Several months ago the president of Loyola University
Maryland, Brian Linnane, announced to the faculty that he had been thinking a
lot about the Baltimore riots that took place two years earlier. (The
riots, you may recall, were a response to the death of a local black drug
gangster while in a police van after he had been arrested. All of the
police involved, most of whom were black, were eventually acquitted at
trial. The rioters looted the CVS pharmacies in town, emptying them of
oxycodone and other painkillers, then burned them to the ground along with
police cars, private homes, and public buildings. The former mayor of
Baltimore publicly referred to the rioters as “our children” and instructed
the police to stand down and “give them their space” to loot, vandalize, and
burn down parts of her city).
In response to all of this the college president decided
that what is needed to reduce the likelihood of such events in the future is
to put the affluent, mostly white, Loyola University Maryland faculty through
a round of cultural Marxist “racial justice” training. Such language
reminded me of Chinese and Vietnamese communist “re-indoctrination camps”
where attendees were pressured/coerced into becoming good little obedient
communists. So, naturally, I had to attend to see what it was all
about.
What I learned is that all the problems of the
65 percent black population in Baltimore city (one of the highest murder
rates in the world, poverty, horrible government schools, criminal gangs
randomly attacking tourists at the Inner Harbor, street crime run amok,
“no-go zones” where even the police won’t go for fear of being shot at, etc.)
are caused by “white privilege.” The lowliest, indigent, white redneck
who lives in a rusted-out old school bus down by the river in Tennessee is
“privileged,” by definition, whereas the children of multimillionaire Barack
Obama or multimillionaire Tiger Woods are not privileged. In
fact, since they are black they are, by definition, “oppressed” by the white
redneck who lives in the rusted-out old school bus down by the river.
A close second in terms of the causes of Baltimore’s
problems, I learned, was the bigotry of white men who died fifty years ago or
longer. We were shown parts of a video documentary about “the history
of racism” up to the 1950s and were told that little or no progress has been
made in Baltimore’s black community because of this permanently-debilitating
history. This is why “things never seem to change in the city,” I was
told by one of the presenters. No mention was made of the fact that,
just a few miles down the road in Columbia, Maryland one will find some of
the most affluent black professionals in the world who share this same
history. What they don’t share is being ruled by the extreme
leftist Baltimore city government for the past half century with their
corrupt police and courts that refuse to imprison violent criminals, their
extortionate taxes, lavish welfare handouts, and a completely dysfunctional
school system ruined by teachers’ unions.
I also learned that only white people can be racists or
commit racist acts. This is because the cultural Marxists have
redefined racism to mean an act of discrimination plus “power,” and
only white heterosexual males can wield this “power.” Several of my
faculty colleagues sheepishly questioned this obviously bogus idea, based on
their life experiences, but got no response from the presenters.
I asked the presenters the following hypothetical:
If the Congressional Black Caucus got a law passed that funded “minority
scholarships” for black students and advertised that white people need not
apply (we do have such programs), would that be
discriminatory? I did not get a yes or no answer, but another mini
lecture about white privilege.
Of course, only a moron would believe that only white
people can be racists. All the “racial justice” presenters would have
to do to learn this would be to listen to some of the harsh racist language
on several of the black-owned radio stations in Maryland. That does not
fit with the virtual reality they have invented for themselves, so there is
no chance of that happening.
Although the supposed purpose of all of this was to
address the root causes of the problems of crime, poverty, and lack of
education that plague Baltimore, the work ethic-destroying and
family-destroying effects of the welfare state were studiously ignored and
not mentioned at all as possible problems. Nor was the awful, corrupt,
teachers’ union-controlled government school monopoly, the extortionate
property taxes that have driven tens of thousands from the city, the squalor
and crime in the government housing projects, all the crime caused by the
government’s war on drugs, and myriad other government policies and
interventions that have been shown by social scientists for decades to be the
real causes of “urban decay” (See Losing Ground by Charles Murray).
In fact, the seminar ended with a power point
presentation that recommended that what “people of color” really need is
“more resources,” which is the usual leftist code language for more welfare,
more money down the rat hole of the government school monopoly, more taxes,
and more bureaucracy. This is always espoused as though it is a
brand new idea that has never been tried before. This of course is the
point of white privilege seminars – to censor out all discussion of how “the
legacy of liberalism and interventionism” is the real problem with cities
like Baltimore, not the legacy of slavery and discrimination.
On the same day as the racial justice seminar the front
page of the Baltimore Sun and the chatter on local talk radio
included a discussion of how, on Halloween night, a gang of inner-city
“youth” armed with baseball bats and wooden planks went around the city
bludgeoning people and stealing their wallets and cellphones. This was
two weeks after a family of ten tourists from New Jersey was attacked at the
Inner Harbor by a gang of “youths” who punched every one of them in the face,
including the 80-year-old grandmother, knocked them to the ground, kicked
them, robbed them, and then disappeared. Now that I have been
re-educated I understand that this was merely the latest manifestation of
white privilege in Baltimore.
