Steven Malanga on question-begging “equity” and its corrosive effects:  

The equity movement presumes that any unequal results in society reflect structural or institutional racism, even when officials can’t identify any actual discrimination. To redress these purported inequities, the movement demands that every city department’s mission, and every major decision in local government, be looked at from a racial-equity perspective. In practice, this has meant mandatory bias training for municipal and school employees, in order to root out “policies that work better for white people,” in the words of one advocacy group, and laws passed in a number of cities that limit what employers can ask job applicants (about any past criminal history, especially), as well as other measures. […] The basic, but highly dubious, assumption behind these reports, and the equity movement generally, is that no possible behavioural differences among ethnic or racial groups might account for different life outcomes. 

Some of the examples of “equity” education are rather boggling in their evasions. Mr Malanga also discusses the “equity” approach to school discipline, which was predictably disastrous, and mentioned here and here. As I said at the time,

What’s remarkable here isn’t that young thugs and budding sociopaths will quickly exploit immunity from punishment based solely on their race, but the fact that grown adults, supposed professionals, many of whom will be parents, either didn’t see this coming or realised what would happen and went ahead anyway, thereby screwing everyone else. 

And – not entirely unrelated – Lee Jussim on the dysfunctions of academia – in neologism form:

Equalitarianism: A dogmatic, quasi-religious belief that all groups are equal in all traits that matter, usually accompanied by the belief that the only credible source of group differences is discrimination and outrage at anyone who suggests otherwise. Often accompanied by the belief that women and minorities are inherently or essentially more virtuous.

Emotional imperialism: The strange belief that your feelings should dictate someone else’s behaviour.

See also the subsequent comments, in which Quillette readers suggest additions. For instance,

Ovaryaction: the compulsion to create neologisms such as manspreading, mansplaining, and himpediment, attributing flaws by individual men as representative of all men to buttress the assertion of systemic, institutional oppression of modern, Western women by the bogeyman known as patriarchy.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

From Tulane University, the very heart of White Devil Babylon – uptown New Orleans – student Shahamat Uddin – pronouns “he, him, his” – howls in protest:

Punctuality centres whiteness. It is far easier for white men to get to work on time than Black people who are having to change their hair to fit the workplace’s professionalism standards.

It’s a hair thing, yes, and therefore terribly political, a hill to die on. But it’s even more than that. It’s also the devastating suspicion that you might be more likely to get hired if you remove your nose piercing, if only during office hours:

I remember the cultural pride I felt when I got my gold studded nose piercing, admiring my ancestors who donned the same kind of jewellery. I take it out now because I know I need a job, and I have learned from the Brown and Black people before me what I have to sacrifice to get one.

You see, wondering whether that nose piercing will be frowned upon, by employers or their customers, constitutes “systemic white supremacy,” a crushing phenomenon “that is barring us from maximal success.” It’s a “sacrifice,” an outrage, proof of being downtrodden. Because nose jewellery is pivotal to both optimal functioning and mental wellbeing. And questions of whether such piercings are ideal for a given workplace – however unspecified and theoretical those questions may be – amount to further, damning proof that “this country was not made for me.”

I have learned when and where it is to my own disadvantage to be too Brown or too gay or too immigrant.

One more time, Tulane University. Where tuition is a mere $60,000 a year. And where the oppressed huddle for comfort against the Cold Winds of Whiteness.

Writing in the pages of Inside Higher Ed, sociology student and “self-identified fat woman” Bobbi Reidinger bemoans the hardships of the chunky would-be educator:

Fat academics need to be more vocal in calls for increased structural accessibility such as larger desks or substitutions for tables and chairs, greater ease in access to elevators, and more. Yet in addition to structural changes that campuses could make to help people of size be more comfortable — such as providing larger bathrooms, chairs without arms and larger auditorium seating — we need to discuss more techniques to combat stigma within classrooms.

