The Big Lie: Systemic Racism

 ANDREW MCCARTHY: 

Systemic Racism? Make Them Prove It.  (Andy McCarthy)

Racism “happens in our residence halls and in our classrooms, at the tables of our dining halls and in our locker rooms, on our sidewalks, within the offices where we work, and in our town.” So maintains Middlebury College president Laurie Patton. Among the doyens of higher education, Patton is the rule, not the exception, in spreading this gospel across the campus. With characteristic clarity, Heather Mac Donald rolled off example after example in a recent City Journal essay. It is not just the administrators, the battalions of diversity coordinators, and the social scientists. According to academics, “structural racism” even “pervades” mathematics, geology, astronomy, you name it — to the point, Mac Donald observes, that the journal Nature claims “the mission of science should be to ‘amplify marginalized voices’ in atonement for science’s complicity in ‘systemic racism.’”

Okay, if they say so . . . but where are the concrete examples?

Mac Donald discerns that the rote self-abasement of academic institutions is detached from lived life. She pointedly asks the questions we should all be asking: What are the specifics of the indictment: “Which faculty members do not treat black students fairly? If that unjust treatment is so obvious, why weren’t those professors already removed?” How have we tolerated an admissions process that apparently lets in thousands of student bigots? Of course, regardless of what they may say, college administrators do not act as if they’re trapped in a racist dystopia. As Mac Donald observes, there is no better proof of this than these same administrators: when not preening about systemic racism, they are gushing about the sensitivity, accomplishments, and integrity of their faculty, students, and alumni.

Earlier: Betsy DeVos Calls Princeton’s Bluff: If You Really Are Racist, No More Federal Funding.

96Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll   

Heather Mac Donnel:Conformity to a Lie