Reheated (120)

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.

The “white body,” it turns out, is a “state of disconnection between mind and body. It is ungrounded and cannot feel the earth.” And which therefore has to be corrected, by an expert, a healer, for $200 an hour. Such are the mental rumblings of Tada Hozumi, a “cultural somatic therapist” whose pronouns, we learn, are “them/they.” Because of course they are.

It would seem that our self-styled betters have merely changed the label, from racist to anti-racist, while their mental habits are much the same as those of the archetypal bigot, only less inhibited by social disapproval. Hence the overt glee in pathologising people of pallor.

The ones who apparently can’t dance on account of their chairs and trousers, and their “energetic imbalance” and “loss of spinal fluidity.” And so, we’re told that a “white body… cannot feel the earth.” Lacking, as it does, that Sino-Negro-Indo-Aboriginal ectoplasm.

Readers will note how readily and often our practitioner of “embodied medicine” – and pretentious ethno-masochism – deploys the word we, thereby blurring the distinction between her own, somewhat odd preoccupations and those of the melanin-deficient more generally. “We can change,” says she. “In fact, we must change.”

Because speaking for all white people involved in medicine, and by extension all white people, and casually and baselessly accusing them of racism, of being morally inferior, and indeed dangerous to non-white patients, is so very selfless. And somehow, conveniently, not at all racist.

And we’re told that the aforementioned healing and realignment – or neurotic and convoluted self-preoccupation – should take the form of fretting about one’s “privilege,” deferring to the opinions of the Sacred Brown Ones, who must not be “burdened” with the “responsibility for educating those of us who are white,” and by “ensuring… the promotion of physicians of colour.”

Not being white being some kind of credential, apparently, a sin-free state, and a basis for accelerated career advancement.

Professor Rowe admits that no evidence of “overt prejudice” against women and minorities has been found, but he nonetheless hopes to inflict discomfort on those deemed sufficiently pale. As if, in itself, this would be some kind of triumph.

“We are mindful that previous attempts at addressing such imbalances have not been successful,” says the professor. And so, rather than revisiting his own egalitarian assumptions regarding the distribution of interest, aptitude and talent, he and his team will be searching for witches and racial ectoplasm.

It’s not unreasonable to suppose that the role of “reverse mentor” will attract people already sympathetic to the hokum being peddled, and intrigued by the personal leverage it affords, and who may feel an ideological obligation to unearth some damning but invisible sin, fairly or otherwise, if only to validate their own conceits.

Which is to say, the so-called mentors – who’ve agreed to participate in a project that by definition assumes white guilt regardless of evidence or lack thereof – seem more likely to be racially bigoted than any random member of staff.

It seems to me that when you’re reduced to hunting for “unconscious bias,” as supposedly confirmed by a person’s preferred charity or the random positioning of a chair, then you’ve crossed a line into something approaching hysteria. And a license for malice.

And yet we appear to have arrived at a point where people are expected to simply accept this kind of insulting presumption and intrusion, with an understanding that one mustn’t question the competence and motives of the clowns doing the ectoplasmic probing.