You see, it’s not just a question of remodelling half the campus:

Weight-based stigma has an impact on the credibility of fat academics, in particular female academics who often must contend with both gender and fat stigmas… Weight stigma negatively impacts a professor’s credibility as a communicator within the classroom, with greater credibility being given to those who argue against their own self-interest.

Being sufficiently obese that it requires special furniture and enlarged bathrooms, and such that it becomes an obvious topic of classroom conversation, is in a person’s self-interest, apparently. As opposed to, say, a significant health concern – a cause of hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, gallbladder disease, stroke, osteoarthritis, joint failure, incontinence, sleep apnea, breathing problems, depression, anxiety, and cancer.

Therefore, when a fat professor makes their fatness salient inside the classroom, their fatness overrides their educational and occupational statuses, as students interpret this information as coming from an unreliable source.

It occurs to me that if an overweight educator, or would-be educator, presents her own fatness as a kind of moral elevation, a political piety arrived at via victimhood, and then demands oversized desks, plus-sized seats without arms, modified lifts, modified bathrooms, modified auditoria, “and more” – and does all this while sidestepping responsibility for her own rotundity – then students would do well to question the motives and credibility of such a person. And when a teacher or grad student fails to convince a class and promptly blames that failure on some alleged-but-undemonstrated sexism or “weight stigma,” as if that were both obvious and the only conceivable explanation, this is not necessarily proof of injustice or unrecognised talent.

Meanwhile, over at Salon, where the delusional hyperventilate, Mr Chauncey DeVega once again rails against Donald Trump. Today we’re being warned of his “political thuggery and mobster-style behaviour.” The current President is, we’re told, a “dictator.”

The question is… whether anything or anyone is capable of stopping him.

To embellish this tale of impending doom, Mr DeVega turns to academia. Specifically,

I recently spoke with historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat in an effort to better understand where America is on its road to fascism and authoritarianism in this fourth year of Trump’s regime.

It’s a regime, you see. Mr DeVega likes this word and uses it no fewer than nine times, as when telling us, confidently, that,

The American people are in a manic state because of Trump’s regime.

Not just Salon columnists, then, but the entire population. Apparently, 300 million people are teetering on the verge of a psychotic episode.

Dr Ben-Ghiat, a lecturer in Italian Studies, is of course on-message:

I’m very upset that there are in fact Trump supporters and I have zero sympathy towards them.

This is followed by pointed references to Hitler and Mussolini – because hey, why not? – and whisperings of a cowed and fearful media:

Many people in the news media are afraid to really engage the fact that Trump is an authoritarian because if they do so then reality becomes too threatening, and therefore they would have to take a different stance publicly.

Readers are invited to take a moment to reflect on Mr Trump’s famously warm and not at all fractious relationship with the mainstream media, which never, ever calls him names. Like “proto-fascist,” for instance. Or when MSNBC’s Niccole Wallace breathlessly announced that the President was genocidal and, for reasons left to the imagination, clearly bent on “exterminating Latinos.” Or when the same broadcaster’s Frank Figliuzzi suggested that Trump’s lowering of flags following a shooting tragedy was actually a coded salute to Adolf Hitler.

Apparently, these things never happened, are not in fact bizarrely routine, and the pundits at CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, NBC, Salon, etc., are just too terrified and deferential to admit, as Dr Ben-Ghiat puts it, that “they are living in the middle of a fascist, authoritarian takeover.”

Remember, students. You are not an individual, but a mascot of a notional group. 

From Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, By Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo.

It occurs to me that when these clowns bang on about analysing events through a racial or identitarian lens, as for instance here and here, what they mean is shoehorning people through an identitarian keyhole, then pretending that the subsequent cartoonery and narrow contrivance, with its phantom evils and funhouse-mirror bigotry, is some universal profundity and proof of the speaker’s personal sophistication. The possible results of such “social justice education,” in which group affiliations, however contrived or incidental, are foregrounded and categorised, and their acknowledgement made habitual and a matter of great importance, are not hard to fathom. 

Update, via the comments: