According to Cheryl E. Matias and Paul T. Le, both of the University of Colorado at Denver, the belief that the apprehension of, and substance of, scientific discoveries is independent of whatever one’s skin colour may happen to be, is a problem. One that results in the spread of “whiteness ideology,” and thereby “white supremacy.”  

Nikita Vladimirov pokes through the mental wreckage: 

According to Matias and Le, “our science is out of touch with the experiences of our students of Colour and, instead, represents post-colonial discourses of White power and control.” “Whiteness embraces White ideology, and because Whites are at the apex of the racial hierarchy, whiteness becomes normalized and is invisible to those who benefit the most from it,” the scholars observe. “This is particularly troubling because the normality of whiteness means that Whites do not believe that they are actively investing in White supremacy or racism, which keeps oppression intact.”

And Kafkatrapping, apparently, is the apex of woke scholarship.

Because if you demur, or suggest that the laws of electromagnetism don’t dramatically alter depending on the melanin levels of the person doing the maths, then you just don’t care about “students of Colour” being “victims of deculturalization” and being “invalidated.” Indeed, you are “erasing the values and culture of indigenous people,” and are bolstering “post-colonial discourses of White power and control over people of Colour via forcing the internalization of Western science knowledge.” Instead, all people of pallor must denounce themselves as oppressors, embrace “other ways of knowing” and “re-imagine what science education spaces can look like.”

Sadly, however, and despite the assertions above, the aboriginal alternatives to Maxwell’s equations and commutative algebra remain oddly unspecified.

Somewhat related. 

Update:

Meanwhile, in the world of clown-shoe education: 

Saying “God bless you” after someone sneezes is listed as a microaggression on a lengthy “anti-oppression” guide posted online by Simmons College. “This guide is intended to provide some general information about anti-oppression, diversity, and inclusion as well as information and resources for the social justice issues key to the Simmons College community,” it states, adding “this guide is by no means exhaustive.”

It does, however, have eight subsections and contains links to over 100 further sources of recreational agonising. Because the fever dream must never end. 

Apparently, the sneezing thing is fraught with oppressive potential because it implies an “assumption of one’s own religious identity as the norm,” and “conveys one’s perception that everyone is Christian.” (There is as yet no word on the injurious effects of greetings and gestures favoured by other religious groups, or on how offended one should be when, following a sneeze, someone says sahha or yarhamukom-Allah.) And that time when I sneezed in the checkout queue in a Marks & Spencer Food Hall and the lady behind me instinctively said “Bless you,” what she really meant, obviously, is “Convert to the one true faith or may The Lord damn your heathen carcass.”

Given the university’s Augean mission to catalogue and denounce all possible sin, however small and theoretical, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the act of compiling lists of things to complain about has itself proved problematic. Specifically,  

Labelling oppression with “phobia” suffixes is harmful, 

And so,

The guide’s authors explain that they replaced the typical suffix “phobia,” such as Islamophobia, with the term “misia,” because the term “phobia” is offensive to people with phobias.

At which point, the very fabric of spacetime began to boil.

If you missed it in the comments, here’s a little creepiness from schools in British Columbia:

When [parent] Kansas Field Allen heard about the posters, she was shocked. She asked her son to take photos of them so she could post about it on social media and get feedback from her peers. “I’d say 95 per cent of the people are in favour of having the posters taken down, and that’s from all races,” Field Allen said.

The posters in question, which appear across the school district, include this one:

Matthew Blackwell on empathy, asymmetries and “woke” hostility: 

[Jonathan] Haidt and his colleagues… sought to discover how well conservative and what Haidt terms ‘liberal’ (i.e., progressive) students understood one another by having them answer moral questions as they thought their political opponents would answer them. “The results were clear and consistent,” remarks Haidt. “In all analyses, conservatives were more accurate than liberals.” Asked to think the way a liberal thinks, conservatives answered moral questions just as the liberal would answer them, but liberal students were unable to do the reverse… Haidt and his colleagues found that progressives don’t understand conservatives the way conservatives understand progressives… and it goes a long way in explaining the different ways each side deals with opinions unlike their own. People get angry at what they don’t understand, and an all-progressive education ensures that they don’t understand.

For further illustration, see this and this. Or poke through just about anything here tagged “academia.”

S A Dance on the horrors and hokum of grad school humanities: 

I had never read Althusser’s Reading Capital and I had never read Marx’s Capital, which, perhaps, guaranteed my floundering in grad school given the pervasiveness of Marxist thought in the humanities… I went to graduate school because I found studying literature exhilarating and fulfilling. In my undergraduate honours thesis I analysed the significance of Herman Melville’s allusions to the Book of Job in Moby Dick. I wanted to do more of that: studying and understanding the great works of literature. Instead I was asked to understand how “The Althusserian ‘ideological interpellation’ designates the retroactive illusion of ‘always-already;’ the reverse of the ideological recognition is the misrecognition of the performative dimension.”

And Gad Saad on “toxic masculinity”: 

Think of the male archetype in romance novels, which is a literary form almost exclusively read by women. He is a tall prince and a neurosurgeon. He is a risk-taker who wrestles alligators and subdues them on his six-pack abs, and yet is sensitive enough to be tamed by the love of a good woman. This archetype is universally found in romance novels read by women in Egypt, Japan, and Bolivia… Most of the traits and behaviours that are likely found under the rubric of “toxic masculinity” are precisely those that most women find attractive in an ideal mate. This is not a manifestation of “antiquated stereotypes.” It is a reality that is as trivially obvious as the existence of gravity.

See also this short clip of Jordan Peterson discussing women’s preferences in pornography. 

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

Jordan Peterson tries to speak at Grant Hall, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Monday, March 5: