The Problem With Whiteness

 Every time I see an article or a posting from the mainstream media now, my default reaction is “how am I being manipulated?” rather than “how am I being informed.”

So it was yesterday when I saw the lead article in the Chicago Sun Times about Rebecca Journey, the instructor at my alma mater, The University of Chicago, who postponed her class, The Problem of Whiteness after an outcry purportedly instigated by sophomore Daniel Schmidt, a student that brought this course to light in social media.

The Chicago Sun Times dutifully picked up the story and, without any critical analysis or questioning, posted it.   As is the case in most articles, a piece that should have been relegated to the opinion pages was out there on the front page, masquerading as news.  The tone and slant of the piece could have (and perhaps was) penned by Ms. Journey herself.

The response by Journey is a boringly predictable one from the neo-Marxist, operating under the camouflage of “scholarship.”

The first tactic of Leftists is exaggeration or outright prevarication.  Journey claims, without support, that she was subject to death threats, cyberbullying and that her inbox was flooded with “racist, misogynistic and antisemitic attacks and threats.”  No specifics, just the labels here.  I’m actually surprised she didn’t find a noose dangling from her office door handle.   It’s possible but it’s more likely she received a few  emails objecting to her nonsense and inflated them. Committed Leftists now have a track record of exaggerating, or flat out lying.  Just ask Jussie Smollett, Bubba Wallace or AOC about her whereabouts on 1/6.   I highly doubt that the Sun Times reporter asked to see the “flood” of emails, and simply took her word for it.

The second is obfuscation in academic jargon.   “The class is emphatically not about ‘the problem with white people’” Journey disingenuously claims, the class approaches whiteness as a problem in the philosophical sense of an open question—whiteness as an object of critical inquiry.”  Oh, ok, then.  Bury the intent in academic mumbo-jumbo.  In other words, you plebes are too dumb to understand.  Well, I have a simple test of symmetry.  Applying the Iron Law of Reciprocity, can we assume that Ms. Journey will be offering the companion course in the following academic quarter, “The Problem with Blackness?”  Because if not, her rationalization fails.  More bluntly, it smacks of unadulterated BS.

Most predictably, Journey then predictably positioned herself as the poor victim, “This was a malicious attack not just on me as a teacher, but on anti-racist pedagogy writ large.”   She attacks a sophomore in college for having a viewpoint and exposing her faux scholarship.  Oh, poor me.  Oh, the drama.  The 19 year kid is not only a threat to her but to a whole body of scholarship, a grave enough threat that Journey feels compelled to go to the press to express her fears.   Playing victim is a standard leftist tactic.  Here, the professor is attempting to portray herself as being victimized by a student.

Journey is an activist pretending to be a scholar.  She met with resistance to her attempted use of a once great university as her platform to preach Wokeness doctrine.  She may deceive some with her  artifice, but those of us that have spent any time at all listening to thinkers like James Lindsay or Jordan Peterson know EXACTLY what she is doing.

It has been very sad to see The University of Chicago succumb to Woke madness so quickly.  From the English Department’s decision to only accept students in its graduate program that  want to pursue Black studies to the establishment of an entire department devoted to Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity, Woke had gotten into its bones like leukemia.