White Pathology/Guilt

Whites’ lack of empathy for other Whites

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There are doubtless a great many factors accounting for the general willingness of Whites to allow themselves to be pushed aside and to voluntarily become a minority amid a sea of non-Whites, most of whom hold historical grudges against them. My general view is that these cultural transformations are the result of a complex interaction between preexisting tendencies of Europeans toward individualism interacting with the rise of a Jewish elite hostile to the traditional peoples and culture of Europe.

The problem with individualism is that we have weak ties to other Whites and we don’t have a sense (yet) of common fate. In other words, we are low on ethnocentrism. We hear about a White person who was victimized by a Black criminal or denied a promotion or admission to a university in favor of an “underrepresented minority”, and we don’t feel empathy for the victims simply because they are White. We don’t feel any psychological pain when we hear that White working class men have moved out of an area because their jobs have been taken by illegal Mexican immigrants.

At a rational level, Whites may well think that victimization of Whites is morally wrong. Hence the finding that Whites support ending affirmative action and ending immigration (especially illegal immigration) as has been shown in California and other states. But I suspect that there isn’t any real gut feeling of empathy with other Whites. And it’s the gut feeling of empathy that in the end motivates the sort of behavior that can really begin to alter things politically.

This was demonstrated recently in a study that scanned the brains of Black and White subjects viewing Black and White victims of Hurricane Katrina (Race and Empathy Matter on Neural Level, Science Daily). Everyone reported empathy for the victims. This is a verbal judgment that reflects nothing more than conventional morality. People certainly would not want to tell the experimenter that they have callous disregard for suffering.

But the brain’s emotion centers told a different story. Black subjects had empathic responses to Black victims, and the more ethnocentric Blacks had stronger emotional responses. Whites on the other hand, did not show any empathic responses to people of either race.

It’s not that Whites are incapable of empathy. Images of family members would doubtless result in strong empathic responses among Whites — responses that would motivate helping family members. Indeed, all the research shows much stronger family bonds among Whites than among Blacks — bonds that are motivated at least in part by empathic concern for family. But in general, we just  don’t get emotionally aroused when we see Whites  suffering or victimized.

And it also suggests that the many Whites who do behave altruistically toward Blacks or other non-Whites are not acting out of an emotional imperative of empathy, but for some other  reason — quite possibly social approval. What better way these days to show you are a good person?  I thought about this today when viewing a photo of Sandra Bullock with her newly adopted Black baby. Of course, it may be misplaced maternal affection.


But this lack of empathy for other Whites is a problem for political action on behalf of Whites. People are motivated far more by emotions than by rational appraisals. The  empathy among Jews for Jewish suffering is legendary. As Walter Benjamin once said, Hatred and [the] spirit of sacrifice . . . are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren. (Illuminations, 1968, 262)

There is undoubtedly variation among Whites for ethnocentrism, implying that at least some Whites would be upset by the suffering of other Whites more than by the suffering of, say, Blacks. In other words, they would have the same pattern that Blacks show, only reversed.

Personally, I have found that I do have an emotional reaction to Whites being victimized. This could be because I am more genetically inclined toward ethnocentrism than most Whites. But it could also be influenced by living in Southern California where Whites are now a minority. Social psychologists have shown that members of majority groups do not have the same sense of an ingroup feeling as do members of minority groups.

The good news is that as Whites become a minority, ingroup solidarity–and empathy for other Whites–would be expected to increase. And getting involved in White advocacy with like-minded others doubtless has the effect of reinforcing and increasing those tendencies, especially when it is not at all difficult to imagine nightmarish scenarios of the future for Whites. Such nightmarish scenarios have a great deal of emotional impact, especially when they are graphically depicted. That is the reason why we will not see such depictions in the media.

The bad news is that even with empathy for other Whites, there are still huge barriers for Whites to really get involved in White advocacy — barriers such as losing one’s job and social ostracism. The power of the left to inflict economic pain is huge, as recently shown by the burgeoning movement to inflict economic sanctions on Arizona for having the temerity to enact a law aimed at getting rid of illegal aliens.

But having empathy for other Whites would certainly be a great first step in the right direction–and probably a step that is necessary if we are going to see really intense commitment by Whites to change the current regime.

