An unnamed New York Times reader asks, “How can I cure my white guilt?”  

I’m riddled with shame. White shame. This isn’t helpful to me or to anyone, especially people of colour. I feel like there is no “me” outside of my white/upper middle class/cisgender identity. I feel like my literal existence hurts people, like I’m always taking up space that should belong to someone else.

Times contributors Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond, self-styled purveyors of “radically empathic advice,” inform this unhappy, seemingly demented reader that, “We do live in a culture steeped in white supremacy and class bigotry, as well as patriarchal values,” and therefore any comforts and advantages the reader might have, however they were arrived at, are “unearned, the product of corrupt systems,” for which “every white person should be ashamed.” “What you really feel,” they continue, “is trapped within an identity that marks you, inescapably, as an oppressor.”

Today’s words are abuse, creepy and cult.  

Via Dicentra. 

In the comments, Farnsworth M Muldoon steers us to this unhappy development:

Male, pale and stale university professors are to be given “reverse mentors” to teach them about unconscious bias, under a new Government funded scheme. Under the project, white men in senior academic posts will be assigned a junior female colleague from an ethnic minority as a mentor… Prof Jon Rowe, who is overseeing the project at Birmingham University, said he hoped the scheme will allow eminent professors to confront their own biases and leave them “feeling quite uncomfortable.”

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.

The speed with which patent woo can propagate among the supposedly intelligent is quite remarkable. The pseudoscience of “unconscious bias” testing and correction has been repeatedly exposed as both laughable and pernicious – a kind of diversity Scientology – and yet it spreads, thanks to ideological modishness and taxpayer funding. And when minority students reject the excuses and woo being peddled ostensibly for their benefit, they may find themselves denounced by their self-appointed saviours.

What’s objectionable, among so much else, is the conceit that these clowns, with their weird racial fixations, and other clowns just like them, have any business at all probing the unconscious of staff based on their race and sex, their maleness and paleness, in order to find bigotry that they assume must exist solely because of their skin colour.

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.

You can’t say that. 

Footnote of note. 

Michael Jones on the Clown Quarter’s approximation of scholarship: 

In her paper, How to Write as Felt: Touching Transmaterialities and More-Than-Human Intimacies, University of Toronto scholar Stephanie Springgay suggests that felt, a “dense material of permanently interlocking fibres,” can be linked to racism and capitalism.

It’s those “cis-heteronormative White supremacist settler colonial logics,” you see. And the “queer self-touching,” obviously.  

Charles Cooke on the latest young titan of US socialism:  

Speaking to a friendly Trevor Noah, [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez revealed that she does not know the difference between a one-year and a ten-year budget; confused the recent increase in defence spending with the entire annual cost of the military; implied that the population of the United States was around 800 million strong; and, having been asked to defend her coveted $15 minimum wage, launched into a rambling and inscrutable diatribe about “private equity” firms that would have been a touch too harsh as a parody on South Park. 

Charlotte Allen on “healthy masculinity,” as defined by campus woke-lings: 

In May, the University of Texas-Austin hastily pulled back a programme on “healthy masculinity” that its counselling staff had devised – amid a flood of ridicule over such aspects of the programme as posters depicting young men wearing pencilled-in dresses (complete with bust-lines) and encouraging UT’s male students to try nail polish and makeup. The programme, titled “MasculinUT” and devised in 2015, had been originally marketed as a means of reducing campus sexual assault and domestic violence. Instead, as even UT administrators ultimately conceded, it mainly consisted of promoting “gender fluidity” and the treatment of traditional masculine roles and goals — such as focusing on career “success,” becoming the family “breadwinner,” and being told to “act like a man” — as inherently pathological.

And Jonah Goldberg on Sarah Jeong and racism as a credential at the New York Times: 

Pogonip steers us to the pages of Everyday Feminism, where Sophia Stephens, a freelance writer and self-described “educator,” informs white employers of how to “ensure the safety of the black people and people of colour who work with and for you.” Not safety in the sense of fire regulations, of course, or loose stair carpeting, but with regard to the exquisitely delicate emotional state of All Brown-Skinned People Everywhere. Due to this perilous and inherent instability of mood, there are “questions to interrogate as you engage with people of colour and their labour.” Among which,

Are you asking or demanding? Many white people who approach Black and non-Black people of colour for labour do not ask for our labour — they demand it from us. Asking someone to do something leaves it open-ended with space for the person to say no… If you are exhausting and hurting Black and non-Black people of colour around you because you won’t take “no” for an answer when you request labour from us… it’s time to check your privilege.

If that’s not catnip for employers with tight deadlines, I don’t know what is. Oh, there’s more:

The most common opening for a demand that most white people don’t even realise is a demand is, “I need.” Of course you have needs, but is it necessary that you consistently go to people of colour, who also have needs that are systematically denied to them, to help you?

Yes, white employers must avoid using the phrase “I need such-and-such by the end of the week,” as this inflicts cruel and unusual hardship on those possessed of brown skin. And as an employer, a white employer, you must always remember to ask yourself, ‘Could I give this person’s work – which I hired them to do, and am paying them to do – to someone else – ideally, someone whiter?’ Or as Ms Stephens puts it,

It is important to reflect on how generations of access and entitlement to our labour does not mean you automatically get it from us now.

Needless to say, there are many other terms and conditions for white employers to observe, including parsing your requests for signs that they may be “inherently racist” or contain unspecified “microaggressions” and “triggering” language; and this:

Take a peek at our social media (if you have access and permission), or go on Google and do some research before you ask us for labour.

Presumably, this is in order to perform a daily, perhaps hourly, check on the current moods of every single brownish employee, and thereby discern whether or not they may be willing to consider doing whatever it is you’re paying them to do.