V: Meet the Clergy
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Robin DiAngelo
"Dr." DiAngelo " grew up poor and white"(sic). She is now rich and white. Her entire career is a stereotype, which would be funny if only she didn't epitomize the breed of ideologues now "training" the next generation of teachers, activists, journalists, and social workers. A walking, talking embodiment of the degenerative rot of our cultural institutions, we shall use her as our teaching prop. She has chosen to be the public face of the Revolution (and made a lot of money from it), so it's all fair game. Let us go through her CV: |
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"Education"
"Ph.D.", Multicultural Education University of Washington, 2004 Cognates in: Whiteness Studies; Intergroup Dialogue. Dissertation: Whiteness in Racial Dialogue: A Discourse Analysis. Chair: James Banks. Graduate Certificate in Women Studies University of Washington, 2004 Feminist Theory & Methods Masters in Education, Social Studies Methods University of Washington, 1995 Advisor: Walter Parker Bachelor of Arts: Sociology, History Seattle University, 1991 |
"Teaching"
Lecturer. School of Social Work. University of Washington 2015-2016 Co-teach in an interracial team "Cultural Diversity & Social Justice". [This is where future social workers are trained] Associate Professor of Multicultural Education. Westfield State University 2007-2015 Teach required courses in Multicultural Education. [This is where teachers are made] Adjunct Faculty. Smith College School of Social Work 2009-2014 Co-teach in an interracial team the required course for the Masters in Social Work Program: Racism in the United States: Implications for Social Work Practice. |
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Anti-Oppression Student Leadership Project. Liberation High School 2009-2012 "Work intensively over a 1-year period with a core group of New York City urban high school students representing a diverse range of social identities including race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, ability status, and religion. Our goal is to create a team of anti-oppression change-agents who will enhance the collective ability of the Liberation High School Community to challenge oppression." Mayor’s Race & Social Justice Initiative. Seattle Office of Civil Rights 2004-2007 "The Seattle Mayor’s Race and Social Justice Initiative is a citywide effort to eliminate institutional attitudes, practices, and policies that result in racial disproportionality; understand the challenges that cultural pluralism places on democracy and transform civic and citizen engagement processes to address those challenges. I was appointed as a member of the inter-racial lead team that designed and delivered this training." |
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...and so on and so forth. You get the general idea.
What do we first notice? We might wonder why an academic would engage in open political activism inside teaching institutions and with the local government, but we will leave that aside to focus on a more immediate enigma: What's all this stuff about "whiteness" , exactly? This must be harmless, goody-goody stuff about not judging others by the color of their skin, right? Well... It certainly sounds that way. After all, they wouldn't let your children be exposed to anything controversial in high school, would they? Alright. "Dr." DiAngelo is the carrier of a pathological doctrine named "Critical Race Theory" (CRT, for short). CRT holds that we all live under something called "white supremacy". "White supremacy" has essentially no resemblance to what you and I understand, demotically, by that expression (i.e. lynching in the Jim Crow South, Apartheid, and so on). Instead, "White Supremacy" in CRT is an invisible power matrix that pervades everything and controls everyone's mind. It is a system set up by white men to oppress minorities and hoard power and wealth. All white people are imbued with "whiteness" (a secularized version of the Calvinist principle of Total Depravity), which makes them impervious to seeing this oppressive structure. Refusal to acknowledge the invisible power grid is proof of their "whiteness" and their complicity in "white supremacy". Further, CRT teaches that each and every interaction between a white and a black person is always, by necessity, racist: it's not a question of "if" racism happened, but how and how much. The rabbit hole only gets deeper from here. The only type of knowledge that CRT recognizes as valid is the subjective impression derived from the "lived experience" of identity groups (your gut feelings are never wrong, folks!). Hence, any demand for proof that the invisible power system exists, or any question as to the validity of the Theory's postulates, is interpreted as "white supremacy". No debate is allowed: Words are literally violence! Doubts are challenges to oppressed people! The scientific method (which, you might have noticed, is predicated on the non-validity of personal feelings as a source of knowledge) is part of the conspiracy by white men to enslave minorities, and the use of facts or experiments to validate the Theory is not permissible (in fact, it is--you guessed it--"white supremacy"). [At this point, we feel the urge to reassure the reader that we are not making any of this up.] |
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Here Ryan delves into CRT epistemology. Referring metonymically to whiteness, he explains: "Do you want to know the real reason we hate them? Because they exist. There is no reason. If there were, some smart-ass [white supremacist] would give us an argument, try to prove us wrong. Which would only make us hate them even more."
A faithful and well-put exposé of the oppressive discourse lurking behind the "Subjective-Objective" dichotomy. Bravo, Ryan! |
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So, science and reasoned debate are ploys that the power grid exploits to perpetuate the status quo and keep minorities in chains.
