Old Hate in new academic vogue
UK, US university cases illustrate greater problem

Two untoward sophists, their respective UK and US sitations distinct, were recently the subjects of white-hot opprobrium and - here, head-shaking is appropriate - some degree of support.

Their ugly episodes merit appraisal, as do their trashy cheerers and ill-carpentered philosophical underpinnings.

"Bahar Mustafa: Goldsmiths Students' Union diversity officer to keep her job after vote of no confidence petition fails," was the
IndependentUK.com's 5/27 headline.

The professionally dyspeptic misfit Mustafa had 
gleefully perpetrated numerous rancid actions not at all befitting a "diversity officer" responsible for encouraging general harmony:

She organized and advertised a 'no white males allowed" 
strategy event, led fractious disruptions of university order, championed the segregationist "safe spaces" fancy, and slurred one critic as "white trash"
through her official Goldsmiths diversity officer email.

As press accounts spread and pressures against her mounted, Bahar Mustafa stamped her feet, balled her fists, and held a particulary bizarre support event.

"There have been charges made against me that I am racist 
and sexist to white men…" the Independent quotes her as bleating, before she offered this self-serving, funhouse mirror redefinition of "racism:"

"I, an ethnic minority woman, cannot be racist or sexist towards white men because racism and sexism describe structures of privilege based on race and gender and therefore women of colour and minority genders cannot be racist or sexist, since we do not stand to benefit from such a system."

A videotape of the oddball pep rally shows the ranting Mustafa backed by a gaggle of unsightly irregulars, who occasionally murmur affirmation noises. There are even a few male adherents at the mob-fringe; their
apparent glumness needs no explanation. Surely, they were hoping to impress someone -- perhaps anyone. Critics of the campus Social Justice Warrior phenomenon term such pathetic and prideless affection-courting sorts, "White Knights."

(And more than one commentator noted that Mustafa delivered her pre-prepared idea-jumble into a microphone held for her by a black woman. The mind reels at the optic wrongness.)

That enough students at Goldsmiths University of London did not find Bahar Mustafa's racial bigotry, calls for seperatism and genocide objectionable shows old hate's favor in 2015 SJW precincts. (#KillAllWhiteMen, a favored Mustafa hashtag, is one whose casual employ she still defends; an 'expression of irony among the marginalized,' she called it -- or some such philosophical detritus.)

Fortunately, the vile, bigoted SJW twits of Goldsmiths 
are not barometers of world sensibility. And they may soon get real-life cold showers, once they have left the the bubble-shelters of an affluent campus and Mummy and Daddy's costly compounds. (One UK paper reported that Bahar Mustafa plots her 'peoples' struggle' schemes from her parents' half-million dollar luxury home.)

Doubtless, they then will find little comfort in school days-cherished paperbacks extolling insurrectionary, factionalist outlooks.   

But pseudo-justifications of racial and gender hostility and division identical to the me-centered redefinition favored by Goldsmith's little Bahar are also thought quite the thing to think by some in certain intellectually disheveled sectors of U.S. academia. Consider the case of Saida Grundy, an incoming Boston University professor of African-American studies.

Earlier this year, Grundy shared her own hostile 
and historically innaccurate views in a recent series of  Twitter messages:

"White masculinity isn't a problem for america's [sic] 
colleges. White masculinity is THE problem for america's 
[sic] colleges" (In a subsequent tweet, she termed white 
males an inherently"problem population.")

"Every MLK week I commit myself  to not spending a 
dime in a white-owned business, and every year I find it 
nearly impossible."

"For the record, NO race outside of europeans had a 
system that made slavery a personhood instead of t
emporarycondition."

"There is also no race except for europeans 
who kidnapped and transported human beings 
in order to enslave them and their offspring for 
life."

"Before europeans invented it as such, slavery 
was not a condition that was defacto inherited from 
parent to child." Grundy would damn an entire racial 
group as immutably wicked. As traditionally 
understood, "racism" entails exactly that sort of 
condemnation of whole shared-inherent 
characteristics groups. 

But again, as with Bahar Mustafa at Goldsmiths in the 
UK, we are confronted by tilted, trendy reimagining. In 
Grundy's twilit flights, racism is a matter of 'oppressive structure,' and necessarily predicated on "access to 
levers of systemic, institutional, political, and 
economic influence." 

