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Teaching Race Hate At Oregon State

Blind progressives calling up the demon of white nationalism
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Oregon State University is taking part in the Social Justice War, sponsoring “social justice retreats” to raise anti-white consciousness on campus, and increase racial discord. That’s not what they say, of course, but that’s what they’re doing. More:

Racial Aikido Retreat

Racial Aikido seeks to empower students of color at predominantly White insititutions (PWIs) using the principles of aikido to recognize, respond, and replenish. Originally created at the University of Vermont, Racial Aikido acknowledges that people of color may be ill prepared to deal with issues of race and racism as it affects them personally. Racial Aikido promotes tools for people of color to maintain a positive self-image and be able to respond to overt and covert racism.

By the conclusion of the retreat, you will have a better understanding of White privilege, in-group and internalized oppression, identity development models, and be more self-aware of your multiple identities. You’ll learn by active participation just how to recognize racism, respond to racism in a self-affirming and positive manner that is appropriate for the situation, and replenish by taking care of your needs in order to maintain a healthy physical, emotional, and spiritual self.

Here’s another retreat offered:

Examining White Identity in a Multicultural World Retreat

The Examining White Identity (EWI) retreat focuses on White identity development, White privilege, and oppression in both personal and institutional contexts, while introducing strategies to dismantle oppressive systems. We will look at ways that understanding these issues will help us address White privilege and oppression in ourselves and with other White people and become better allies for social justice.

And a third:

Examining White Identity for Faculty and Staff

Faculty facilitators of the EWI in a Multicultural World retreat are hosting a pilot experience for faculty and staff. This one-and-a-half day, experiential, on-campus retreat will focus on: white identity, socialization, institutional racism and dominance. 

We will work to build our capacity to dismantle oppressive systems, and we will build a network for continued dialogue and learning. So join us on Friday-Saturday, January 8-9, 2016. To register, please visit: https://tinyurl.com/ewi-facstaff

All white (self-identified) faculty and staff are invited to sign up. Capacity is limited. However, we will continue to accept registrations after all spaces have been filled, and you will have the option to indicate your interest in future opportunities as they become available.

So, what does this tell us? That it is the official policy of Oregon State University to train minority students to be especially conscious of their minority status vis-a-vis white people, and to be paranoid against perceived slights. According to the Daily Caller, a promotional video on the retreat site quotes a student saying “that the retreat provides students of color with “a set of tools to deal with overt or subtle microaggressions that you experience as a marginalized student.”

It is also the official policy to train willing white students to hate themselves and their culture, and white faculty to facilitate this self-loathing, under the rubric of “dismantling oppressive systems.”

What are the white Oregon taxpayers (outside of The People’s Republic of Portlandia) expected to think about the fact that a state university is engaged in promoting hostility, even hatred, towards whites as a group? Recall what Jonathan Haidt said about the 2015 social science finding that in contemporary America, people hate those who disagree with them more than any other group:

This is extremely bad news for science and universities because universities are usually associated with the left. In the United States, universities have moved rapidly left since 1990, when the left-right ratio of professors across all departments was less than two to one. By 2004, the left-right ratio was roughly five to one, and it is still climbing. In the social sciences and humanities it is far higher. Because this political purification is happening at a time of rising cross-partisan hostility, we can expect increasing hostility from Republican legislators toward universities and the things they desire, including research funding and freedom from federal and state control.

Tribal conflicts and tribal politics took center stage in 2015. Iyengar and Westwood help us understand that tribal conflicts are no longer just about race, religion, and nationality. Cross-partisan prejudice should become a focus of concern and research. In the United States, it may even be a more urgent problem than cross-racial prejudice.

What happens when the white taxpayers of Oregon realize that one of their state universities is openly indoctrinating their children in self-hatred, and, through politically correct sophistry, calling it “social justice”? How can they expect that their children will get a fair shake in classrooms led by professors who believe that their kids come into the classroom with an unfair advantage simply because of the color of their skin?

Progressives, especially in academia, are sowing seeds of destruction, and not just of the academy. They are promoting tribalism and tribal politics. They assume that making white people think of themselves as a separate, undifferentiated tribe,  is the first step in making them despise themselves as a people, and therefore be willing to surrender to other tribes. They are wrong. These blind progressives are calling up the demon of white nationalism and accelerating the Balkanization of America. This is not going to end well.

I teach my children that it is evil to judge others on the basis of their skin color or ethnicity, that people must be judged as individuals, by the content of their character. I expect them to think and act according to those standards. But I also expect them not to stand for it when someone openly discriminates against them, treating them as morally suspect or damaged simply because of the color of their skin. Like Oregon State University does, poisoning the minds of students of all races who participate in these “social justice retreats.”

UPDATE: Kenan Malik’s 2015 Foreign Affairs article on the failure of European multiculturalism is relevant here. Excerpt:

[E]verywhere, the overarching consequences have been the same: fragmented societies, alienated minorities, and resentful citizenries.

As a political tool, multiculturalism has functioned as not merely a response to diversity but also a means of constraining it. And that insight reveals a paradox. Multicultural policies accept as a given that societies are diverse, yet they implicitly assume that such diversity ends at the edges of minority communities. They seek to institutionalize diversity by putting people into ethnic and cultural boxes—into a singular, homogeneous Muslim community, for example—and defining their needs and rights accordingly. Such policies, in other words, have helped create the very divisions they were meant to manage.

And a reader sends in this Washington Post report about how political correctness is helping Donald Trump. Excerpts:

Cathy Cuthbertson once worked at what might be thought of as a command post of political correctness — the campus of a prestigious liberal arts college in Ohio.

“You know, I couldn’t say ‘Merry Christmas.’ And when we wrote things, we couldn’t even say ‘he’ or ‘she,’ because we had transgender. People of color. I mean, we had to watch every word that came out of our mouth, because we were afraid of offending someone, but nobody’s afraid of offending me,” the former administrator said.

All of which helps explain why the 63-year-old grandmother showed up at a recent Donald Trump rally in Hilton Head Island, S.C., where she moved when she retired a year ago.

The Republican front-runner is “saying what a lot of Americans are thinking but are afraid to say because they don’t think that it’s politically correct,” she said. “But we’re tired of just standing back and letting everyone else dictate what we’re supposed to think and do.”

More:

One thing is clear: Trump is channeling a very mainstream frustration.

In an October poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University, 68 percent agreed with the proposition that “a big problem this country has is being politically correct.”

It was a sentiment felt strongly across the political spectrum, by 62 percent of Democrats, 68 percent of independents and 81 percent of Republicans. Among whites, 72 percent said they felt that way, but so did 61 percent of nonwhites.

“People feel tremendous cultural condescension directed at them,” and that their values are being “smirked at, laughed at” by the political and media elite, said GOP strategist Steve Schmidt.

Because it is, and they are. “A sentiment felt strongly across the political spectrum.” As the SJWs and their campus administrative abettors would see if they would pull their heads out of their progressive rear ends.

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