In 1987, Allan Bloom wrote a book about The Closing of American Mind. In it, he warned that colleges were becoming places of indoctrination rather than temples of learning, which requires the freedom to ask and answer questions, even if it might make some uncomfortable.
Thirty-three years after the book appeared, the American mind has been locked down at colleges and universities by rabid intolerance determined to replace learning with the incantation of orthodoxies few dare to question.
But one brave young woman just did. Her name is Jodi Shaw, and she works as a residential staffer at Smith College — the all-female analog of Harvard College. Smith has always been a liberal school — and Shaw is a self-described liberal herself. But she is the wrong kind of liberal for today’s intolerant liberalism.
She asks questions, and she wants answers, not only for herself but for the sake of others who aren’t brave enough to demand them. That includes her co-workers, who fear they’ll lose their jobs, or worse, if they don’t grovel enthusiastically enough before the BIPOC (the campus crazies’ acronym for “black, indigenous, and people of color”) Red Guards who have locked down Smith College, where being white, even if female, even if liberal, means you’re guilty of everything.
In a ten minute video, she methodically deconstructs the racist shibboleths of the “structural racism” racket that’s turning American higher education into reeducation.
“Stop reducing my personhood to a racial category,” she insists. She raises an important question about the motives of people who claim they oppose racism, categorizing them solely according to their race.
“Stop pretending to know who I am, and what my culture is, based on my skin color,” she says. “Stop asking me to project stereotypes and assumptions onto others based on their skin color.”
Isn’t that what liberals used to oppose?
She goes on to explain how she and other white staffers are subject to “extreme intimidation” meant to coerce genuflection before all the tenets of critical race theory, a variant of Marxism which reduces everyone to bots who act according to their skin tone, just as Marx insisted that in economics, everyone is a widget who acts according to his class.
You are condemned or praised not according to who you are but what you are, the thing over which you have no control.
In the name of combating “structural racism,” racism is to be enshrined structurally. If some blacks or indigenous people suffered because of racism, then all whites must be made to suffer racism as a collective reprisal, even if the particular whites in the crosshairs never caused anyone to suffer on account of their race.
Merit doesn’t matter when all that matters is the color of your skin, especially if it’s white skin, which is all that matters to the campus Red Guards, who don’t care about the content of anyone’s character or their individual humanity. The things liberals said they used to care about. Virtue and inherited guilt are now both functions of skin tone.
Shaw has had enough. Her sadness at having to say so is evident in her voice. She seems baffled to find herself, a lifelong liberal and alum of a liberal college, the target of an illiberalism that would make Stalin blush.
Shaw is no radical. She’s not even political. “I’m a human being,” she says. This liberal deserves the support of everyone who values liberality — the opening of closed minds and implacable opposition to those determined to close them.
A.J. Rice is CEO of Publius PR in Washington, D.C.