CRT denounces individualism, meritocracy, equality before the law, capitalism, empiricism, objectivity, reason... as racist ideologies concocted to keep whites in power. Entrance examinations for college (like the SAT), being meritocratic, are part of the great conspiracy to oppress blacks: their poor scores on average are proof of "white supremacy". The fact that Asian-Americans are the highest scoring group is also proof of "white supremacy". |
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Now, you may wonder: what is "Critical" about this hallucinogenic brew?
The "Critical" part of CRT is not a reference to critical thinking (which is also "White Supremacy"), but to the neomarxist project of splitting society into opposing factions, oppressors and oppressed, in order to foment conflict (by "critique", the oppressors' culture is "deconstructed"). From the ashes of the race war it seeks to ignite, the oppressed groups will rise victorious and seize power and wealth, just like the proletariat was supposed to do in classical Marxism. (And we know how that worked out). |
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Now, given its epistemology, CRT is referred to as postmodern neomarxism. But it is really quite an old-fashioned doctrine. To give you an intuitive understanding of what CRT is, let's make one simple tweak to it:
Jews have installed themselves in all the key positions of power and wealth in society, and have created, with their exclusivist values and unconscious bias against non-Jews ("Jewishness"), a vast power network to keep down and bleed the goyim. CRT is not analogous to antisemitism. CRT recapitulates antisemitism, in the same way general relativity recapitulates Newtonian mechanics, if Jews are considered as a subset of whites. All the evils of the modern world are ascribed to a perfidious race ("the white race is the cancer of human history"--Susan Sontag). And indeed the theory inspires its own blood libels.
All differences of outcome between groups are adduced as evidence of oppression. But there is one group in particular that is seemingly over-privileged, isn't there? When people say "whites" are disproportionately represented in the elite, they aren't talking about rural whites from Wyoming... All features of Critical Theory are exquisitely fine-tuned for it to spread like wildfire in academia. It is the Master Meme. The idea that there is no truth or reason, but only power, explicit in CRT, is the essence of totalitarianism. Now you know where "cancel culture" comes from: The purges, the Twitter mobs, the viciousness, all the people fired for expressing heretical thoughts... You have been told that opposing ideas are "white supremacy", haven't you?
You may say, but have these insane ideologues learned nothing from the 100 million dead, the tortures, the Red Terror, the secret police, the gulags, all the fruits of Marxism 1.0? Do they want to have another go at this murderous game? Then you haven't been paying attention. The Clergy has nothing to do with sanity or progress or truth. Critical Theory exists because it spreads in modern universities, and it spreads there because it gets "critical theorists" tenure and grants. Even "Dr." DiAngelo, a second-rate superspreader of the doctrine, has managed to get rich thanks to it. Social externalities are for the proles. Ask the sociologists who keep getting people killed . Like Marxism 1.0, CRT is a historical-revisionist doctrine.
While Marxism re-wrote the whole of human history according to its dogmas of class struggle, CRT is re-writing Western history by the lights of its axioms of race struggle. The infamous "1619 Project" of the New York Times aims to teach children (yes, it is being incorporated in elementary schools, high schools, made mandatory in California public universities) that America was founded, ideologically and practically, not on the 4th of July 1776, but when the first black slaves landed in Virginia, despite the fact that the vast majority of Europeans in colonial America arrived as indentured servants, and lived in conditions little different from slavery. According to CRT, the Founding Fathers were "white supremacists" whose only objective by declaring independence was to ensure the perpetuation of slavery. If you accept this premise, the Constitution of the United States is an evil document that should be abolished. And indeed, CRT denounces it as a racist text that should be scrapped, along with the nation it established. In sum, CRT is the antithesis of all the values on which Western societies were based: reasoned debate, freedom of expression, appeals to facts, the rule of law, a new order that led to the greatest improvement in the human condition in history--the values, paradoxically, that made the "Euro-West" the only civilization in history to abolish slavery. And now, dear reader, the Clergy is indoctrinating a generation of young people, who will inevitably see racism, sexism and oppression everywhere, will reject reason and debate as means to settle social disputes, and will instead resort to bullying and violence. This, in turn, will squander all good will in others and provoke a reaction that will destroy our societies. Actually, it is already happening. You have noticed, haven't you? |
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This is where we are, brought to you by the Clergy.
"Historically, white supremacy has venerated the idea of objectivity, and wielded a dichotomy of ‘subjectivity vs. objectivity’ as a means of silencing oppressed peoples. The idea that there is a single truth--’the Truth’--is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment. This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples." |
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Ok. Now we know the actual meaning of "systemic racism". Lest anyone be tempted to seek refuge in false consolations: no, this isn't the academic fringe. CRT, very influential in its own right, is an offshoot of Critical Theory, which has been the hegemonic mainstream in all academic "social disciplines" at least since the 1960s.
Next, how exactly do the tenets of Woke Progressivism, which we have so admired in this chapter, achieve their high fitness in modern American universities? Can enforced conformity and grants alone really explain everything? "The players cannot keep counsel. They'll tell all." |