Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Microaggression, Macro-Crazy
Townhall.com ^ | July 17, 2015 | Heather Mac Donald

Posted on 07/17/2015 7:26:59 AM PDT by Kaslin

Early this year, the University of California’s president, Janet Napolitano, asked all deans and department chairs in the university’s ten campuses to undergo training in overcoming their “implicit biases” toward women and minorities. The department heads also needed training, according to the UC president, in how to avoid committing microaggressions, those acts of alleged racism that are invisible to the naked eye. A more insulting and mindless exercise would be hard to imagine. But Napolitano’s seminar possesses a larger significance: it demolishes any remaining hope that college administrators possess a firmer grip on reality than the narcissistic students over whom they preside.

The “Fostering Inclusive Excellence: Strategies and Tools for Department Chairs and Deans” seminar presumes that University of California faculty are so bigoted that they will refuse to hire the most qualified candidate for a professorship if that candidate happens to be female or an “underrepresented minority”—i.e., black or Hispanic. Attendees at the seminar were subjected to an “interactive theater scenario” called “Ready to Vote?” that showed white male computer-science professors on a fictional hiring committee belittling females and failing to “value diversity.” The author of the scenario, a professor of performance studies and ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego, seems never to have attended a faculty-hiring committee meeting in her life. Nor, it would seem, has Janet Napolitano. How otherwise could they not know that every faculty search in the sciences, far from shunning females and URMs, is a desperate exercise in tracking down even remotely qualified female and non-Asian minority candidates who haven’t already been snapped up by more well-endowed competitors? Females in the sciences are hired and promoted nationwide at rates far above their representation in applicant pools. (Too few URM science Ph.D.s exist to have inspired many reliable studies analyzing their hiring chances.)

The “Fostering Inclusive Excellence” seminar supplemented the patent fictions in “Ready to Vote?” with an equally specious handout, “Identifying Implicit Bias,” which claims that females and URMs are required to meet higher academic standards than white males and that their work is scrutinized more closely by hiring committees. This conceit was preposterous 30 years ago when it first became widespread and is even more so today. True, there is a double standard in hiring, but it redounds to the benefit of females and URMs, as anyone with the remotest exposure to academic culture should know. An entire subspecialty of diversity agitation argues that nontraditional forms of scholarship, such as personal memoirs or the collective editing of anthologies, should be viewed as equivalent to publications in peer-reviewed journals during tenure evaluations, when URMs and females are performing those activities. The advocacy for nontraditional credentials for “diverse” candidates has largely succeeded, especially in the social sciences and humanities.

To voice these realities, however, is to commit a microaggression, according to University of California diversity enforcers. Another handout inflicted on “Fostering Inclusive Excellence” attendees presents a long list of microaggressions, categorized by “Theme” and “Message.” The “Myth of Meritocracy” “theme” includes such statements as: “Of course he’ll get tenure, even though he hasn’t published much—he’s Black!” The “message” conveyed by this particular microaggression, according to UC’s “Recognizing Microaggressions Tool,” is that “people of color are given extra unfair benefits because of their race.” Now where would anyone get that idea? Well, you might ask any high school senior, steeped in his class’s SAT rankings, if it’s true that “people of color” are given “extra benefits” in college admissions. He will laugh at your naïveté. A 2004 study of three top-tier universities, published in Social Science Quarterly, found that blacks were favored over whites by a factor of 5.5 and that being black got students an extra 230 SAT points on a 1,600-point scale. Such massive preferences for URMs are found at every selective college and graduate school. Every student knows this, and yet diversity protocol requires pretending that preferences don’t exist. The race (and gender) advantage continues into the academic workplace, as everyone who has sat on a hiring committee also knows. But President Napolitano is determined to brand anyone who violates that collective fiction as a closet racist, someone who targets “persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership,” in the words of the “Microaggressions Tool.”

Other alleged microaggressions include uttering such hurtful words as “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” or “America is the land of opportunity” on a UC campus. Someone who has been through the “Fostering Inclusive Excellence” seminar may call you out for giving voice to such ideas. Why exactly saying that the most qualified person should get the job is a microaggression is a puzzle. Either such a statement is regarded simply as code for alleged antiblack sentiment, or the diversocrats are secretly aware that meritocracy is incompatible with “diversity.”

Equally “hostile” and “derogatory,” according to the “Tool,” is the phrase “Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough.” Such a statement is obviously an insult to all those career victims whose primary occupation is proclaiming their own helplessness and inability to accomplish anything without government assistance.

Many purported microaggressions arise from the contradictions in diversity ideology. Authorities in a diversity regime are supposed to categorize people by race and ethnicity—until that unpredictable moment when they are not supposed to. Assigning a black graduate student to escort a black visiting professor, for example, is a microaggression, per the “Tool.” But wasn’t the alleged need for role models and a critical mass of “persons of color” a key justification for “diversity”? Describing a colleague as a “good Black scientist” is another microaggression. But such a categorization merely reflects the race-consciousness and bean-counting that the campus diversity enforcers insist upon.

Color-blindness constitutes an entire microaggression “Theme” in the “Tool,” pace Martin Luther King, Jr. Beware of saying, “When I look at you, I don’t see color” or “There is only one race, the human race.” Doing so, according to the “Tool,” denies “the individual as a racial/cultural being.” Never mind that diversity ideologues reject the genetic basis of racial categories and proclaim that race is merely a “social construct.” The non-diverse world is under orders both to deny that race exists and to “acknowledge race,” in Tool-parlance, regarding Persons of Color.