My view is that these cultural transformations
are the result of a complex interaction between preexisting deep-rooted
Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 23
tendencies of Europeans (individualism, moral universalism, and science)
and the rise of a Jewish elite hostile to the traditional peoples and culture of
EuropeMy view is that these cultural transformations
are the result of a complex interaction between preexisting deep-rooted
Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 23
tendencies of Europeans (individualism, moral universalism, and science)
and the rise of a Jewish elite hostile to the traditional peoples and culture of
Europe..

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Bill Clinton hints at desire to see anti-government speech restricted

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Political elites, especially among the liberals, are beginning to be quite worried about the White rage they see all around them. A good indication of the hysteria is that Joe Klein of TIME wants Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin indicted for inciting sedition, and John Heilemann of New York magazine adds Rush Limbaugh to the list.

Bill Clinton is doing his part. In an interview with CNN pundit and former AIPAC lobbyist Wolf Blitzer, Clinton was not shy about expressing his dislike of the Tea Parties, and he hinted at his desire for tougher speech restrictions. Referring to the Oklahoma City bombing, Blitzer said “the hatred that Timothy McVeigh … had … , there are plenty of people like that right now” — to which Clinton replied “lot’s of them.” Blitzer said that there were many websites advocating “hate” and Clinton replied with silly platitudes about how the Internet can be used to learn how to make a bomb. The former president added that “websites are easily accessible and you can be highly selective and spend all of your time with people that are, you know, kind of out there with you” (emphasis mine).

Clinton noted that the Tea Party debate had to be kept “within the limits that the framers [of the Constitution] intended.” These kinds of mantras are designed to appeal to the attachment of Americans to the Constitution, even though the country has evolved in ways that would have been unthinkable to the framers. Needless to say, Clinton couldn’t care less about the original framers of the Constitution.

He added that “beyond the law there is no freedom, we can’t have violence or the advocacy of violence and we got to be careful when we get close to that, particularly if we’re in positions of influence.” Translation: The nightmare of the current regime is that respected, intelligent, influential people would begin questioning the legitimacy of the government.

Clinton tries to conflate the Tea Party movement with the Oklahoma City bombing:

By and large in the last fifty years, well at least since the early 70s, […] by and large these [problems] have been systematically coming out of the far right. Again I think that all those folks have a place in our political debate, we just have to know where to draw the line, and we have enough threats against the president, enough threats against the Congress that we should be sensitive to it. The 15th anniversary of Oklahoma City, I’m not trying to draw a total parallel, I’m just saying that we should be aware of this.  This is a vast echo chamber this internet, [in which] some are serious, some are delirious, some are connected, some are unhinged.

He then worried about “what certain words might do to people who are less stable.”

Of course, we know full well that politically-motivated violence is overwhelmingly committed by the Left. Exhibit A is the cancellation of the recent American Renaissance conference due to heavy harassment by leftist fanatics, which included death threats and led to cancellations by four different hotels. As Jared Taylor lamented, the story received no coverage from the mainstream American media, and law enforcement yawned. Leftist and minority activists are never prevented from meeting by conservatives.

In another interview with the New York Times, Clinton referred to Rep. Michele Bachmann who called the Obama administration “the gangster government” at a Tea Party rally. He said: “They are not gangsters, they were elected. They are not doing anything they were not elected to do.”

“There can be real consequences when what you say animates people who do things you would never do,” Mr. Clinton said in an interview, saying that Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the Oklahoma City bombing, and those who assisted him, “were profoundly alienated, disconnected people who bought into this militant antigovernment line.”

“Have at it,” he said. “You can attack the politics. Criticize their policies. Don’t demonize them, and don’t say things that will encourage violent opposition.”

Clinton and the rest of the liberal elites who control the media want business as usual:  polite political debate and wait for the next election. But for many of the tea partiers it’s beyond all that. They feel themselves abused and dispossessed. There is a desperation and intensity in the air.

This is an administration that crammed health care down the nation’s throat despite majority opposition. It is now poised to once again flout the majority by making citizens of the millions of non-White illegal immigrants and their relatives. In a situation like this, is it any wonder that people are questioning its legitimacy? Gangsters indeed!

