The Unbearable Whiteness of Being

Have you heard the latest in higher education? It’s no longer enough for schools to establish a multicultural educational environment, one that welcomes all creeds, races, and ethnicities. Plain old diversity is just not enough. The prophets of political correctness have gone beyond settling for mere inclusion. They now desire, if not demand, something called “deep diversity” — that is, eliminating all signs of “whiteness” from campuses across the country.

How do we know this? We read it at The College Fix, a website devoted to chronicling the PC silliness that runs rampant at institutions of higher learning. If you haven’t heard of The College Fix, you might want to check it out (www.thecollegefix.com). But for those of you with more delicate constitutions or heart trouble, beware! Expect your blood pressure to skyrocket.

In its April 17 edition, Fix assistant editor Dave Huber wrote about an eye-opening presentation on “deep diversity” given at the Seventeenth Annual White Privilege Conference in Philadelphia. (Yes, there’s such a thing as an annual White Privilege Conference, and it’s been going on for seventeen years. You can’t make this stuff up!) Heather Hackman, a former professor of multicultural education at Minnesota’s St. Cloud University who now runs an educational consulting group, offered a workshop fanatically entitled “No Freedom Unless We Call Out the Wizard Behind the Curtain: Critically Addressing the Corrosive Effects of Whiteness in Teacher Education and Professional Development.”

Hackman’s thesis is simple: Modern education is hopelessly tainted by white supremacy and the “white imperial gaze,” and the solution is to train prospective teachers to be activists as well as pedagogues. According to Hackman, virtually everything associated with being a good student in modern education is actually just a tool of racist white supremacy. Punctuality? A tool of white supremacy. Discipline? A tool of white supremacy. Working hard? Being goal-oriented? Speaking proper English? All tools of white supremacy. These also happen to be the attributes of education that Hackman seeks to eradicate.