On June 24th, the University of Calgary leadership team\u00a0published its response\u00a0to an\u00a0open letter, dated June 9th, from hundreds of students, alumni, and faculty. The original letter had called on the university to make a series of anti-racist statements, and commit to a series of actions to address racism on campus. The specific statements and actions were helpfully catalogued in the open letter.<\/p>\n
While the university president declined to give details on his plan of action, he declared in his June 24th response that \u201cit is no longer adequate to simply not be racist, it is time to be anti-racist\u201d; and that \u201csystemic racism exists, and we allow it to live on when we fail to address it meaningfully and with urgency. There is systemic racism at UCalgary, and it is incumbent upon us to tackle this challenge with vigour and purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is all very familiar. In recent months, we have seen countless organizations re-affirm their commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), tout all the good work they have already done in these areas, while issuing a self-flagellating\u00a0mea culpa<\/em>\u00a0in regard to how much\u00a0more<\/em> learning, listening, and understanding they still have to do. This cookie-cutter executive-speak has become predictable, almost as if it were written by the same small set of well-paid communications consultants. It is just the right mix of virtue signaling and self-abasement, offered in the hope that these organizations will be temporarily spared by the mob.<\/p>\n I\u2019m from an immigrant family, and a proud faculty member at the University of Calgary, a large post-secondary institution in the province of Alberta. And I take issue with the university\u2019s response.<\/p>\n Before I expand on this, I want to give some credit where it\u2019s due: The campaign to achieve social justice, in its original form, at least, was well-intentioned. Moreover, the quality of self-reflection, and the freedom to criticize institutions from within without fear of retribution, are important components of our Enlightenment tradition. They help explain why our democratic institutions have stood the test of time. An acknowledgment of one\u2019s shortcomings can make for a humbling and worthwhile exercise, both personally and institutionally. We stress-test ourselves, and become stronger as a result.<\/p>\n But if taken to an extreme, through a relentless focus on one\u2019s faults without any sense of proportionality, one risks engaging in rituals that are merely self-destructive and performative. I worry that we are exhibiting this pattern\u2014a sort of neurotic inferiority complex on a communal scale\u2014in which we acquiesce reflexively to hyperbolic (and often false) claims to the effect that our societies are uniquely and unremittingly racist, even now, in the 21st century. These claims are especially dubious in regard to our university campuses, which contain some of our most liberal and tolerant subcultures.<\/p>\n In 2020, the principle of free expression seems to apply robustly to any critique aimed at dismantling our institutions in the name of social justice\u2014but not so much to words spoken in defence of those institutions. As a University of Calgary professor in the sciences, I am choosing to write this letter under a pseudonym because I know that the views expressed herein, while widely shared, would lead to professional reprisals. Indeed, they could even end my career if my real name were used. My colleagues have the same fear about speaking out. If the mob came after us for expressing these common-sense ideas about campus life, I doubt the university would protect us.<\/p>\n Simply put: The University of Calgary is not systemically racist. And administrators likely know this, too, even if they are required to say the opposite. Yes, there are repugnant racists in our society\u2014including, no doubt, on my university campus. But despite the frequent claims of widespread and virulent systemic racism, the most outspoken organizations never seem to provide any evidence other than disparities in outcomes (which, if taken at face value, suggest that whites are being oppressed by Asians). The causal relationship between bigotry and performance disparities is simply assumed.\u00a0<\/em>Despite my best efforts, I haven\u2019t found a single racist or discriminatory university rule or policy on my campus. If anything, what I have seen is an institution, like others, desperately trying to absolve itself of the supposed original sin of whiteness\u2014as well as maleness, settler colonialism, cis-heteronormativity, and all the rest.<\/p>\n I have seen efforts to hire new faculty fail because the dean deemed the applicant pool insufficiently diverse. I have seen discussions quashed when faculty members questioned the affirmative-action requirements imposed by government research granting agencies. Emails asking for details regarding an\u00a0across-the-board salary increase for all female faculty members<\/a>\u00a0fell on deaf ears. We have entrance scholarships for \u201cDiversity Champions<\/a>\u201d to encourage women, minorities, and activists to join our programs. We have prestigious chairs in \u201cindigenous ways of knowing\u201d in certain sciences\u2014which everyone involved knows to be a fundamentally unscientific endeavor, even if we all have to pretend otherwise.