Do you contribute to white supremacy? If you’re white, you do. Yes, you do stop it. And if you’re not white but let white people get away with “it,” you are part of the problem as well.
To assist us with the burden of not knowing how and when we’re contributing to white supremacy, English Professor Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt created a list of situations or circumstances that show how you are contributing to white supremacy.
One of the critical points in her thesis is white people insisting that people advance based on merit. Meritocracy is a construct of the white devil (embellishment, mine). Limiting yourself to examining the actual skills necessary to perform a task or a job is white supremacy because the meritocracy “is built on [the] racist assumption that everyone has had the same access and opportunities.”
See how she harpoons that whole “equality of opportunity” narrative?
Of course, she doesn’t dare pursue that line further, certainly not in this context.
As a liberal Marxist progressive, I’m certain she obsesses over the union-run, government monopoly of public education. That thing to which we must all belong or else.
The government must provide, and yet the opportunities are not equal?
How can so many of these schools have huge budgets but still fail to provide educational opportunities when schools with less deliver students who have learned more?
Why isn’t she more incensed at the failure of the system to provide better opportunities? A system that exacerbates the so-called lack of equal opportunity she bemoans?
Has she ever supported policy moves to make opportunity more equitable? Has she advocated for voucher programs, scholarship incentives, or other programs that offer financial assistance to help “people of color” get access to the opportunities she insists are not equally accessible?
I don’t know the answer but based on the language on her list, she fits the mold of a big government Marxist Socialist Democrat. That means more taxes poured into failing schools that spend the money on everything but teachers and students. Which, if we take her seriously, means that Big Government Democrats and the progressive white-tower liberals who support them…are contributing to her definition of White Supremacy.
They are white-supremacy white-tower liberals.
- You work in a position of power in a predominantly white institution, and while you claim to be working for social justice, you do nothing to change the white supremacist power structures within your departments, committees, and institutional decision-making process.
- When your colleagues who are marginalized complain to you about their “oppressive” work conditions, you think that they are difficult.
- When your colleagues and students claim that they experienced microaggressions, your response is, “I am so sorry. This is unbelievable!”
- When you are asked to nominate your students and faculty colleagues for awards or leadership positions, your first instinct is to nominate those that are “stellar” (mostly men) and obviously “white.” It doesn’t occur to you that you are implicitly supporting a logic of meritocracy that is built on this racist assumption that everyone has had the same access and opportunities.
- When it comes to understanding your own white privilege, you get very angry if a faculty member of color points out to you where and how your privilege is operating. You deem such critiques as “uncivil” and as not supporting a collegial environment.
- You are aware of the many wrongs that you see your institution is doing to your marginal faculty and students, and while you sympathize with people of color and marginal students and faculty members behind your closed door, you never openly confront your institution.
- When a professor of color stands up in your faculty meetings and expresses their frustrations about inequity, you go to your trusted colleagues (the next day) and ask, “Why is s/he or them always so angry?”
- When you are on a hiring committee, you think that the writing samples by your white candidates of choice are stellar, while what is “stellar” about the candidates of color is, of course, their ethnicity.
- You never fail to articulate publicly your commitment for increasing diversity within your institution, but when on a hiring committee you express your strong hesitance to let go of your stellar candidate in exchange for a candidate who you perceive as only adding to your institution’s diversity mission.
- When people of color (faculty members and students) complain to you about discrimination and racism, you actively discourage them to report their cases and often try to convince them that “it must be a misunderstanding.”
- You think of yourself as an ally to your faculty of color colleagues, but cannot understand why your white students are so upset when professors of color teach and critique sites of white privilege.
- In your institutional reviews for tenure and promotion cases, you advise and critique your faculty of color colleagues to be more sensitive and mindful in respecting the viewpoint of our students. By “our students” you really mean “our white students.”
You benefit so much from the system that you have decided to stay out of all of this “identity politics.” - You have never thought of yourself as an ally to any of the causes of faculty of color and you never have any time to go to any events that they and other marginal folks have organized (where they express their everyday struggles). But you will happily go to an event if Ta-Nehisi Coates is speaking in town.
- Claudia Rankine, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and Teju Cole’s “The White-Savior Industrial Complex” — all rub you the wrong way.
This list is fascinating, not because it reads like a gripe about a person or persons she is forced to work with but because it comes from a worldview whose final form could care less about any of the things of which she complains.
The perfectly engineered society has no tolerance for deviation from the program. A program of political supremacy. A system enforced by people who hold positions of authority as members of an elite class that uses violence or intimidation to keep control and power.
But it is a colorblind supremacy if that’s any consolation.
Regardless of the “color” of your political supremacy, the Marxist/Communist utopia survives through lies, fear, graft, loyalty, and force. A world where your survival depends on your ability to be invisible or to make the people in power more powerful. A place where you have merit.
But there is a “diversity” program.
The state will arrest anyone, regardless of sex, color, or opinion, if they decide (sometimes randomly and for no reason, because you are living in a police state) they are a problem or a threat to order.
But keep on peddling it. You might get lucky and be one of the select few at the top forcing your political supremacy down upon everyone else, but the odds are good that won’t be the case.
And it never occurs to her, as with most progressives, that the inequality of opportunity demonstrated by government-run education won’t be duplicated in everything else the government tries to run?
And Progressives still think they are smarter.
