I want to share with people why I didn’t know I was white. Because I think a lot of people don’t know they are white.

I bring thrilling news from academia:

Professor of education and human development at George Washington University, explains how she needed “somatic embodied training” to “learn that she was white”.

These people are responsible for training new teachers. pic.twitter.com/yXBv2KV7VW

— Mythinformed (@MythinformedMKE) October 18, 2021

The speaker quoted above is Dr Julia Storberg-Walker, an associate professor of education at George Washington University. A teacher of teachers, of those who will in turn shape young minds, or try to, anyway. Our educator’s realisation of her own “whiteness” – and thus innate wrongness – was, we’re told, a result of “somatic, embodied training,” which is essential, apparently. In order to struggle with one’s “positionality” as a White Devil, a doer of “harm,” a devourer of souls.

Dr Storberg-Walker’s academic biography tells us,

Her activist/scholar work…

Because one can’t not be an activist, obviously.

is generative and aims to develop equitable and compassionate frameworks, models, and processes for the purpose of catalysing whole planet interdependence and flourishing.

Whole planet flourishing. Goodness. This feat is to be achieved by drawing on,

quantum field theory, and wisdom traditions spanning diverse cultures and historical moments.

Readers are invited to speculate as to exactly how quantum field theory might bear upon such topics as “critical race activism,” or “colonised words,” and how it might inform “deep learning” about the seemingly endless pathologies of being pale. Alas, Dr Storberg-Walker remains coy on the subject, merely teasing us, and instead offers the following:

The new student counselling director at Middlebury College has vowed to use “more inclusive” methods to treat student mental health, including a focus on white supremacy and social justice.

Ah. I think I see the problem.

Alberto Soto, who received his PhD. in counselling psychology from Brigham Young University, told the Middlebury Campus newspaper that… “The body and mind cannot be healed solely by self-care and focusing on surviving… At some point we must address and identify the source of all our psychic suffering, which is whiteness, heteronormativity, patriarchal systems, etc.”

When not using the word “whiteness” as a modish pejorative and “questioning Eurocentric ideas surrounding mental health,” Mr Soto plans to “challenge the historically-dominant whiteness” of the campus and thereby “create a more open environment for students.” This heavenly state of openness and resurgent mental wellbeing will be rendered upon the Earth by telling students at an upscale and statusful liberal arts college how oppressed they are and by invoking racial conspiracy theories, the aforementioned “whiteness” and “white supremacy,” as the root of all distress.

Readers will recall that Middlebury College is where students suitably gorged on “inclusivity” and “social justice” display their righteousness and mental stability by physically menacing elderly scholars, trying to trample them underfoot, and assaulting female staff, such that they require a hospital visit and, subsequently, a neck brace.

The Middlebury campus has spent the past few years cultivating its persona as one of the most active antiracist campuses in America… Yet at the same time schools have ramped up their antiracist efforts, mental health among students has only gotten worse.

Readers may wish to speculate as to why that might be, and why the phenomenon – a surge in students reporting “anxiety and depression” – predates the pandemic.

Annual tuition at Middlebury is a mere $56,000, excluding books and housing.

Applause would surely follow. 

I am a polyamorous, pansexual, lesbian and nonbinary transwoman. I’m also a furry. 

As someone quips in reply to this, “When you give yourself all the roles in the Discord server.” 

When not discussing his mental health issues – a go-to and seemingly inexhaustible topic – or deploying niche hashtags by the dozen, or modelling his assorted looks, from “hot girl summer” to “basic bitch autumn,” Mr Wildcat, quoted above, likes to remind viewers of how startlingly original he – sorry, e/er – is:

I realise my neo-pronouns are a little unique, mostly because… I came up with them. 

Readers will note that Mr Wildcat apparently finds it bewildering that someone – specifically, a female colleague – might not be entirely convinced by his supposedly unassailable womanly status:

She struggled with identifying my gender and it’s like… what? I wear low-cut tops to work.

“It was confusing. It confuses me.”

Update, via the comments:

My daughter’s father called her “princess” yesterday and I had to lecture him… again.

It’s a short video, but quite a lot is implied. Not all of it, I think, intentionally.

Update, via the comments, where Burnsie adds,

Watching that, I can certainly understand why her “daughter’s father” is not her daughter’s mother’s husband.

Well, quite. “We do not use that term in this house,” says our Queen of Indignation and Overreach. It’s a “harmful word,” we’re told. Though I’d imagine rather more harm is being done to said daughter by her having the kind of mother she apparently has.

Also, open thread. Have at it, me hearties.

If what I’ve been saying is true, then you could say, within the white cultural racist imaginary, black bodies are different, black bodies can suffer, black bodies should suffer.

I wonder if Dr Derek Hook, the agitated educator quoted above, the one mentioned here recently, needs to lower his dosage. Or up his dosage. Or to smoke some entirely different kind of bathroom cleaning product. Either way, “whiteness,” or “the white big other of the racist domain,” appears to be pressing on his nerves. When not suggesting, in a bizarrely circuitous and somewhat manic way, that white people, as some collective entity, secretly fantasise about harm befalling random black people, via “damage” and “mutilation,” Dr Hook apparently endorses the idea that “white people should commit suicide as an ethical act,” in order to “castrate whiteness.”

So, no concerning patterns of thought there, obviously.  

And in other educational news.

She’s “challenging a broken system,” you see.

Needless to say, if you poke through the archives, you’ll find countless examples of educators whose racial neuroticism and mental contortions, often with racially sadistic overtones, are quite remarkable. And again, it’s not just that the ideas on display – and very much in fashion – are obnoxious, or contorted, or morally deranged, or a blueprint for ruin; it’s that the kinds of people who find such things titillating or life-consuming, as Dr Hook and his peers evidently do, tend to be… psychologically marginal. Which is to say, the kinds of people you wouldn’t generally want anywhere near your children.

And yet.