn’t they just walk out?
I’d expect this sort of thing would actually boomerang and have the opposite effect to that intended by the indoctrinators. Is there any evidence of this happening?
“Why didn’t they just walk out?”
“Is there any evidence of this happening?”
Several students objected to the patronising role-play and intrusive questions. A female student took exception to being quizzed on her sexual orientation, pointing out it was “none of your damn business,” and adding that she was tired of having “diversity shoved down her throat.” She was written up as one of the “worst” students in the programme, which was mandatory.
When the story first broke, Delaware’s Michael Gilbert tried to convince critics that the programme wasn’t *really* mandatory – as if that made everything okay – but his claim was repeatedly contradicted by the University’s own written material and internal documents, and by those who were actually administering the “treatment.” Students were given the distinct impression that submitting to this embarrassing nonsense was a required part of their orientation and a condition of living on campus. Not only was the indoctrination mandatory, it was explicitly described as being intended to “leave a mental footprint on [students’] consciousness.”
If you follow the link below, you’ll see how those responsible for the programme were quite willing to deceive the public about what they were doing in private.
http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/8577.html
It’s like something out of Kafka.
99% of people are racist; black, white or otherwise. The other 1% are liars.
“It’s like something out of Kafka.”
Conceived in this way, “diversity” will always be Kafkaesque; it’s just a question of degree. In the name of “social justice” students are coerced into regurgitating the dogma of paranoid grievance merchants, whose own worldview is, of course, overtly racist. In this case, it’s the worldview of Dr Shakti Butler, who insists “all white people in the US” are “racists” by virtue of, er, being white. Butler redefines racism, absurdly, as “prejudice + power” and peddles a racial variant of that old Marxist claptrap “false consciousness.” Oddly, Dr Butler isn’t troubled by her *own* abuse of influence, or by the power of educators who take it upon themselves to inflict their mental health issues on students in their care.
Just read the ‘diversity’ pdf you linked. Let me get this straight. If you DON’T care what color someone is you’re now a racist. And if you’re totally hung up on race and what group someone belongs to you’re NOT racist, but only if you think ALL white people ARE racist.
Holy fucking hell.
http://www.thefire.org/pdfs/3d0208922083e5d59664be8371ab5f0f.pdf
“there’s a remarkable lack of penalty and an imperviousness to shame.”
That’s exactly it -they’re ideologues and they’re proud of their brainwashing. The only way to stop this is to keep it in the public eye. Every time it happens.
“The only way to stop this is to keep it in the public eye. Every time it happens.”
It’s important to understand this isn’t some one-off aberration confined to Delaware. The same hustle is peddled nationally by Peggy McIntosh* and in Seattle schools by Caprice Hollins,* and by Bucknell’s Professor Geoff Schneider, who confidently asserts, “a lot of our students are unconsciously racist” and who defines as harassment “anything that offends.” And then there’s Professor Noel Ignatiev** of the Massachusetts School of Art. Ignatiev publishes the deranged journal “Race Traitor” and his students learn that “whiteness is a form of racial oppression” and should therefore be “abolished.” (Race Traitor’s motto is “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.”) Ignatiev and his Race Traitor colleagues declare their refusal to “limit themselves to socially acceptable means of protest,” and find it “hard to believe” opposition to their ideas could come from anyone except “committed white supremacists.”
After all, who but a “committed white supremacist” could possibly take exception to pretentious collective guilt or the cultural and psychological eradication of the “social construct known as the white race”? And who else could possibly be concerned that these enlightened beings “reject in advance no means of attaining their goal”? Who wouldn’t want their kids educated by these people…?
* https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2007/05/prejudice_revis.html
** https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2008/10/a-commonplace-e.html
THE LEFTIST STATE MUST CONTROL ALL THOUGHT
And that will come when the state gains control of all wealth, business and information, to which end we are rapidly approaching…
http://doctorbulldog.wordpress.com/2009/03/26/mark-levin-slams-obama-on-cavutos-show-last-night/comment-page-1/
We can stop the individual indoctrinators now, because we are free. But when the state is in control of everything, then they can do whatever they want, and our objections will fall on deaf ears.
