Evergreen State College in Washington State, a unique school, has developed a day for racial sensitivity. A few years ago, the demand was made by student activists that all-white faculty and students vacate the campus for a day “or else.”[1] One professor, Bret Weinstein, refused to succumb to the demand. He felt that the activists were guilty of a “…show of force and an act of oppression.” Confronted by the activists, the episode was caught on tape. One activist is heard shouting at the professor, “We are not speaking to you on terms of white privilege. This is not a discussion…” – it is not dialogue, it is forced monologue, and it is not mutual, it is militant and threatening. And that is the problem. When free-speech and mutual dialogue is shut down, when silence is imposed, a free society ceases to exist. An oppressive government, though it may not yet be clearly defined in terms of form or function, nevertheless is arising, and the revolution is on.
Who’s in Charge?
The idea is shocking – students to a profession, “This is not a discussion. You have lost that one.” Meaning, the power dynamics are no longer bi-lateral in any sense. New terms for living together are being imposed – that’s tyranny. “You’re useless,” the animated student declared. Another student called for the professor to resign. Not all the students were black – and this is the mystery. That white guilt has created, not an appropriate empathy, as we would desire, but a social neurosis, that now seeks, at all costs, to appease, even to the denigration of whiteness. This is not healthy. This is not reasonably sound and clear-headed people, who, from different perspectives, are working through social issues together toward common solutions.[2]
Fifty or so students disrupted the class – not students enrolled in the class, but students the professor had never met. At first, the professor was certain that he could reason with the students. He quickly realized that was not an option. He would say before congress, “The protesters had no interest in the very dialogue they seemed to invite.”[3] When students in Weinstein’s class came to his defense, they too were silenced, particularly, Weinstein noted, students of color. They were, it seemed, expected to toe the line of adversity against the professor. Taking his side, or that of logical fairness, was not acceptable. Color mattered more than truth.
As the situation grew in intensity, the campus police showed up, but they were blocked from entering the class. They were concerned about the professor. The protest was obviously planned. The protestors subsequently made demands of the college president. The demands were not optional. That is, the president was threatened with ‘violence’ if the demands were not met – this again is not a true democracy. It is not true liberty. It is oppression. And if such ideas and notions are reinforced by State Colleges and Universities, our future as a nation is in peril. The president acted then to give the protestors a wide berth, instructing the campus police to “stand down.”[4]
Weinstein, no political conservative, noted, “I am troubled by what this implies about the current state of ‘the Left.’”[5] Weinstein’s great crime that wounded campus blacks was that he argued, “People should not be allowed to speak or not based on their skin color,” the idea being that ideas mattered, from whatever quarter or corner. Free-Speech should be genuinely free – but that is no longer a value practiced by ‘the Left.’ Increasingly, on campuses, faith speech, and conservative speech is repressed. Only politically correct speech is championed.
This is what made Jesus was wildly popular among the common folk, and it is also what got him killed, by the establishment. Still, the way to liberty, is bold, free speech. And the church’s model is truth, wrapped in the language of love, but, still at times painful. Trust stings. Then it heals.
The experimental approach at Evergreen had been to create a racial hierarchy in the faculty. It appears that those who are driven by identity politics don’t want to be free of racism. Rather, they want a new form of racism. Using “weaponized terminology,” language that is masked to elicit public and popular support, while serving, simultaneously, a subversive purpose is often code language for the efforts of those who propose radical sociological transformation. Code words such as ‘equity’ should be embraced, overtly, by everyone. But, those who see underneath the word, and the philosophy and cultural-structural designs intended, a de facto code, and who then resist ‘equity,’ are branded as racists, as misogynists. It is a clever ploy out of the deceivers’ handbook. Weinstein noted that increasingly, “one’s right to speak is now dictated by adherence to an ascendant orthodoxy in which one’s race, gender, and sexual orientation are paramount.”[7] Weinstein did not ultimately blame the students, calling them “unwitting tools of a witting movement.” While he would not assert such, this is the essence of the invisible wind that drives the “children of disobedience,” the work of the “prince of the power of the air,” what Wink identifies as the social, political ‘powers.’
The bottom line of this movement is power and control. Free speech is permitted if it is affirmed by the powers. Each individual and group, in this environment, must learn to “self-censor” or to modify its language, conforming to the new cultural norm, or pay the price of “crippling stigma.” Such tools are used, Weinstein argued, “to unhook the values that bind us together as a nation, equal protection under the law, the presumption of innocence, a free market-place of ideas, the concept that ‘people should be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.’” The core tenet of the Civil Rights movement is being dismantled in the form of a kind of reverse racism.