<\/p>\n Of note, we have created a position for a\u00a0Vice-Provost for Equity and Diversity, an enviable position, which, I am informed, comes with a six-figure salary (well above that of your average professor). The hire was announced in early 2020, just as my public university was emptying amid the pandemic. The announcement also came amidst severe austerity measures in the province of Alberta, including layoffs. How many student-facing positions\u2014lab technicians, for instance, who provide real, measurable benefits\u2014could have been spared if we weren\u2019t throwing money at newly-created equity and diversity bureaucracies?<\/p>\n The new vice-provost, who is empowered to speak on the university\u2019s behalf,\u00a0recently hosted a talk<\/a>\u00a0entitled \u201cThe racist violence of \u2018not racism\u2019 and the role of \u2018contrarian\u2019 academics<\/a>,\u201d in which bizarre assertions were made to the effect that we all inhabit an apparently irredeemable state of racism. A video excerpt appears immediately below (and a second in the same series appears several paragraphs down).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Here is a text excerpt of the sort of material that was presented, all under the ironic banner of \u201cCourageous Conversations\u201d\u2014with no one uttering a peep of protest:<\/p>\n It\u2019s not only public figures like Trump and so on, who constantly deny that they are being racist and claim to be non- or even anti-racist, but ordinary people also, perhaps your friends and your family constantly repeat how \u201cthat wasn\u2019t racist\u201d or \u201cI\u2019m not racist.\u201d But I\u2019m suggesting that beyond this well-known denial of racism, what is particular to what I\u2019m calling \u201cnot racism\u201d is that it contains a definition of racism, which is constructed negatively through opposition. This definition is characterized by the fact that it denies racialized people\u2019s subjective understanding of what racism is and negates this experience. In this way, \u201cnot racism\u201d is what I call a form of discursive racist violence\u2026 \u201cNot racism\u201d as a redefinition of racism lends itself to a positivist approach to social science, one that historically has been bound up epistemologically with the idea of race. So \u201cnot racism,\u201d I hope to encourage you, is also epistemically racist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This moment is driven by emotion and social panic, not facts. Just read the university\u2019s response letter cited in the first paragraph: The president is simply mumbling whatever pre-set phrases he thinks will be greeted with approval from the same sort of people who spend their days lecturing us about racism (and the even worse sin of \u201cnot racism\u201d). What\u2019s worse, anyone who points out the nonsensical and performative aspects of these presidential letters will be gaslit for his troubles\u2014this, in a supposed citadel of logic and learning. Since Critical Race Theory and its myriad offshoots are based on the claim that racism is like an invisible gas that surrounds us\u2014all the more pernicious for it being undetectable to all but expert anti-racists\u2014its precepts are unfalsifiable. Amazingly, this is happening at a university whose scholars purport to honor the scientific method.<\/p>\n I have my own question for the University of Calgary executive leadership, though I have little expectation of seeing a public response: What actions will you take to create a\u00a0truly<\/em> inclusive, equitable environment\u2014one that honors diversity of opinion, and in which students, staff, and academics are no longer terrified of speaking and debating lest they accidentally speak their real thoughts? (In the alternative: If you are so truly convinced that you preside over a fundamentally racist campus, then why do you still have your jobs? Shouldn\u2019t the most obvious way to root out all of this racism be to fire the people who put up with it in the first place?)<\/p>\n In the end, it comes down to careerism. The president\u2019s apparent strategy is simply to string nonsense words together, day by day, week by week, in hopes that he\u2019ll say enough of them, in the correct order, such that the mob moves on.\u00a0V\u00e1clav Havel\u00a0once described the story of a greengrocer coerced into placing the slogan \u201cWorkers of the world, unite!\u201d in his window. On its surface, this message has the appearance of being benign, allowing the greengrocer to say, \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?\u201d It masks his degradation, the system of forced obedience. Similarly, many will ask \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong with being anti-racist?\u201d I ask you to look past the slogans, and examine the fact that we are all forced to utter them.<\/p>\n AmNews\/News Agencies.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On June 24th, the University of Calgary leadership team\u00a0published its response\u00a0to an\u00a0open letter, dated June 9th, from hundreds of students, alumni, and faculty. The original letter had called on the university to make a series of anti-racist statements, and commit to a series of actions to address racism on campus. The specific statements and actions<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":505,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"twitter_1160854738579181570_1160854738579181570":"","facebook_3558452337540614_100649324928663":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,15,23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-504","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-general-news","8":"category-education","9":"category-world-news"},"yoast_head":"\n