Everything Is White Supremacy: Inside America’s New Maoist ‘Struggle Sessions’
Posted on | February 10, 2023 | Comments Off on Everything Is White Supremacy: Inside America’s New Maoist ‘Struggle Sessions’
You’re probably looking at Vincent Lloyd and thinking, “No way this guy could be an advocate of white supremacy,” but welcome to 2023, when everything is white supremacy. Lloyd is a professor at Villanova University and a leftist who, last summer, taught a seminar called “Race and the Limits of Law” in a six-week course at Cornell University for high-school seniors sponsored by the Telluride Association.
In an amazing article for Compact magazine, “A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell,” Lloyd describes how his seminar was wrecked and ended prematurely after his teenage students became radicalized in an “anti-racism workshop” held during the same Telluride-sponsored summer program for high-schoolers. One of the leaders of the anti-racist workshop, whom Lloyd calls “Keisha,” he describes thus: “A recent graduate of an Ivy League university, mentored by a television-celebrity black intellectual, Keisha . . . was planning to devote her life to transforming the academy in the direction of black justice.”
What Lloyd discovered was that, in the hands of such ideologues, “anti-racism” is a cult, and he offers this example of its operation:
In their “transformative-justice” workshop, my students learned to name “harms.” This language, and the framework it expresses, come out of the prison-abolition movement. Instead of matching crimes with punishments, abolitionists encourage us to think about harms and how they can be made right, often through inviting a broader community to discern the impact of harms, the reasons they came about, and paths forward. In the language of the anti-racism workshop, a harm becomes anything that makes you feel not quite right. For a 17-year-old at a highly selective, all-expenses-paid summer program, newly empowered with the language of harm, there are relatively few sites at which to use this framework. My seminar became the site at which to try out—and weaponize—this language.
During our discussion of incarceration, an Asian-American student cited federal inmate demographics: About 60 percent of those incarcerated are white. The black students said they were harmed. They had learned, in one of their workshops, that objective facts are a tool of white supremacy. Outside of the seminar, I was told, the black students had to devote a great deal of time to making right the harm that was inflicted on them by hearing prison statistics that were not about blacks. A few days later, the Asian-American student was expelled from the program.
Get me that student’s name, so I can recruit him to become a Republican Party operative! There is nothing that aids GOP youth recruitment quite as much as the nightmare experience of students coming face-to-face with the campus Left. That’s how Trump advisor Stephen Miller became such a dangerous right-winger, you know. He was at Duke University when the infamous 2006 lacrosse team gang-rape hoax went down, and it forever altered his worldview. The more the Left increases its ironclad grip on academic, the crazier the campus climate becomes, and the only way to protect your sanity is to join the Republican Party.
From the account of his experiences at this Telluride summer program, Professor Lloyd may be considering a shift to the GOP. If “objective facts are a tool of white supremacy,” then every rational person must become a white supremacist. It doesn’t seem to occur to the Left that, by embracing such radical nonsense, they’re creating their own enemies.
The type of radicalism that took hold during this Telluride program bears a close resemblance to the Maoist “Cultural Revolution” of the 1960s, when those suspected of insufficient Communist zeal were forced to denounce themselves in public “struggle sessions”:
The most violent aspects of the campaign included incidents of torture, murder, and public humiliation. Many people who were indicted as counter-revolutionaries died by suicide. During the Red August 1966, in Beijing alone 1,772 people were murdered, many of the victims were teachers who were attacked and even killed by their own students. In Shanghai, there were 704 suicides and 534 deaths related to the Cultural Revolution in September. In Wuhan, there were 62 suicides and 32 murders during the same period.
Things haven’t become this bad on U.S. campuses — yet. But clearly many campuses have been drifting toward Maoism for years, and Professor Lloyd tells how the radical “Keisha” acted as Maoist commissar:
Keisha and I were supposed to meet weekly, but she told me she couldn’t schedule in advance, and she would let me know when she had availability. She never did. But Keisha did find time to intervene when a student was “harmed.” During one class, when we discussed Brown v. Board of Education, my co-instructor explained what the “doll test” was that provided a psychological basis for the Supreme Court’s decision: It involved showing children black and white dolls and asking what language they would use to describe them, “colored,” “white,” or “negro.” During the seminar break, a student had reported this to Keisha, and she rushed in to tell us that a student had been harmed by hearing the word “negro.”
Oh, grow up! The idea that merely hearing archaic terminology can “harm” someone reflects a hypersensitivity that is incompatible with education. How can you study the history of racism if you can’t read anything written before 1970 because it might contain the word “negro”?
As might be expected, Professor Lloyd’s experience at the Telluride program ended with a Maoist “struggle session” led by Keisha:
Late Sunday night, I was informed the students were too exhausted to have class on Monday. Tuesday morning, no one was in the seminar room. I waited 10 minutes, and Keisha entered. She said the students had something to say to me. Ten more minutes of waiting in silence. Then all nine remaining students entered, each carrying a piece of paper. One by one they read a paragraph. Out of their mouths came everything Keisha had said to me during the “urgent” meetings she had with me after classes when students had allegedly been harmed. The students had all of the dogma of anti-racism, but no actual racism to call out in their world, and Keisha had channeled all of the students’ desire to combat racism at me.
Bingo! A cult requires a Devil — a sinister enemy, a bogeyman that the cult can use to frighten its members into obedience. And in the absence of any “actual racism” at this Telluride program — with no Trump-style demon figure available as the hated enemy — Keisha had somehow decided that Professor Lloyd would suit her purposes.
Welcome to the “white supremacist” clubhouse, professor. We’ll alert the SPLC, so you can get your own personal dot on the annual “Hate Map.”