A course titled “White Mythologies:
Objectivity, Meritocracy, and Other Social Constructions,” was offered at
Hobart and William Smith Colleges this past spring.
The course description read as follows: “This course explores the history and ongoing manifestations
of ‘white mythologies’ — long-standing, often implicit views about the place of
White, male, Euro-American subjects as the norm against which peoples of the
world are to be understood and judged. Students will explore how systematic
logics that position ‘the West’ and ‘whiteness’ as the ideal manifest through
such social constructions as objectivity, meritocracy, and race, and as
justifications for colonial interventions, slavery, and the subordination of
women.” Sign me up!
What the hell is “systematic
logics?” And, if objectivity and meritocracy are to be considered merely social
constructs, humankind might as well pack it in now, and spare itself the ever
more painful devolution back into the primordial soup.College professors—and some groups on the far left—are, with
greater and greater frequency, labeling erstwhile virtues such as courtesy, honor, decorum, dignity, intelligence, kindness,
honesty, compassion, empathy, courage, sobriety, self-control, discipline,
language skills, imagination, and competence as “white constructs.” They deny the existence of any concrete
“virtue,” period.
What does
that say about those who believe and promulgate this insanity?
Are we really better off
denigrating these characteristics/virtues and those who possess them (regardless
of race, creed, color or sex)? Or would we be sentencing our society to a new
Dark Ages? Failure to distinguish between healthy, positive traits and damaging,
negative ones so as not to embarrass a certain group tells that group they are
incapable of possessing them. Attempting to equivocate good and evil does not
make it so. It simply coarsens society while implicitly telling members of the “protected”
group that they are inferior and unworthy.
We are discrediting virtue, while
removing the stigma from destructive behaviors. We are discounting achievement
and rewarding—or normalizing—sloth.
But, f!#$%&@*%$! Who cares?
Nothing matters…and what if it did? That’s my
truth. Everything else is just mythology.
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