Political Correctness

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.

Bookmark and Share

Kevin MacDonald: Minnesota's German Studies Disaster

Kevin MacDonald: My fate in life is to work at a university. What that means right now is to be completely immersed in the culture of the left. Trudie Pert’s current TOO article shows that in the humanities right now it’s all about queer theory and the Frankfurt School, with supporting roles for psychoanalysis and Marxism. Prof. Ruth Joeres describes her course:

In this course the contributions of ‘German’ women of ethnic heritage such as Afro-German, Turkish-German, Japanese-German women are studied. What does it mean to be called, ‘German”? 

We can guess that it has nothing to do with being ethnically German. In the eyes of these people, Germany too has doubtless become yet another proposition society.

And then there’s professor Morris (Moskowitz) and her idea that fraudulent Holocaust memoirs are to be preferred to the real thing because they are more moving. (Why does a Jewish activist in a department of Jewish/German Studies use a non-Jewish sounding name? I can understand why Jewish communists did it in the 1930s or post-WWII Eastern Europe, but why now?) And Prof. Zipes and his campaign to  the minds of young children. My favorite title: Down with Heidi, Down with Struwelpeter: Three Cheers for the Revolution: Towards A New Socialist Children’s Literature in West Germany.” In other words, down with every vestige of traditional German culture. 

The academic food chain is starkly obvious here. Pert notes that the professors at Minnesota received their doctorates at elite Eastern universities, and their students will staff the second-level colleges, universities, and K-12 schools throughout the mid-West. It’s a top-down system, with zombie-like grad students emerging to carry on the revolution of the left at the lower levels of the educational system.

What’s striking is that Jews and other non-Europeans wear their ethnic identity and sense of victimhood proudly and explicitly. The Whites typically have their own sense of victimhood — as gays or as women. In my experience, the heterosexual White males become adept at effusive expressions of guilt in order to be accepted into the system. In this culture of victimhood, all the rewards go to those who make alliances with other victims.

It’s easy enough intellectually to point out that gays and women have ethnic interests too, and that White identity and interests are entirely legitimate. But getting academics to think and act on that basis means disrupting mutually reinforcing networks where all the rewards come from allying oneself with the culture of victimhood.

And it means that real change must start at the top of the academic food chain. In the social sciences, one clings to a hope that this could happen because there is still a scientific tradition with some power. But in the humanities, it’s a lost cause. The triumvirate of the Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis, and Marxism is impervious to scientific findings and is intensely political; it will strenuously resist significant change. The revolution will have to happen without a very large part of the educational system.

Bookmark and Share

Christopher Donovan: O'Reilly v. Law & Order

Christopher Donovan: The Jewish producer of Law & Order, Dick Wolf, presides over a television show that presents a grossly distorted view of New York City’s criminal class. Namely, that it’s rich whites, skinheads and radical right-wingers committing all the crime, while heroic black, Hispanic and Jewish detectives chase them down.

Often, the writers of the show will put liberal or anti-white speeches directly into the mouths of the characters. TV talker Bill O’Reilly, a recent target of one such speech, fired back.

Of course, the real fight here isn’t loudmouthed conservative radio personalities versus liberal television writers. It’s implicit whiteness, in the forms of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly, versus Jewish sensibilities. How many O’Reilly viewers get that?

Bookmark and Share