They are having a Salon evening on the subject of "Techno science"
Sounds innocuous enough, eh?
Think again:
Through critical itineraries, the Salon will bring
postcolonial studies, indigenous studies, critical race studies, and feminist
and queer studies to bear on the ways we follow and tell stories about
technoscience.
We aspire to
provoke interventions into our analytic, narrative, and political habits, to
spark scholarship that is accountable to multiple histories and contemporary
urgencies, and to rethink the relationships among diversely situated human and
nonhuman actors. While recognizing how technoscience is deeply implicated in
violence, colonialism and capitalism, how might we also attend to the
non-hegemonic possibilities, alters, and elsewheres that are within
technoscience? Read our provocation at http://technosalon.wordpress.com/provocation/
As Ben Shapiro writes, the main premise of critical race theory is that society is “too corrupted, too based on the notion of white supremacy, for equal protection of the law to ever be a reality. The system must be made unequal in order to compensate for the innate racism of the white majority”. It is a form of racism that targets white people under the guise of social justice or anti-racism.
Critical race theory is dark and disturbing, and is prevalent in progressive circles across North America. There are few places more progressive than a university campus; unfortunately, critical race theory is promoted within the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), a Marxist organization which over 500,000 of Canada's university students are forced to join and pay into. The CFS defines “white privilege” as a concept that “refers to the benefits experienced by people who are not racialised as a result of systemic racism. It is a concept used in critical race theory to describe racial inequities... White privilege is a manifestation of systemic societal racism that exists regardless of whether overt racism occurs in a given context”. They go on to say that “there is a great need for wider education at all levels on how whiteness reproduces itself in a myriad of subtle and systemic ways. Basic information about white privilege should be taught in first year courses”.
"White privilege is knowing that even if the bomber turns out to be white, no one will call for your group to be profiled as terrorists as a result, subjected to special screening or threatened with deportation," writes author Tim Wise. "White privilege is knowing that if this bomber turns out to be white, the United States government will not bomb whatever corn field or mountain town or stale suburb from which said bomber came, just to ensure that others like him or her don't get any ideas. And if he turns out to be a member of the Irish Republican Army we won't bomb Dublin. And if he's an Italian-American Catholic we won't bomb the Vatican."
We suppose it's necessary to point out that this is almost entirely bunk. There have been plenty of nonwhite mass murderers--among them Long Island Rail Road shooter Colin Ferguson (black), Beltway snipers John Muhammad and Lee Malvo (black and Muslim), Wisconsin mass shooter Chai Soua Vang (Laotian) and Virginia Tech's Seung-Hui Cho (Korean). None were treated as anything other than lone wolves, and it's been decades since America bombed either Laos or Korea.
It's true that Muslim terrorists are often "portrayed as representative of larger conspiracies, ideologies and religions that must be dealt with as systemic threats," but only because that portrayal is accurate. And many important media and other cultural voices go out of their way to argue that not all Muslims are terrorists (which is to their credit) and to play down Islamic terrorists' religious and ideological motives (which is not).
Tim Wise, to whom the article refers, is a race huckster whom the Toronto District School Board and Ontario`s Ministry of Education thought fit to bring in to deliver a keynote address at their `Futures` conference last year. He delivered the same sort of Marxist, `Critical Race Theory` idiocy that James Taranto referred to above. But in Toronto, to a room filled with almost all Caucasian teachers, he received a prolonged standing ovation.
Over at the
blog Blazing Cat Fur, a fine job has been done keeping us informed of the
self-serving, hypocritical idiocy coming from our future generation of would-be
educators. A current example comes from a Shaista
Patel, who defines herself as a Muslim feminist. Evidently being a Muslim
feminist doesn't mean criticizing Islamic misogyny, forced marriages,
gender apartheid, or honor killings in Muslim cultures. It means being a Muslim who criticizes genuine Muslim feminists like
Irshad Manji while telling white Canadians that they are evil oppressors and
occupiers of Native land.
So it only
seemed fitting to take a look at what's going on at Ms. Patel's home at
that toxic pedagogical wasteland of Marxist proselytizing, the Ontario
Institute for Studies in Education (OISE).
OISE - occupying and colonizing Native land since 1973
The Department
of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (SESE), a notoriously academically
inept program at OISE, produced two anti-Semitic theses in 2010. One of
which was condemned by Ontario's Minister of Citizenship and was roundly mocked
as thoroughly incompetent as to suggest, as the National Post's Jonathan Kay
ironically put it, that OISE is the type of place where you could get a
"course credit for setting up an anti-Israel facebook page."
That same program then produced a thesis declaring that western feminists
opposed to female genital mutilation are lascivious racists motivated by an
obsession with genitalia and "the pleasure of whiteness."