Clinton is carefully and implicitly voicing his support for the banning of certain forms of speech that he sees as threatening the legitimacy of the ruling regime. Of course he feels personally threatened by the recent outbursts of rage coming from a large segment of the population. He knows he has contributed greatly to transforming the country and alienating them. He is a sought-after speaker — paid hundreds of thousands of dollars per speech and drawing thousands who buy their hundred-dollar tickets to see him deliver one platitude after another. The media paints him as a brilliant, warm-hearted guy who was a good and fair president. He obviously has a lot to lose in any movement that strongly criticizes a ruling regime that lavishes money and glory upon him. He is clever in dropping here and there a catch phrase like “you can attack the politics, criticize their policies [but] don’t demonize them, and don’t say things that will encourage violent opposition.”

The reason he carefully weighs his views is that he knows a majority of Americans are still deeply attached to the First Amendment and opposing it too directly and without nuances would be ill-perceived by many. Between the lines, he is advocating eventual hate speech legislation and considerable extension of government powers to muzzle people who challenge them.

William Davis (email him) is a freelance writer.

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A Tale of Two Rich Guys, Haim Saban and Charles T. Munger

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A Sacramento Bee op-ed by Dan Morain points out that the motives for all the money going into a California ballot proposition on redistricting are hidden from the public. The two men couldn’t be more different. Haim Saban, the billionaire media tycoon, wants the politicians to redraw boundaries so that the Congressional seat of Howard Berman, a Jewish politician who is strongly pro-Israel  is protected from the ever expanding Latino population. As Morain notes, Saban’s only motivation in life is to advance the cause of the Jewish state, famously telling the New York Times “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.”

It’s interesting that activist Jews are now worried that there will be fewer Jewish politicians with the rise of the same minorities that Jewish activist organizations have been so eager to populate the country with. Organizations like the ADL have expressed concerned that new ethnic blocs will not be appropriately sympathetic to Jewish causes such as Israel. Their solution is not to try to stem the tide of non-White immigration but to make political alliances with the new arrivals and, as indicated by Saban’s actions, skew the political process in a way where Jewish political assets (particularly money) will still be effective.

Charles T. Munger is a completely different story. Munger, a Stanford physicist,  is also very wealthy, his wealth stemming from his father’s partnership with Warren Buffet. Munger wants a citizen’s panel to draw the redistricting lines in the hopes that politics will be less partisan — a position that sounds like high-minded idealism. As a Republican, he may well want more  Republicans, but as Morain notes, he is almost certainly wrong about that. If he really wanted to have more Republicans elected, he should have invested his money in anti-immigration efforts. No matter how California is redistricted, Latinos and other minorities are going to continue to increase in political power while Whites are increasingly dispossessed.

So Munger is tilting at windmills while Saban is helping his people. There is a great deal of wealth controlled by people like Munger, but in general its wasted on things like this. As I noted in an earlier blog:

One of the biggest problems for European-Americans is that wealthy non-Jews seem far more interested in funding the opera or getting their name on a building at the local university than in helping their people. A good example is the Chandler family who formerly owned the L. A. Times. They had no interest in the media, and the company is now controlled by Sam Zell, who is Jewish. The family remains wealthy but in general seems to be involved in finding fun and interesting ways to spend their time (one of them flies around the world to attend the opera; another is into building outsize model trains) rather than influencing the world.

Munger is more politically involved than the Chandlers, but his efforts are absolutely useless in really achieving anything remotely beneficial to Republicans — or, more importantly, White Californians.

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The Monstrous Winston Churchill

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In his book Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, Pat Buchanan places particular emphasis on the role of Winston Churchill for his role in promoting both World War I and World War II.  Buchanan is scathing in his criticism of Churchill, correctly pointing his bellicosity, his vanity, and his desire for personal power. There are also strong hints of his corruption as a result of being rescued by wealthy Jews from near bankruptcy after the stock market crash of 1929.

Buchanan carries on this theme in a recent column on the Katyn executions, Pat Buchanan once again comments on Winston Churchill’s treachery.

When Polish patriots, whose sons had flown with the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, went to … Churchill to demand that he get answers from Stalin about the atrocity, he brushed them off.

“There is no sense prowling around the three-year-old graves of Smolensk,” said the Great Man.

At Stalin’s request, Churchill bullied the Poles into acceding to Soviet annexation of all the Polish land Stalin had been awarded for signing his pact with Hitler.