Weinstein’s testimony was shocking in his assertion that what is taking place in the nation, of which Evergreen was a microcosm, and in which, the George Floyd riots are now a bubble-up of this larger movement, is less like a conspiracy, and more like a cult. It has religious, spiritual energy. And, as in cults, where leaders control and dupe their followers, we are witnessing groups who demand power, being themselves enslaved, unwittingly. Weinstein called the narrative of these groups, “a carefully architected fiction.”[8] The followers, the groupies, are sincere. They believe the arguments that the noble cause, the tactics, will end oppression. They are so close to oppression, they cannot see that they are in its grip. The true goal, Weinstein argues, is not to end oppression, but to merely “turn the tables,” inverting it, shifting the control of the nation and its institutions. “Something is seriously and dangerously amiss,” Weinstein suggested. “At this moment in history, the center does not hold. Partisan polarization and pollical corruption have rendered government ineffective, predatory, and often cruelly indifferent to the suffering of American citizens. Tribalism is the natural result.”[9]
Weinstein’s arguments have the clarity of a secular prophet. His observation that “the center no longer holds” is a description of a nation without unifying values. Multiculturalism is no longer a secondary, enriching matter – it is now the primary dynamic. No longer centered, we are increasingly pulled apart at the edges.
Say Anything You Want As Long As You Say … What? But Not That?
What is being invoked now, on college campuses, and mainstreamed, is the repression of politically unacceptable speech. The inversion of values has produced contradictory notions. For example, a ‘safe space’ was one in which ‘free speech’ and free ideas could be advance, without impunity. That is no longer the standard. Now a ‘safe space’ is one in which you are assured that you will not be offended, that you do not hear contradictory speech – this is the opposite of the First Amendment, and of a truly educational environment in which fresh ideas challenge stale fixed notions. This represses conviction that comes by the use of religious language that surely offends before it heals us. This is insanity. This traps us in an echo chamber.
Already, social media is censoring free speech in the same way, determining what acceptable and non-acceptable speech, not in terms of vulgar or moral gutter language, that is more allowable that certain political and social views.
Shelby Steele notes that the number one moral issue on the nation’s conscience is race.[10] Not lying and cheating. Not idolatry and licentiousness. But how white America has treated blacks. It is an amazing national moral and social transformation. It is sociology as theology. It is a record of malignant behavior driving behavior rather than discipline from principled lives. That shift represents a free-fall from noble ideals to narrow self-interested values.
Identity Politics seems to offer the current generation a reason, a cause, but its ideas are injected, adopted. This is superficial group-think, not deep reflection and reason resulting in an inner existential conviction. With Frankl, the liberation and the experience are deeply personal, individual. It is inner-outer. Maslow assumes that one outside, the powerful, needs to jump-start the self-actualization process. It is an outer-inner dynamic, and it has given us a failed experiment.
One of the mind-bending irrational elements of this movement is that it is satiated in the politics of power. Reason is dismissed. Relativism is enthroned. For example, a white person before someone who is black, or a man, before a woman, or a Christian before an LGBTQ advocate has no say. Forget the First Amendment. Forget person-hood. One is seen, not as an individual, but as a representative of a class. In the meeting, the dominant class representative must be silent. They must defer to the claim of the subordinate group. Objective arguments, concrete evidence has no place. Truth is established based on the perception of the oppressed group member. To offer contrary evidence is to deny the reality, which is really a perception, of the oppressed. Perception is reality – I perceive you as a racist, therefore, you are a racist. Don’t explain. Don’t even try to apologize. You are guilty! Wherever did the golden rule go? How did we become such a judgmental culture, under the guise of tolerance? Bigotry now reigns. We are standing in front of the funniest mirror ever displayed – the guilty white, or man, or Christian, or straight is bigot, for his privilege, status, and contrary opinion. Still, the accuser, gets to act like the bigot, with dismissive arrogance and silencing shame, and refusal to create a context for reconciliation, and instead, framing the relationship as a play for power and ultimately extortion, because that is the end goal of the Black Lives Matter group, which is a growing collection of anti-straight, anti-white, anti-male, anti-Christian rebels.
[1] Tucker Carlson Report, “Professor Objects to ‘Day of Absence,’. YouTube video, “Professor objects to no white people on campus demand.”
[2] Ibid.
[3] See: “Bret Weinstein Testifies in Congress on the Evergreen State College riots, Free Speech & Safe Spaces.” Youtube.com.
[4] Tucker Carlson Report, “Professor Objects to ‘Day of Absence,’. YouTube video, “Professor objects to no white people on campus demand.”
[5] Ibid.
[6] See: “Bret Weinstein Testifies in Congress on the Evergreen State College riots, Free Speech & Safe Spaces.” Youtube.com.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (Harper: New York, 2006), 6.
