See how this is working. If you don’t believe that you are benefiting from “white supremacy,” or don’t believe that you’re being racist because you haven’t engaged in racist behaviour – by “colonising” or “enslaving” or excluding black people from things because of the colour of their skin – then this is just proof of how racist you really are, and of how pervasive “white supremacy” is.

The intrepid SJW Nonsense takes her sanity in her hands and offers a personal guide through Everyday Feminism’s “Healing from Toxic Whiteness” online seminar, the first two parts of which can be found linked below. During the “healing” process, we learn that one baldly asserted but entirely unproven thing somehow proves another baldly asserted but entirely unproven thing, again via bald assertion, and that this is a satisfactory basis for “social justice” activism. We also learn that Everyday Feminism founder Sandra Kim is “super, super, super excited” about her mission to purge white people of mental toxins, that “people of colour” can feel the emotions of their ancestors via “inter-generational trauma,” which is passed on “genetically,” and that simply being white makes one “complicit with racism.” 

Part One. Part Two.

Update: 

Part Three. 

A word of caution. You may feel a strong urge to bite down on your own neck. Especially during part three.

TomJ steers us to another of academia’s identitarian dramas:

Black students’ progress is being stalled by university tutors who are “60-year-old white men” and “potentially racist,” according to students at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) in London. In a report called Degrees of Racism, the student union demands that “all academics must be prepared to acknowledge that they are capable of racism.” It claims unconscious bias is rife at the school — part of the University of London — and that white tutors allow white male students to dominate class discussions and have lower expectations of black and ethnic minority (BME) students because of “racist stereotypes of people of colour as less capable, or lazy.”

Alongside the usual demands for double standards and racial favouritism in hiring, and “compulsory classes for academics to combat unconscious bias,” the students want “all staff [to] feel able to confront each other’s racism.” The report, they say, is intended to address the “significant gap in attainment” between white and ethnic minority students.

[The report] quotes black undergraduates who say their academic progress is being hampered by older white professors who cannot relate to them. “Both of my tutors are white men. How can I have a rapport and feel comfortable talking to a 60-year-old white man?” asks one. “Our experiences of life are so different and you’re coming from completely different places.”

Readers will note that the students, these avowed opponents of racism, refer to themselves, and by extension all black students, as if they were some ancient and unfathomable offshoot of humanity, for whom rapport with outsiders is impossible. And who are supposedly oppressed by the unremarkable fact that, in a white-majority country, their professors will often be white and – as seems unavoidable – older than the students. Readers may also wonder how such exquisitely sensitive creatures will fare when faced with potential employers who may also be paler than themselves and, shockingly, not nineteen.

In short, the students are admitting, albeit unwittingly, that in fact they are the inflexible and bigoted ones, the ones preoccupied with racist and ageist stereotypes, and are incapable of feeling “comfortable” with people whose appearance differs from their own. Apparently, for them, learning is next to impossible unless they are being taught by people who look just like them, are of a similar age, and who share the assumptions of a subset of nineteen-year-olds who are very much accustomed to flattery and indulgence.

Perhaps the students are too busy issuing grandiose demands to consider the humdrum fact that a person’s knowledge, perspective and experience, from which one hopes to benefit, necessarily take time to accumulate. Or to consider the possibility that stretching oneself beyond the familiar and comfortable is the general idea of education. And so it seems to me that the “significant gap in attainment” that the student union bemoans may have more to do with the limited abilities, and even more limited horizons, of the students in question.

Update, via the comments:

Headline of note. (h/t, Damian) // Horse versus rubber chicken. // How to sex, fatly. // Not all balloon pops are the same. // When poor impulse control meets a lack of foresight. // Surface tension. // The future is foolproof. // Two artificial intelligences engage in a strange and tedious argument. // Film effects of yesteryear. // Some animated engines. // Monochrome storms. // Classical mash-up. // Why you’re probably playing Monopoly all wrong. // Marbles and magnets. // Mongolian wrestlers. // Neglected grain silos. // Odd ice. // Impractical tableware. // And finally, some screwless, glueless Japanese joinery.

Sohrab Ahmari on the narrowness and tedium of leftist cultural criticism: 

Culture is the whole constellation of practices, norms and institutions that help people think through big questions — about truth, beauty and the good… The problem with identitarianism is that it… reduces all these mysteries — the things great art and culture have grappled with for millennia — into grievance and propaganda… Open up your social-media newsfeed, or go to nearly any cultural criticism website, and chances are you’ll spot the new philistinism right away: “Did you know that yoga is cultural appropriation?” “Your sushi restaurant is actually part of a structure of colonial oppression!” “Why the new Spider-Man movie is terrible for trans people!” And on and on. For millions of people, all thinking about culture is summed in the question: Does this affirm the feelings of the “oppressed” or not?  Nothing higher, nothing transcendent or universal.

See also the first item here. And the first item here. 

Jonathan Haidt shares a vision of the near future: 

The [on-campus] microaggression programme teaches students the exact opposite of ancient wisdom. Microaggression training is — by definition — instruction in how to detect ever smaller specks in your neighbour’s eye… It’s bad enough to make the most fragile and anxious students quicker to take offence and more self-certain and self-righteous. But… what will happen to a democracy as students graduate from college and demand that microaggression training be implemented in their workplaces? If you think American democracy is polarised and dysfunctional in 2016, just wait until the baby boomers have aged out of leadership positions and the country is run by a millennial elite trained at our top schools, which immersed them in a microaggression programme for four years.

Damon Linker on the crab-bucket world of intersectional identity politics:

It should be obvious that this brand of politics is profoundly poisonous. Instead of seeking to level an unjust hierarchy, mitigate its worst abuses, and foster cross-group solidarity, intersectionality merely flips the hierarchy on its head, placing the least “privileged” in the most powerful position and requiring everyone else to clamour for relative advantage in the new upside-down ranking. Those who come out on top in the struggle win their own counter-status, earning the special privilege of getting to demand that those lower in the pecking order “check their privilege.” This is a sure-fire spur to division, dissension, and resentment.

You are moving forward in the queue.