I've Got the Power

I will begin by pleading your indulgence; the march of time has been merciless, and the newsprint of my memories has faded with age. But I seem to recall taking a bus ride, sitting in the back third of the Chicago Transit Authority's Jeffrey Express bus. I was coming home from either from middle or high school, so this would have occurred between approximately 1975 to 1981. I shared the back of the bus with three or four other black kids, along with a white boy who was in his pre-teens or teenage years, as were we all. That a young white male was on my bus was curious enough, as these where the years after the "white flight" of the 1960s that rendered my neighborhood as chromatically homogeneous as a midnight sky.

I wish I could report that I had some premonition of what would happen next; without so much as a word, the other black youths set upon the white kid, kicking him with a ferocity that my not yet fully formed mind could not completely wrap itself around. A better man (or a boy with the potential to grow to become a better man) might have told his racemates to cease, but I froze in terror, lest their rage turn itself on me. After what may have been the longest minute of his life to that point, the white boy fled from the bus at the next stop. For their part, the black kids sat back down and rode the bus to their stops. I eventually did likewise.

Proceeding through the vicissitudes of high school, the Military Academy, and the fitful attempts to start and reboot my life, I am at present in the thrall of news coming from the University of Delaware. As we are informed by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (F.I.R.E.), the university intended to institute a series of curricula that would have served as a "program of ideological reeducation that is referred to in the university's own materials as a 'treatment' for students' incorrect attitudes and beliefs." Had the program been implemented, students would have been required to adopt the university's approved beliefs on matters of "politics to race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and environmentalism."

A review of excerpts from the university's Office of Residence Life Diversity Facilitation Manual speaks to a vision of race that could only have been incubated in the sterile vacuum of the leftist academy.

A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination. (This does not deny the existence of such prejudices, hostilities, acts of rage or discrimination.) (Emphasis added.)

My apologies to the liberal stalwarts who put together this "daffynition" of a racist, but my sense is that the white kid who was attacked on the bus on that afternoon some 25-30 years ago would plead to differ on whether African Americans have the ability to reinforce their "hostilities, or acts of discrimination" (as would Reginald Denny.) But more to the point, the idea that all whites are racist is a definitional absurdity; if racism is an immutable part of whiteness, than what is the point of such a curriculum to begin with? Better to move to a forced interment or some sort of "final solution" in order to eradicate the problem.

The manual also waxes eloquent on the idea of "reverse racism."

REVERSE RACISM: A term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege. Those in denial use the term reverse racism to refer to hostile behavior by people of color toward whites, and to affirmative action policies, which allegedly give 'preferential treatment' to people of color over whites. In the U.S., there is no such thing as 'reverse racism.

So by providing a fairly comprehensive explanation of a concept that to their own way of thinking does not exist, the Left makes obvious the central intellectual and logical failings of liberalism. Progressive thought, such as it occurs, is established behind a bulwark of doctrinal palisades. For those of us beyond the parapets of liberal dogma, it is evident that this thankfully aborted program was born of a class of individuals who bathe themselves daily in a murky pool of contempt and self-loathing. As such, they can not be trusted to have any esteem for others.

The fact that any opposing opinion exists at all is a function of two facets of modern liberalism. As discussed elsewhere, liberalism is racist at its core; this explains the Left's inability to envision anything resembling black self-sufficiency, let alone the idea that blacks would have the power to be racist. Liberalism can conceive of only black dysfunction, and as such it sprinkles the crumbs of affirmative action to be lapped up by sycophantic minorities. And in as much as it can't make an intellectually consistent defense of affirmative action, it defines the problem away by describing it as a form of "reverse racism" (which again, to their way of thinking, does not exist.)

But as much as liberalism is racist, it is also incurious. In that the Left seems impervious to facts that do not support its preordained conclusions, it is unable to observe its own inadequacies. To be sure, I would rather be a black man under "the U.S. system" than be white in virtually any other country on the planet. African Americans - even those unfortunates of the underclass - have a quality of life beyond the imagining of the vastest majority of the world's population, and poor blacks today enjoy a standard of living above that of middle-class whites living as recently as thirty years ago.

So if we take nothing away from this whole sordid episode, let's remember that liberalism still is (as it was described elsewhere) "something that must be imposed; its adherents must be indoctrinated." In a time when college students can graduate from elite universities knowing less about civics than when they began, the University of Delaware saw as its highest duty to make sure that students graduated with correct thoughts as opposed to useful knowledge. We can only hope that the next time university President Patrick Harker thinks he has a good idea about education, he will get a second opinion from someone who didn't drink their own murky bathwater.