Wednesday, July 25, 2018

College Course Says Objectivity, Meritocracy Just White Mythology


              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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