If you don’t like a leftist position, just wait a while. It’ll change.
A good example of this is how while liberals fought racial segregation decades ago, now they increasingly are advocating it. Just consider that at George Mason University (GMU) recently, a separate orientation was held for black students.
As The College Fix reports, “The event was called the ‘Black Freshman Orientation.’ Hosted by the Black Student Alliance, the additional orientation occurred on August 25 at the university. It has become an annual event there.”
“Incoming black freshmen at GMU did not have to attend the Black Freshman Orientation, and if they decided to attend, they still were required to go to the university’s regular orientation as well, according to the university,” the site continues.
These events are actually fairly common on today’s college campuses. As the College Fix reported in 2016, “While segregation of the past has a negative connotation, today its general definition — to set apart from the rest, isolate or divide — describes what’s going on at universities in which special events are designed for students of color, and often specifically for black students.”
Moreover, some universities are even offering special dorms wings for black students. Of course, in colleges there are no white orientations or white wings (only left wings), not any more than there’s White Entertainment Television, a Miss White America pageant, or a Congressional White Caucus. There’s plenty of dogmatic lecturing about “white privilege,” though.
There are far more egregious examples of the new segregation, too. Students around the nation have demanded no-whites-allowed “safe spaces” for blacks. The University of Minnesota offers a “Tongues Untied” program that excludes straight people and whites, according to Campus Reform. And it was reported in 2015 that a NYC school was asking third-graders their race and then dividing them into “affinity groups” (i.e., racial groups) for racial tolerance training (i.e., politically correct indoctrination).
Of course, this doesn’t come out of nowhere: The San Francisco-based Pacific Educational Group (PEG) — which devises materials for taxpayer-funded teacher training — actually recommends formulating student groups based on race.
PEG goes even further with the separation, too, instructing teachers to “have separate behavior expectations for minority students, because those students supposedly come from cultures with radically different values,” reported EAG News’ Steve Gunn in 2015.
PEG tells these educators that minority kids frequently have a “different value and view on time, missed days, working together, and wait time between questions and answers,” Gunn continues. Consequently, teachers should “‘be flexible’ with minority students who are persistently late or miss a lot of school days [and should] be tolerant if black children exhibit ‘an exuberant participation style of shouting out answers and questions.’”
Gunn further informs, “According to PEG, white culture is based on ‘white individualism’ or ‘white traits’ like ‘rugged individualism,’ ‘adherence to rigid time schedules,’ ‘plan(ning) for the future,’ and the idea that ‘hard work is the key to success.’”
Yeah, wow, radical notions like those could really ruin a kid.
What’s so tragic about this is that by labeling success-oriented behaviors — or, more precisely, virtues and their sub-categories — “white,” these “educators” are encouraging vice in minority children. Years ago it was only jealous peers who’d apply this destructive social pressure, telling studious, academically successful black students that they were “acting white.” Now this attitude has the imprimatur of authority figures.
Yet none of this is surprising given the moral relativism that defines the Left. Why is this relevant? It once was understand that there are absolutes, expressions of Truth, which, of course, apply to everyone. Those pertaining to our physical/biological being are obvious: We all have survival needs, requiring food, water, and shelter to survive.
But what of moral health? Since you can’t see a moral under a microscope or a principle in a Petri dish, this is where secular moderns (a redundancy, really) fall into relativism’s trap. “Who’s to say what’s right or wrong?” they’ll ask. Or they’ll declare, “You have your ‘values,’ but someone else’s may be different. It’s all a matter of perspective.” Of course, they act like quite the absolutists when they feel they’ve been wronged.
This leads to what we witness today. It was once understood that to be a good, successful person, everyone needed to develop virtue. For example, punctuality and working hard for legitimate success are not “white traits” but expressions of the virtue of diligence; likewise, “planning for the future” isn’t a white hang-up but reflects the virtue of prudence. And there simply is no group on the planet that can dispense with virtue without suffering serious consequences.
Upon embracing relativism, however, these important universals — which, being universal, help unite people — appear non-existent. Then all that’s perceived are different “values,” and who’s to say which are more valuable? Then white is white, black is black, and ne’er the twain shall meet. Each group just has its own ways, and there’s no objective arbiter to make qualitative judgments among them.
From this perspective, racial segregation makes sense because you’re dealing with groups that operate in entirely different universes of “values.” How could the same teaching apply to them all?
(Of course, the deeper point missed is that if everything is relative, this includes leftist dogma. So then how does it matter what kids learn or if they learn anything?)
This relativism also explains why yesterday’s liberals could be for one thing and today’s liberals for another, with the switch from anti to pro-segregation positions being a good example. As I’ve explained elsewhere, “liberalism” and “conservatism” aren’t ideologies as much as they’re processes.
Liberalism is the process of ever trying to change the status quo.
Conservatism is the process of ever trying to preserve it.
Thus, as the status quo changes, so do the consensus positions of the day’s liberals and conservatives.
As philosopher G.K. Chesterton put it, “Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision.… [Instead,] we are always changing the vision.”
This hints at our real problem. Without recognized moral universals, how can we ever even imagine a morally united world?
Photo: wikimedia
