
Inside the Madness at Evergreen State - jseliger
https://www.wsj.com/article_email/inside-the-madness-at-evergreen-state-1506034740-lMyQjAxMTE3NjIzMjgyMDIyWj/
======
meri_dian
Wow, this is really reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution.

These retaliatory attitudes towards 'white' people are hostile and racist and
do not work towards building an inclusive society.

Edit: Why was this flagged?

~~~
quuquuquu
It was flagged because x% of users on this site refuse to have difficult and
nuanced conversations about racism and censorship.

They ruin it for the rest of us.

~~~
dang
HN has many major conversations about these issues. It's just never enough for
those who want them, and always too much for those who don't.

------
quotemstr
Why is Evergreen still getting a single cent of public money? This attitude
doesn't educate people or serve any public interest.

~~~
wallace_f
Academia. 'Anti Whiteness is pro humanity,' according to a professor teaching
a course "The Problem with Whiteness," who UW Madison defends[0].

"In this class, we will ask what an ethical white identity entails, what it
means to be #woke, and consider the journal Race Traitor's motto, 'treason to
whiteness is loyalty to humanity"

Any professor teaching anti-(any other race'ness') would be instantly a pariah
and unable to keep a job.

[http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/23/health/college-course-white-
co...](http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/23/health/college-course-white-controversy-
irpt-trnd/index.html)

I have a question. When I grew up I heard 'colorblindness' was a good thing.
What happened to that? It appears we are going in the opposite direction.

~~~
Blackthorn
> Any professor teaching anti-(any other race'ness') would be instantly a
> pariah and unable to keep a job.

Whiteness isn't really a race, so that's not the same thing. In America, it's
been a social construct whose members have shifted over the years.

> I have a question. When I grew up I heard 'colorblindness' was a good thing.
> What happened to that? It appears we are going in the opposite direction.

People started to realize that it ignores the lived experience of black
people.

~~~
wallace_f
I feel like I don't understand this. Consider the hypothetical courses: "the
problem with Jewishness," or "the problem with Blackness." Are those at all
acceptable? I am certain they are not! So what is acceptable about "the
problem with Whiteness?" I think you are saying that Whites do not constitute
a race in the same way that Blacks do?? Does that make sense?

~~~
Blackthorn
> So what is acceptable about "the problem with Whiteness?"

You got the answer yourself:

> I think you are saying that Whites do not constitute a race in the same way
> that Blacks do?? Does that make sense?

~~~
dmix
They don't seem to be making a cultural distinction here by calling it only
"whiteness". A dynamic that both racists and rabid anti-racists so often
ignore to their own detriment.

Culture is the issue. And by bypassing that and focusing on race it instantly
makes the conversation taboo and kills any progress through conversation and
public discourse.

This happens often in society and it's a shame, especially when cultural
defects result in oppression or mass inter-community violence. These are
serious problems that can't be addressed honestly.

~~~
Blackthorn
I'm not certain I understand your objection. The point is that whiteness in
America isn't a race at all; it's a social construction made to exclude people
that the in-group at the time didn't like, like Irish (who were not considered
white until, gradually, they were). Where does culture enter into this?

~~~
dmix
> Where does culture enter into this?

For one you cite a phenomenon that was unique to a certain time/place (the
irish).

> The point is that whiteness in America isn't a race at all; it's a social
> construction

My objection is how this misses the forest for the trees. There's a weak
correlation between some rednecks in appalachia who hate blacks and, say, the
hiring behaviour of wealthy whites in business, or the politics driven out of
middle-class America which push out ineffective criminal justice policy.

These need to be confronted on a culture-by-culture basis.

For example, just look at how so many people with honest concern about
violence in ghettos often blame it on the black race, or because of the
popularity of the former, non-racists who criticize it will get dismissed as
merely being racists. But just because they are primarily black doesn't mean
the problem is racial nor does it mean their race is entirely why they got
into that position. There are plenty of non-black ghettos with high violence
and low educations in many countries.

If you lump it all into a racial issue you will only get a huge push back as
we see here in this thread. For good reasons too, it's as reductive and
irrational as the racists or anti-semites.

You could get all social-science academia about it, but all cultures are
partially social constructs. And pretending it's only a social construction is
similarly reductive, there is more than enough resesrch on the genetic S
culture.

