Sarah Jeong Is a Boring, Typical Product of the American Academy
11th August 2018
Heather Mac Donald has seen it all before.
The key features of Jeong’s worldview are an obsession with whiteness and its alleged sins; a commitment to the claim that we live in a rape culture; and a sneering contempt for objectivity and truth-seeking. These are central tenets of academic victimology. From the moment freshmen arrive on a college campus, they are inundated by the message that they are either the bearers of white privilege or its victims. College presidents and the metastasizing diversity bureaucracy teach students to see racism where none exists, preposterously accusing their own institutions of systemic bias. “Bias response teams,” confidential “discrimination hotlines,” and implicit-bias training for faculty and staff roll forth from university coffers in wild abandon.
UC Berkeley’s Division of Equity and Inclusion until recently hung banners throughout campus reminding students of their place in the ruthlessly competitive hierarchy of victimhood. One particularly lachrymose entry, featuring a female black and a Hispanic male student, urged the presumably “non-diverse” sector of Berkeley to “create an environment where people other than yourself can exist.” This year’s White Privilege Conference, a nationwide academic gathering, featured panels on “Breaking the Chains of Capitalism and White Supremacy,” the “Whiteness of Law,” and “How Whiteness Kills.” The journal Cultural Studies of Science Education ran a perfectly standard article this year on how notions of merit and scientific truth are simply covers for white supremacy and racism, while the Feminist Journal of Geography argued that the convention of academic citations bolsters the status of those who are “white, male, able-bodied, economically privileged, heterosexual, and cisgendered.”