As such, goes the unwieldy propaganda line, racism 
is the exclusive province of "the oppressing class." 
No one else can possibly be racist. At all. In any way. 
Ever. 

(And it gets worse: with the contemporary coining of the 
"white privilege" concept, guilt-by-group-membership 
can be extended into perpetuity. Sort of a caste 
phenomenon.)

Clear-headed onlookers, hewing to the orthodox, clearly

objective definition, recognized that Grundy's Twitter 
rants belied an unquestionably racist nature. 

Once the national spotlight had fallen on her, and once donating Boston University alumni 
began voicing objections,Grundy did issue a faint 'apology.' Most who 
read it, though, noted that while she did call her original statements

"indelicate," she did not at all renounce their horrible philosophical foundation.

The UK students who back Mustafa have a good deal in

common with Grundy's US campus advocates, beginning
with  a fabricated and self-serving ethos.

Shorn of its particulars and reduced to logical essence, 
the recently-minted 'new definition' these papier-
mache musketeers heft in reeling parade is at base 
identical to its claimed foe - for each depends for utility 
on a supposed inherently inferior/dastardly demographic 
group.

By their beclouded adolescent adherents' stunt-reasoning, 
all whites are the inherently racist enemy -- save for themselves, of course. Many of Mustafa's and Grundy's raggedy collegiate stalwarts are themselves pasty as 
can be. They just never quite get about the business of 
accounting for that rip in their pretended reality.

To the motley and callow choir - unsophisticated, 
unintellectual, and unflaggingly PC, all persons can be 
neatly compartmentalized into two camps: themselves 
and "right wingers." 

That cheap and cowardly trick-move allows them to 
simply sweep aside without consideration all 
contrary arguments, never mind how such might be 
reasoned. It is the way of tyrants, not of thoughtful 
persons.

(And readers may recall that the counterfeit tactic of 
evading explanation by preemptorily dismissing all 
critics as uniformly arch-conservative, and thus ignorable, 
was also recently essayed by 3rd Wave feminist 
squawkbox and bragging child molester Lena 
Dunham.)

It is simple to seem victorious and of redoubtable nobility 
when jousting a fictitious foe of one's own crafting. But it 
is a lie, and I will not let it pass unexposed.

For, in their foolish play, they do not acknowledge, and 
perhaps do not even grasp, that they do not own anti-
racism. There is a purer, more principled form that, 
unlike their tender, flawed model, objects equally and 
as a matter of genuine, unvarying principle to all racial 
bigotry, regardless of its source; one which is hardly 'of

the right,' being further ideologically distanced from
that bent than are they.

Too, our eyes belong on those dust-blanketed academics 
who wheezed to Grundy's banner. She did not originate 
the rigged fantasy that racism is exclusive to whites 
and is necessarily manifested in systemic and 
structural ways.

That curious and rigged construct enjoys popularity 

in many unproductive, navel-gazing ivory towers. 
One nationally recognizable academic figure 
sympathetic to similar silliness is Georgetown 
University Professor Michael Eric Dyson, a frequent 
guest on the fast fading MSNBC. (When exercising 
my sardonic muscles, I term Dyson "Professor Popinjay.")

Hurriedly hopping onto Twitter to take up for the 
beleaguered Grundy were growling and generally un-
pleasant academics who shared her toy definition and 
hate rationale. Surely, they perceived themselves as 
potentially imperiled.

Of course, exploring unorthodox avenues and testing 
for soundness nontraditional theories are legitimate 
academic functions, not ones to be discouraged.
(Regrettably, a scattered few vile white racist posters 
joined the Twitter criticism of Grundy. The damage they 
did was two-fold: They were, of course, noxious and socially injurious in their own right -- and I certainly object to them no less vigorously than I do to Grundy -- and they gave 
her unethical backers the opportunity to misrepresent the occasional, foul message as typifying the nature of Grundy's opposition. Of course, when someone cultivates a disingenuous tactic, that signals that they are conscious of the frailty of their argument, as well as proving character deficit 

on their own part. Too, lending support to the bigoted 
professor have been a couple of crude black racist 
posters. To the present author's knowledge, Grundy 
never rejected their backing.)

It is doubtful that the hard-working taxpayers who fund
institutions of higher learning would be pleased by the 
news that they are providing for their own demise.

The Mustafa and Grundy episodes demonstrate the need 
for public scrutiny of accepted teachings in higher 
education and, to be frank, the abolition of trivial positions 
and departments.

end