~~~
Blackthorn
So, this whole thread started because people were freaking out over a college
professor calling whiteness a racist concept, yes? I think we've been over how
it has been exactly that historically. So what's the issue? Are we just in
violent agreement here?

~~~
dmix
Not if you think this issue is a product of 'whiteness' as a product of a
social construct. If so you have very much misunderstood what I'm saying.

------
Overtonwindow
Perhaps we can also look at this in terms of power dynamics. It's possible
many of the students are not as devoted to their cause as it may seem.
Instead, the cause has given these students power, over administrators, and
others. That power can be intoxicating. So the students will use any
opportunity they can to exert power over others, and expand that power. I
think Evergreen is worth examining through the lens of Lord of the Flies.

~~~
dmix
The book "Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands" has a recurring theme about how this
obsession with viewing everything in the world through the lens of 'power' has
resulted in misguided, irrational, and just plain wrong thinking. Often from
otherwise smart people.

Power plays a role but it's only one of many. But reducing everything to that
is a recipe for missing the big picture.

Foucault's work is one of the great examples of this. He loved to reduce
complex systems with many competing motivations as merely the products of
power.

[https://www.amazon.com/Fools-Frauds-Firebrands-Thinkers-
Left...](https://www.amazon.com/Fools-Frauds-Firebrands-Thinkers-
Left/dp/1472935950/)

------
api
Am I the only one who sees this stuff and the thinly veiled neo-Nazi ideology
of the alt-right as two wings of the same movement?

They operate as a kind of dialectic with the antics of both sides serving to
strengthen the other. Under the hood they share the same intellectual
foundation in biological determinism, identity politics, postmodernism, and
anti-rationalism.

~~~
abiox
the 'alt-right' isn't composed wholly of white identity politics; however such
people are clearly there. their boldness has been stoked by anti-white
identity politics. between this willing visibility and an ad-dependent 24-7
news cycle hunting for eyeballs, some get the impression that this group is
much larger than it is.

------
zenkat
From
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're
evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Ideological or political battle
or talking points. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures.
If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

------
quuquuquu
>[A student] cited Christopher Hitchens’s variation of Occam’s razor: “What
can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

>[a person who helped organize the Day of Absence] observed that because
Hitchens’s razor is an “Englishman’s popularization of a Latin proverb,” it
“would seem to itself be the product of at least two traditionally
hierarchical, imperialist societies with an interest in disposing of
inconvenient questions.”

. . Wow, you really can't make this up.

Evergreen officially asked "white" students to not show up to campus one day.

Those who protested this decision were told that because their logic is of
English and Latin origin, it's racist.

~~~
meri_dian
People who can't think for themselves let the fashionable tropes of the day
think for themselves instead.

------
gaius
Evergreen is $25k/year, so while not quite as egregious as Oberlin at
$65k/year, it's enough that anyone enrolled there is highly privileged
themselves. Particularly those without a direct route to monetise their degree
such as those taking professional subjects.

~~~
BCM43
You know that loans and scholarships exist, right?

~~~
gaius
Loans still have to be repaid no? Money is money.

In the case of scholarships, that's a golden opportunity that is being
squandered - an even greater exercise of privilege.

------
zenkat
Why is this article considered suitable for Hacker News? It's political
fodder, not sci/tech.

In any case, there appears to be many overheated claims around this event,
with precious little context. This was a voluntary event, where both minority
and white students were allowed to go off-campus for discussions around
"identity politics";

[https://evergreen.edu/multicultural/day-of-absence-day-of-
pr...](https://evergreen.edu/multicultural/day-of-absence-day-of-presence)

~~~
meri_dian
>"Day of Absence is a day for community building around identity groups."

It sounds more like an event encouraging and celebrating tribalism.

~~~
zenkat
That's a valid critique of identity politics. The original article is not.

And again, I didn't think HN was a forum for debating these sorts of political
/ cultural issues in the first place. What does this have to do with science,
technology, or startups?

~~~
sremani
HN has a constant stream about current events and opinion discussed on the
front page pretty much every day. You can use the hide button if it does not
interest you.

