New York colleges to offer new course teaching ‘objectivity’ and ‘meritocracy’ function as ‘white mythologies’
Hobart and William Smith Colleges are offering a course next year to teach students how “objectivity” and “meritocracy” function as “white mythologies.”
“White Mythologies: Objectivity, Meritocracy, and Other Social Constructions” is a sophomore-level course taught by Kendralin Freeman and Jason Rodriguez, who are sociology and anthropology professors, respectively. The pair co-authored an article in the journal of Whiteness and Education together.
The racist title has shocked many across the Internet and Campus Reform dug in deeper.
“This course explores the history and ongoing manifestations of ‘white mythologies’—long-standing, often implicit views about the place of White, male, Euro-American subjects as the norm,” explains the course description, which adds that students will also “explore how systematic logics that position ‘the West’ and ‘whiteness’ as the ideal manifest through such social constructions as objectivity, meritocracy, and race.”
Freeman and Rodriguez argue that despite the good intentions of white students and community members, calls for “intersectionality” and “diversity” on campus may actually “derail dialogue about racism” and inadvertently “recenter whiteness.”
They added that efforts to increase minority representation on college campuses may actually promote white privilege since those diversity efforts are often promoted in neo-liberal sloganeering as opposed to an acknowledgment that racism still exists.
“Diversity measures are rarely presented as tactics for addressing the unfair, systematic advantages that white subjects experience, but are instead framed as either avenues for addressing historical injustices or issues of simple underrepresentation,” they write.
“In the absence of any discussion of the ongoing structural relations that produce minority underrepresentation and white privilege, this is particularly easy to co-opt into the ideology of ‘culture of poverty’ or to denounce in the name of meritocracy.”
Meritocracy and objectivity are often criticized by academics for promoting or justifying “whiteness” or “white privilege.” Social justice and victimhood are necessary evils to the Alt-left to adjust the outcomes and create their version of fairness instead of focusing on freedom and the opportunities afforded to all equally.
photo/ George Zimmerman protester planted by a leftist group
