Christopher Donovan on Swarthmore

Christopher Donovan’s current TOO article “A Window on the Warping of Whites:  The Swarthmore College Alumni Magazine” is yet another example of the anti-White hostility that is rampant in American universities. Coming on the heels of Trudie Pert’s exposé of German Studies at the University of Minnesota in TOO and a New York Times article on the institutionalization of the left at American universities, it shows the unrelenting messages of multiculturalism, White altruism toward non-Whites, and the legitimacy of non-White ethnocentrism. Besides earnest Whites helping Blacks and Ecuadorian Indians, Whites are presumably also altruistic simply by paying tuition. The article shows that one year tuition at Swarthmore is  $49,600 (!). 55% receive financial aid averaging $35,450. The proportion of incoming students not receiving financial aid is pretty much exactly the percentage of White students. Here’s the featured photo of the class of 2013. I doubt they’ll be paying their way.

Swarthmore is proud of its Quaker heritage. The president of Swarthmore, Rebecca Chopp, told the first-year students about one of Swarthmore’s founders:

She was 4 feet, 11 inches tall and weighed not quite 90 pounds. Over the course of her lifetime (1793–1880), Lucretia Mott would not only help found Swarthmore College but also shelter runaway slaves in her home, co-found with her husband the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, advocate for peace rather than war, and sign the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiment at the first women’s rights convention, which she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized in 1848.

Quakerism is part of the indigenous culture of critique so important during the 19th century and seamlessly joining the current culture of political correctness now. As I noted in my review of Eric Kaufmann,

An important node this network [of leftists who worked to undermine the cultural and ethnic homogeneity of the US] was the Settlement House movement of the late 19th century–early 20thcentury. The settlements were an Anglo-Saxon undertaking that exhibited a noblesse oblige still apparent in some White leftist circles today. They were “residences occupied by upper-middle-class ‘workers’ whose profile was that of an idealistic Anglo-Saxon, university-educated young suburbanite (male or female) in his or her mid-twenties” (p. 96). The movement explicitly rejected the idea that immigrants ought to give up their culture and assimilate to America: “To put the immigrants (as individuals) on an equal symbolic footing with the natives, a concept of the nation was required that would not violate the human dignity of the immigrants by denigrating their culture” (p. 97). Cultural pluralism was encouraged: “The nation would be implored to shed its Anglo-Saxon ethnic core and develop a culture of cosmopolitan humanism, a harbinger of impending global solidarity” (pp. 97–98).

The leader of the Settlement House movement, Jane Addams, advocated that America shed all allegiance to an Anglo-Saxon identity. Addams came from a liberal Quaker background — another liberal strand of American Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, like the Puritans stemming from a distinctive British sub-culture. In general, the Quakers have been less influential than the Puritans, but their attitudes have been even more consistently liberal than the Puritan-descended intellectuals who became a dominant intellectual liberal elite in the 19th century. For example, John Woolman, the “Quintessential Quaker,” was an 18th-century figure who opposed slavery, lived humbly, and, most tellingly for the concept of ethnic defense, felt guilty about preferring his own children to children on the other side of the world.

We who are dismayed at the impending self-destruction of our culture and people have to look in the mirror and attempt to understand this strand of ethnic self-abnegation characteristic of so many Whites.