Michael Colhaze’s current TOO article, To Be a German, Part II, credits Buchanan with shedding light on the truly horrifying spectacle of Churchill. Ever the artist, Colhaze expresses it beautifully:

[It boils down] to one single, terrible truth, namely that this man and his paymasters were the instigators not only of the death of Britain’s and America’s finest young men, but also of the greatest carnage, the worst fratricide committed in Mankind’s entire history. It is really here, in the inordinate hate for Germany as the old heartland of our incomparable Christian-European civilisation, that the roots can be found for the ever intensifying assault on the White Man’s right to exist.

I wonder sometimes how this man must have felt during the twilight years of his life. Terrible, most likely. Fiddling with some pitiful canvas utterly devoid of human warmth, let alone artistic gratification. Abandoned by his old paymasters because that’s what they inevitably do once you’ve lost your expediency. Deserted by his political cronies who knew damn well what mess he had landed them in. Prowling the casinos of Monte Carlo where a greasy Onassis dropped an occasional chip into his pocket since he had blown his pension already at the tables. Bored to death by all the glorifications and laurels and distinctions which honoured, as he himself knew perfectly well, only the one great lie that was his life.

Churchill’s philosemitism is legendary. This review of three books on Churchill’s relations with Jews indicates that indeed, he was “among the greatest friends the Jewish people have had.” The record shows that Churchill repeatedly stood up for Jewish interests throughout his entire very long career in politics — often in opposition to those around him. Churchill’s family was philo-Semitic and socialized with Jews; he received expensive gifts as a young man from Jewish friends of his father. In Parliament, Churchill was an eloquent spokesman for Jewish immigration, and later he had a long career in support of Zionism.

He left a long record of activism for Jewish causes and was rarely deterred from these, even when he found himself in a distinct minority. When overruled by his own Cabinet, he often sought ways around the problem to help Jews and Zionism. The personal and official papers consulted in these studies confirm the picture of a man who rejected anti-Semitism in public and private, something that can be said of very few of his colleagues.

Churchill may have been the greatest friend the Jews ever had. But he certainly was not a friend for his own people.

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Thank You Sir, May I Have Another?

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Another White male — the list is endless — has been fired for poltically incorrect speech.  Allen Zaruba, an adjunct art professor at Towson University in Maryland, quickly dropped to his knees to beg for forgiveness, and even welcomed his own firing.

It’s not even clear from the story what, exactly, Zaruba said, reminding me of Sam Francis’ writing in Race and the American Prospect that racial issues today are what sexual issues were during the Victorian age.  You might well have seen “Governess Fired for Mentioning Unmentionables” in the English press a century ago.

“I will never use that term again,” Zaruba told the Baltimore Sun. “It is absolutely transgressive.”  Transgressive?  Is that the opposite of Barack Obama’s “transformative”?

But was there a spark of resistance in his mind?  The story ended this way:  “Despite taking responsibility for his error, Zaruba said his firing
raises troubling questions about the power of political correctness in modern society.  Are we in for another state of McCarthyism?’ he said. ‘We have to have compassion and realize that people are not perfect.'”

The problem, Allen, is that there is no “compassion” for Whites.  You — and so many like you — are under the impression that non-Whites, once in power, will extend compassion to Whites.  Let me correct this misimpression:  they won’t.

Liberal Whites like Amy Biehl assume that their halos will distinguish them in the eyes of Blacks from “bad” characters like Eugene Terreblanche, but they won’t.  They don’t care if you’re a full-fledged Klansman in Alabama or a hippie-dippie art teacher in Maryland.  If you’re White, you’re going under the multicultural steamroller.

That is racial reality, and more whites need to check into it.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist. Email him.

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Robert Satloff and the Jewish Culture of Deceit

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Stephen Walt had the audacity to suggest, given Dennis Ross’s close ties to WINEP, that Ross should not have a policy-making position on Middle East issues in the Obama Administration. Neocon Robert Satloff responded with outrage, claiming that Ross has been doing nothing but promoting “U.S. interests in peace and security for the past quarter-century.” And he disingenuously asks, “To which country do we allegedly have a ‘strong attachment’?  Our foreign-born scholars hail from virtually every country in the Middle East — Turkey, Iran, Israel, and at least a dozen different Arab countries.”

The best response is by MJ Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum, an organization that advocates a two-state solution to the conflict:

Steve Rosen [who was acquited on charges of spying for Israel in 2009] … cleverly came up with the idea for an AIPAC controlled think-tank that would put forth the AIPAC line but in a way that would disguise its connections.