Sociology and
Equity Studies became such a humiliation that OISE recently changed the
department's name this year to "Humanities, Social Sciences and Social Justice Education."
The name suggests the same insidious indoctrination is happening in the new
department, but with the hope that subsequent alumni are alleviated of some of
the stigma attached to its predecessor.
However, we
still can get perverse entertainment from SESE, which has a few academic dregs in the form of theses leftover from the old auspices.
One of which is a remarkable representation of the deplorable race-baiting
identity politics that pervades the thinking at OISE.
It is a
doctoral thesis called White Terror, Canada's Indian Residential Schools, and the Colonial
Present: from Law Towards a Pedagogy of Recognition. In the
name of so-called anti-racism, it perpetuates the despicable idea that people
are merely constructs of their skin color with a collective identity and
responsibility, rather than distinct individuals. In fact, its author, Leslie
Thielen-Wilson, actually states that, "the European ideology of
possessive individualism.., and the ontological force of property.. to
which it gives rise, is one important element to this racial power network
and its productive force. "
The thesis is a
reflection of the fatuous, simplistic, and effectively racist doctrines spouted
by its thesis adviser, Sherene Razick. Pronouncing from her comfortable perch
at OISE, the grounds of which occupy an acre of once-First Nations land which
is now some of the most valuable real estate in Canada, Razack pompously
teaches that Canada "is a
white settler society and that we live in an ongoing colonial
project."
That type of
stereotyping, which sits like a grotesque Rumpelstiltskin of thought in
the mental crevices of critical race theorists, presumes that every white
person is a privileged racist as an inevitable consequence of their skin color.
It says that a poor worker who immigrated from Poland or the Ukraine, which had
no part in the English and French colonization of Canada, is a privileged
oppressor and colonizer. Whereas a tenured University of Toronto professor who
is an immigrant from Iran or Pakistan, makes over a hundred thousand dollars a
year, gets one of every seven years off for paid sabbatical and a lucrative
pension among other privileges, is an oppressed victim and does not share in
the collective white guilt of colonization.
Smugly thinking
they are cloaked in the inviolability of their self-proclaimed victimhood,
OISE's poobahs exhale malefic manifestos from their mushroom thrones. Their
clouded ideology encourages more and more immigration from third world
countries, many of which have inherently racist, violent cultures. If
immigrants have white skin and are from Europe, they add to the `crime` of
"occupation" and "colonization" of Canada, but at the
University of Toronto's crown jewel of education studies, developing
world immigrants they inanely refer to as "racialized"
get colonizer exemption status. Because quite a few OISE
professors teach that race is the primary determining factor of a collective
guilt and accountability, which places them in philosophical agreement
with Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.
In her thesis,
Ms Thielen-Wilson writes with palpable self-abasement, " I
am a Canadian of European descent, a Euro-Canadian, a white settler,
white. I agree with Alfred that settlers must be forced into a
reckoning of who (and perhaps what) we are before we can be held
accountable for colonial violence (past and present) and before we can
attempt to embark upon anti- or non-colonial relationships with
Indigenous peoples in the present."
One could mix
a justifiable dread of how Thielen-Wilson might intend to force such
a "reckoning" upon Euro-Canadians (a terrifying image is conjured of
Mao or Pol Pot's forced reckoning of their less enlightened
subjects) with the comfort that, with the exception of her Women's Studies
students at Western University, she is unlikely to ever be in a position
to force anyone to do anything. But when she writes, "I
suggest that this reckoning...requires that Euro-Canadians understand that we
are part of a white collective body...and that this collective body continues
to engage in practices (often violent, always vile).." it is a
frightening reminder of the shameful racism and denial of individuality with
which OISE conditions its students. More frightening is that its graduates
go on to teaching positions in schools and universities and form school board
curricula.
If you think this critique of OISE as racist is rhetorical hyperbole, then consider for a
moment what the reaction would be if Ms Thielen-Wilson had substituted another
skin color for 'white' in her statements. If she had written that Indo-Canadians
or Native Canadians were part of a brown or red collective body that engages in
practices, often violent, always vile, she would likely be charged with a Hate Crime.
Perhaps someday
OISE's teachers will recognize that regardless of our skin color; red, black,
yellow, brown, white, whatever, we are are individual human beings responsible
for our own actions, neither culpable for nor ennobled by the acts of others
with whom we have little in common other than pigmentation. Regrettably, that
day seems far off at OISE's radical departments, be they old or in the new
guise of Humanities, Social Sciences and Social Justice Education.
For now, that institute remains a disgrace and embarrassment to the field of
education.
UPDATE: Discussing this post with Brian Lilley on Byline on Sun News Network:
