Academia Anthropology Politics Problematic Parties

Begone, White Devils

December 10, 2021 by David 67 Comments

Over at The College Fix, Dave Huber ponders the complications of being woke while simultaneously having a good time:

In [Swarthmore College student paper] The Phoenix, economics major Sameer Halepoto points to a pre-Thanksgiving party, hosted by the Swarthmore Queer Union, Swarthmore African Student Association, Swarthmore [Hispanic and Latino organisation] ENLACE, and the Swarthmore African-American Student Society, which had filled up rather quickly.

Filled up quickly. Must be the fun crowd.

Halepoto says “typical [Swarthmore] parties include an outsized number of white students (many of whom are athletes), making it harder for marginalised groups to feel welcome.” As a result, party organisers blared a repeating electronic message through speakers which warned that white people had to leave.

Vibeslayer. Or, as Mr Halepoto, our fretfully woke student columnist, puts it,

As the number of students at the party swelled, however, the organisers decided to clean house over fears of overcrowding. Specifically, it was time to kick out the white people. What followed was a message blaring through the speakers from Google Translate that looped for several minutes on end — telling white students to leave. By the time the message stopped playing, the party’s racial demographics had shifted significantly.

Mr Halepoto goes on to share his fashionable (and fashionably unsubstantiated) belief that being gay or brown or sort-of brown is a state of being “marginalised,” even on a modern, upscale, super-progressive campus, where annual tuition fees are north of $70,000. Being so cruelly downtrodden, such put-upon persons are, we’re told, entitled to “safe spaces.” In contrast, “white people” are defined, rather breezily, as a “non-marginalised group,” all party-going to the contrary. How white students who also happen to be gay should navigate student parties without risking looped and amplified racial scolding, and subsequent ejection, is not made entirely clear.

We are, however, told that,

Whiteness does not preclude people from being queer or Latinx.

Furthermore,

This uncertainty is exacerbated by the fact that even after the message stopped playing, there were still a significant number of white students at the party. It is highly unlikely that all of them were queer. As such, the message created an incentive for students to falsely identify with a marginalised identity.

At which point, ironies abound.

Mr Halepoto notes that “not everyone who stayed at the party belonged to the affinity groups,” by which he means favoured groups, or groups allowed to indulge in loud and self-satisfied acts of bigotry. And clearly, one can’t have a good time when one is so busy trying to count exactly how many white people are at one’s party, and to determine how many of those white people are in fact gay, or merely happy to be among those who are.

Seemingly troubled by a dim flickering of reality, Mr Halepoto concedes,

It is fair to question whether telling white students to leave through a text-to-speech software loop is the optimal solution to creating a more inclusive party.

The college’s own rules forbid such discrimination, though, as so often, enforcement and consequences appear to be applied rather selectively and with differing levels of vigour. And although Mr Halepoto remains uncertain of how to resolve the intersectional convolutions required of the woke – such that “marginalised groups” are “centred,” with white devils present but firmly relegated to the role of sidekick or “ally” – he does invoke the importance of “more inclusive music.”  




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