There was no question that WINEP was to be AIPAC’s cutout. It was funded by AIPAC donors, staffed by AIPAC employees, and located one door away, down the hall, from AIPAC Headquarters (no more. It has its own digs). It would also hire all kinds of people not identified with Israel as a cover and would encourage them to write whatever they liked on matters not related to Israel. “Say what you want on Morocco, kid.” But on Israel, never deviate more than a degree or two.

In other words, Satloff’s claims that WINEP is not tied to any particular lobby or country are part of an ongoing subterfuge that fools no one except the mainstream media: “It matters because the media has totally fallen for this sleight of hand and WINEP spokespersons appear (especially on PBS) as if WINEP was not part of the Israel lobby. Some truth-in-labeling is warranted.”

This sort of subterfuge is central to Jewish efforts at influencing policy in a wide range of areas. Because they are a small minority in the US and other Western societies, Jews must recruit support from the wider community. Their positions cannot be phrased as benefiting Jews, but as benefiting the interests of the society as a whole. As a result, these movements cannot tell their name.

A great example is the $PLC, an organization that we now know is funded by Jews and, apart from the sociopathic Morris Dees, is also largely staffed by Jews. Yet whenever there is a story about “immigrant rights” or angry White people, the SPLC is called on by the mainstream media as a “respected civil rights organization” rather than for what it is: A Jewish activist organization actively attempting to further the ethnic  interests of Jews, typically at the expense of White Americans.

This sort of subterfuge was true of all the Jewish intellectual and political movements discussed in The Culture of Critique. As I noted in Ch. 6:

It is thus not surprising that although these theories were directed at achieving specific Jewish interests in the manipulation of culture, they “could not tell their name”; that is, they were forced to minimize any overt indication that Jewish group identity or that Jewish group interests were involved …. Because of the need for invisibility, the theories and movements discussed here were forced to deemphasize Judaism as a social category—a form of crypsis discussed extensively in SAID (Ch. 6) as a common Jewish technique in combating anti-Semitism. In the case of the Frankfurt School, “What strikes the current observer is the intensity with which many of the Institute’s members denied, and in some cases still deny, any meaning at all to their Jewish identities” (Jay 1973, 32). The originators and practitioners of these theories attempted to conceal their Jewish identities, as in the case of Freud, and to engage in massive self-deception, as appears to have been common among many Jewish political radicals. Recall the Jewish radicals who believed in their own invisibility as Jews while nevertheless appearing as the quintessential ethnics to outside observers and at the same time taking steps to ensure that [non-Jews] would have highly visible positions in the movement (pp. 91–93). The technique of having non-Jews] as highly visible exemplars of Jewish-dominated movements has been commonly used by Jewish groups attempting to appeal to gentiles on a wide range of Jewish issues (SAID, Ch. 6) and is apparent in the discussion of Jewish involvement in influencing immigration policy. …  [Chap. 7]: Beginning in the late nineteenth century, anti-restrictionist arguments [on immigration]  developed by Jews were typically couched in terms of universalist humanitarian ideals; as part of this universalizing effort, [non-Jews] from old-line Protestant families were recruited to act as window dressing for their efforts, and Jewish groups such as the AJCommittee funded pro-immigration groups composed of non-Jews (Neuringer 1971, 92).

It’s an old technique, arguably present (see also here)  from the origins of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. The sad thing is that people who should know better continue to be deceived.

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Women, Minorities and Academia

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I recall that someone—perhaps it was William F. Buckley—said that you can’t have both affirmative action and nuclear power.

His point, of course, is obvious: merit of the highest order is necessary to invent, build and maintain a highly complex system like America’s nuclear power industry. To the extent standards are bent or diluted in favor of political goals such as increasing the number of minorities and women—though they be less qualified—a cost will be paid in efficiency, reliability, and potentially safety.

Despite this truism, America and other Western nations have headed down the road to diversity despite these costs. Thus, we have seen robust efforts to change the demographic face of life-saving occupations such as firefighting, where highly qualified White males are often passed over in favor of politically favored groups such as Blacks, Hispanics or women. For example, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Maria Sotomayor famously ruled against White firefighter Frank Ricci (the pre-Sotomayor Supreme Court overturned the ruling, a rare instance of justice and safety winning out over political correctness).

