CA University Uses Tax Cash to Run 'White Privilege' Summer Workshops

P. Gardner Goldsmith | July 5, 2018
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Ahh, summer. Ice cream. Outdoor concerts. Hikes. So many things to love, why not add one more, at taxpayer expense, and make sure it’s infused with as much contemporary social justice labeling and accusations of subliminal racial “unfairness” as possible?

Why not head to Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, for one of their many “workshops” designed to foster “positive white racial identity”?

As Sarah George explains for The College Fix, Humboldt recently put together five special, ultra-caring “workshops” just for privileged pale people out there. And if you don’t think you should go, you’re clearly blind to your own privilege and are part of the problem.

Humboldt has already hosted the first two sessions of the five-part summer series titled 'Building Stamina: Cultivating a Positive White Racial Identity that Supports Positive Participation in Conversations about Race.' The series is designed for 'white folks who want to participate in conversations about race more productively' in the hope that they might better understand whiteness and privilege.'

And, of course, built into that are a lot of assumptions, the first of which is that some form of “social equality” can be defined in any government policy -- that those who define it are not themselves creating a machine to destroy the individual and set up a politically reinforced, perpetual race-baiting game. Indeed, it will never end, even as it continues to blame so-called white male prejudice for virtually all advantages or disadvantages complained about by every disparate subset of America.

And if you think that breaking down the potentialities in that way is a tall order, check out how difficult it is to pierce the veil of the organizers running this “social-justice-is-whatever-we-define-it-to-be” world.

As Ms. George writes, the managers and purveyors of these “workshops” seem disinclined to tell her more about them.

University officials declined to comment on the workshop. Reached via email, campus spokesman Grant Scott-Goforth only provided The College Fix with a link to the publically available event description. The staff contact listed on the event itself, Meredith Oram, failed to respond to numerous email requests for comment. Reached twice by phone, she stated both times that she was too busy to talk and indicated that she would call back at a later date, which she did not.

Hold on now.

Does that mean that these disrespectful university employees, who receive taxpayer money are exercising a form of privilege over this reporter? I see a clash here. They’re being discriminatory, prejudging Ms. George, assuming she might be contrarian. And even if she is, doesn’t that mean they should be doubly sensitive to her differences? Shouldn’t they be forced to speak to her? After all, she’s just one person, and they are many, backed by the power of the state.

This unraveling begins to shed light on the unworkable nature of mandating “social justice”, of using group identity to assume the “privilege” of other groups, and of the attempt to make things “equal” by grabbing political levers.

Ms. George writes that the school has already hosted two of these delightful confabs, one of which featured a soporific MTV video explaining what “privilege” is. In it, the hostess tells viewers that “everyone has” privilege. So, for example, an able-bodied person might not be able to realize how many negative glances a crippled person might receive in a day, or how hard it is for a wheelchair-bound person to get into a bathroom at a store, or that an obese person feels he or she will be at a disadvantage for hiring.

Anyone who was ever teased at school or had older siblings do the teasing will get that. A grand MTV presentation isn’t necessary to know how bad that feels. The questions are how prejudice and mistreatment can best be recognized, and whether one is solving the troubles or making them worse by telling individual members of certain “categories” that they have benefited from prejudice they might never have felt or exercised. This negates the individual, and if the individual can be blamed for some mythical group wrongdoing, cannot the potential minority recipient of the “social justice” fix be negated as well?

Since the word “group” is merely a term applied to an association of people, how can one determine which person is at fault, and which member of the put-upon group has actually been wronged, and to what degree?

And the ideas of “privilege” and “social justice” face additional logical hurdles.

For example. If we are all guilty of having some form of “privilege”, how does a society (the pushers of this clap-trap don’t mean society; they mean government) fix this? How can an equation be written that will equitably fix it for every person who feels “wronged”? After all, we are all subjective, so the “wrong” or the “slight” or the “disadvantage” one person feels will be qualitatively different from that of another. And how can this be quantified, or rectified by policy, because any government policy will financially harm and threaten the “privileged” to help the “underprivileged”.

What is one to make of the unconscious biases people might feel if they do have privilege? How does a government create a rubric for the different degrees?

Moreover, if we find that we don’t like certain individuals who exhibit prejudice or we think a man has exploited (consciously or not) his “privilege”, are we not engaging in our own prejudging? How can one say that he dislikes “privilege” without confirming his own prejudice against individual people with “privilege”? Shouldn’t we all have to accept those poor “privileged” people who might have been born into “advantaged” lives, and not punish them for that?

Ayn Rand famously said, “The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”

And Rand escaped from a dystopian Soviet state that was predicated on “making things equal”.

All the soviet people did was equally share in the misery foist upon them by collectivist policy.

And, like the tax-funded college bureaucrats at Humboldt, the only people who do well in such a "social justice" system are the politicians who run it and destroy individual rights.

Easy lesson to learn.

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