America drank the KoolAid, and soon it will be time to pay the piper, unless we can get our act together in time to stop them. It can happen, and please G-d it will.
“They called out the category, ‘South Pacific Islander’. And no-one stood up, because there didn’t happen to be anyone who was a South Pacific Islander there. So we’re going to clap, and recognize this group anyway.”
Jesus.
These people are actually *obsessed* with difference.
And as the girl in the video points out, these “orientation” activities led to people bracketing each other into groups when they would not otherwise have done so.
They are actively creating division.
“They are actively creating division.”
They’ve got to justify all those diversity programs with something. If there isn’t a problem to start with then make a problem. Whatever it takes.
From the film: “The immediate effects were to intimidate and humiliate students.”
Naturally. That creates emotional vulnerability so that any rescue (including indoctrination) offered would be grabbed at.
DTOM wrote, “If you DON’T care what color someone is you’re now a racist.”
Don’t you remember what Jesse Jackson said a few years ago? “To ignore race and sex is racist and sexist!”
It’s the standard conceit of the postmodern grievance industry. Supposedly, our identities are socially constructed along lines of whichever racial, gender or class group a person can be said to belong to. For believers, almost everything is viewed in this absurd collectivist light. There’s little apparent interest in people as *individuals* – only as interchangeable markers of a tribe that’s allegedly being oppressed by some other tribe.
“They’ve got to justify all those diversity programs with something. If there isn’t a problem to start with then make a problem. Whatever it takes.”
Here’s a first-hand account of (mandatory) “diversity” training at Delaware:
“She announced that we were going to expose our prejudices and stereotypes about other races and in so doing learn more about diversity. To this end, she was going to read off a list of minorities and ethnicities and we were to write down all the stereotypes and prejudices we could think of for each category… For the next ten minutes we went to work thinking of all the slurs, epithets, and bigoted comments used to demean African Americans, Asians, Italians, Jews, Hispanics, Poles, gay and lesbian persons, and persons of other alternative lifestyles. When it was finished, Lori said something to the effect of, “Look how bigoted and prejudiced even us college students can be,” and “isn’t it a shock that even us who are being educated can think of all these slurs and stereotypes?”
http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/10264.html
compare & contrast….
a)If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face.
b)If you want a vision of the present, imagine leaving a mental footprint on [students’] consciousness.
> “I’d lived with these forty kids for about 6 months at this point, thought I knew them pretty well, and really didn’t think that any of them actually believed these prejudices about any of the minorities we discussed…. If the program was intended to show us our own inherent racism, I think it actually backfired. For as my one friend commented, “Wow! I never realized how few racial slurs I knew for Jews before this activity.” <
“It’s important to understand this isn’t some one-off aberration confined to Delaware.”
At Virginia Tech: “Candidates must do a better job of participating in and documenting their involvement in diversity initiatives. Diversity accomplishments are especially important for candidates seeking promotion to full professor.”
http://thefire.org/index.php/article/10363.html
What’s interesting is just how readily these assumptions are enforced, despite them so often being unconstitutional, incoherent, improper and/or illegal. Only when challenged by outsiders – usually FIRE – is there any discernible hesitation – and then, it seems, only as a result of exposure and embarrassment. And this is very much related to the political monoculture that prevails in much of academia. The general assumption seems to be: “But… but… everyone we know thinks this way. How could anyone not…?”
“Mental footprint.”
God damn. Left by a foot stomping on the brain. How else?
Shades of George Orwell. “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
Nice beaches in Delaware. Rehobeth and so on. Very rural. Last place I would have expected this. It’s like an ant infestation. Inattention leads to infestation. Suddenly the bugs are everywhere.
I agree with David. For believers, almost everything is viewed in this absurd collectivist light.
-James
Wow. Interesting post.
Jay
Defining Racism
David Thompson: Via Critical Mass, here’s a short follow-up film on the indoctrination efforts of Delaware University’s ResLife programme -…