Another instance where ability and inclination still prevail over politics is commercial aviation, which has remained solidly in the hands of White males. Among commercial airline pilots, for example, only about 2% are women, with blacks accounting for far less than that. The Organization of Black Airline Pilots reports around 700 African-Americans working for U.S. airlines, about fifteen of whom are women.

In many areas of life, however, stakes are far lower, so blatant affirmative action policies elicit far less concern or reaction. For instance, does it really matter if your freshman English teacher at a community college is male, female, Black, White or other? Probably not that much. Even at better schools it is not a matter of life and death, though cumulatively it could affect the culture in some way.

Thus, the humanities have been able to politically alter the make-up of university faculty across America. Where White males overwhelmingly filled professorial roles through the 1960s, today’s academy is the dream-come-true of the  minority activists of the 70’s (though not of today’s activist, where complete absence of straight White non-Jewish able-bodied males is taken for granted as the holy grail).

As you leave the humanities and move toward the more quantitative subjects, however, political gerrymandering gets a little harder. By the time you are in the highly objective fields such as mathematics, engineering and physics, ability and merit are harder to fudge. Then-president of Harvard Larry Summers ran smack into this uncomfortable fact when in 2005 he commented on why, in the previous year, 88 percent (28 of 32) of newly tenured faculty had been men. Despite having reliable evidence on his side, his conjecture that men and women could have differing abilities in some fields created an uproar. (See Steve Sailer’s take here.)

As is so depressingly common under our multicultural regime, Summers was forced to apologize repeatedly, “in the style of a Communist show trial,” in the words of one observer. Wikipedia gives us the follow-through:

Desperately trying to keep his job, Summers quickly appointed female historian Drew Gilpin Faust, head of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute For Advanced Study, to lead Harvard’s Task Forces on Women Faculty and on Women in Science and Engineering.

Heather Mac Donald noted in Harvard’s Faustian Bargain in City Journal:

“Faust runs one of the most powerful incubators of feminist complaint and nonsensical academic theory in the country.”

Eventually, Dr. Faust brought back a $50 million wish list of payoffs to feminist interests, which the beleaguered Summers immediately agreed to fund. Hey, the money wasn’t coming out of Larry’s pocket, so why not?

Such aggression on the part of Dr. Faust did no harm, as she now sits in the Harvard president’s office, where her website proudly displays endeavors such as this: Empowering girls all over the world.

This is all meant as background material for our current leading example of  “The Disappearing of the White Male Academic: Shirley Tilghman and Princeton.” As Kevin MacDonald reported in this blog space, “Once again . . . all of our elite institutions are essentially enemy-occupied territory. Princeton’s president, Shirley Tilghman, is the sort of White person that is absolutely poisonous to our cause…. She is also doing her best to absolutely eliminate White males from high-profile positions.” MacDonald noted something that stood out for me as well: “My favorite is making a woman dean of the School of Engineering even though she is not an engineer.” What could be more blatant than this?

And don’t think that Tilghman is alone as a female president of an Ivy League school. Currently half of the eight Ivy League universities have women presidents, with Ruth Simmons being the only African American. (I’m not sure if this is better or worse than the days when six or seven of the Ivy League presidents were Jews.)

This topic of White male displacement in academia has cropped up in other instances this week as well. For example, a friend who earned a graduate degree in the field of American Studies sent me information on gender representation in the discipline to justify his decision to abandon a career in the field. (This reminded me of Alex Kurtagic’s own justification “Memoirs of a Dissident Student in Postmodern Academia”.)

American Studies was once a White male preserve that sought academic diversity by combining the study of American literature and history in an interdisciplinary way. Since then it’s gone the way of most other humanities departments and hosts minority activist groups such as The Minority Scholars Committee, Ethnic Studies Committee and Women’s Committee.

The women’s committee, of course, looks after the interests of women. Fair enough.

What, then, are we to make of the fact that women in American Studies today by far outnumber males? And by the looks of it, this disparity will only increase in the future, for recent Ph.D.s become future faculty, and they too are overwhelmingly female.

Last year, for instance, freshly-minted female Ph.D.s outnumbers males 65% to 35%. In 2008 it was a whopping 75% to 25%. I told my friend he should inquire about why American Studies still needs a Women’s Committee. (Better yet, why not agitate to establish a men’s committee?  Yeah, right.)

Anyway, I can only thank my lucky stars for the fact that I was born with and continue to enjoy White male privilege.

Edmund Connelly (email him) is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for The Occidental Quarterly.