Other microaggressions provide a glimpse into the future. It may seem like a stretch today to label as a microaggression “being forced to choose Male or Female when completing basic forms,” but it won’t remain a stretch for long. The movement to discredit binary, biological sex distinctions is accelerating weekly; expect more institutions to accede to the demand to allow their members to choose from an array of “gender” possibilities and combinations or face protest.

Though participation in “Fostering Inclusive Excellence” was, in theory, voluntary, Napolitano had informed the deans and chairs that she would be briefed on attendance and the “tenor of the conversations.” Her office would not disclose the turnout for the seminars. It would be a good barometer for whether the faculty possesses any remaining spine.

The ultimate question raised by the seminar is: Are there any adults left on campus, at least in administrative offices? And the answer is: no. An adult administrator would realize that he is presiding over the most tolerant, well-meaning, and opportunity-filled community in human history. He would understand that the claim that females and minorities are the victims of discrimination on campuses is sheer fiction. He would know that teaching students to go around ferreting out imaginary slights does them a disservice.

Maybe that administrator is so cowardly that, while he knows these things, he is not willing to assert them in the face of student agitation for more victim infrastructure. Such cowardice is deeply unfortunate. But at least it holds out the possibility for some return to sanity at a later date. The most disturbing aspect of “Fostering Inclusive Excellence” is that it was initiated by the president’s office without outside provocation. Had Napolitano not come up with these antibias trainings, no one would have noticed their absence. Instead, she has sua sponte promulgated an initiative deeply ignorant about how seriously most professors—at least in the sciences—take their responsibilities to build up a faculty of accomplishment and research prowess. We have come to expect such ignorance from coddled, self-engrossed students. Now it turns out that those students may be the least of the university’s problems.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; US: California
KEYWORDS: collegesandunis; highereducation; hypersensitivity; janetnapolitano; race; uc

1 posted on 07/17/2015 7:26:59 AM PDT by Kaslin
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

I’d tell ‘em to go F themselves just to watch them burst into tears and call for their mommies.


2 posted on 07/17/2015 7:30:34 AM PDT by Noumenon (Resistance. Restoration. Retribution.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

Liberals don’t need to overcome ‘microaggressions’ - they need to overcome the full blown out-and-out hate that causes them to deny soldiers the right to defend themselves...


3 posted on 07/17/2015 7:31:11 AM PDT by GOPJ (Kerry paid billions for a machine-made Persian rug worth eight hundred dollars.That's the Iran deal.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: GOPJ

You said it


4 posted on 07/17/2015 7:32:33 AM PDT by Kaslin (He needed the ignorant to reelect him, and he got them. Now we all have to pay the consequenses)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

Liberals don’t need to overcome ‘microaggressions’ - they need to overcome the full blown out-and-out hate that causes them to deny soldiers the right to defend themselves...

Causing innocents to be murdered is a worse crime than spitting on a dyke... hard as that is for liberals to believe.

Even using the term ‘dyke’ is ‘nothing’ - absolutely nothing - compared to disarming our soldiers on US soil.


5 posted on 07/17/2015 7:32:59 AM PDT by GOPJ (Kerry paid billions for a machine-made Persian rug worth eight hundred dollars.That's the Iran deal.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin
Though participation in “Fostering Inclusive Excellence” was, in theory, voluntary, Napolitano had informed the deans and chairs that she would be briefed on attendance and the “tenor of the conversations.”

Doesn't this kind of Stalanistic behavior bother those working for Napolitano?

Is no one will to stand up and say "You are out of control."

6 posted on 07/17/2015 7:35:12 AM PDT by BenLurkin (The above is not a statement of fact. It is either satire or opinion. Or both.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

Just smile and nod, say nothing and walk away.

Works very well.


7 posted on 07/17/2015 7:37:40 AM PDT by OpusatFR
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: OpusatFR

Always does


8 posted on 07/17/2015 7:41:59 AM PDT by Kaslin (He needed the ignorant to reelect him, and he got them. Now we all have to pay the consequenses)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 7 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

When are the blacks and the rest of the liberals going to undergo “sensitivity training” to make themselves tolerant towards whites and other conservatives?

The stinkin’ liberals are the most intolerant idiots any of us will ever come across.

The white deans and department heads should tell Jan the bull dyke to take her sensitivity training and stick it up her ample fat butt.


9 posted on 07/17/2015 7:43:22 AM PDT by july4thfreedomfoundation (Liberals are like the Taliban and ISIS....destroying cultural icons they don't like.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin
“Fostering Inclusive Excellence: Strategies and Tools for Department Chairs and Deans”

Too long, no catch acronym: FIESTDCD

How about: Inclusive Departments Increasing Objective Training for Students.

Now that has a nice ring to it.

10 posted on 07/17/2015 8:09:47 AM PDT by Michael.SF. (This tagline lists all of Hilary's accomplishments............................)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

Perhaps people ar developing biases against womyn and minorities because they are constantly being asked to treat then like fragile porcelain statues and walk on egg shells around them


11 posted on 07/17/2015 8:44:17 AM PDT by dsrtsage (One half of all people have below average IQ. In the US the number is 54%)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 10 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

Bookmark


12 posted on 07/17/2015 8:52:43 AM PDT by aquila48
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin
DAILY MAIL Aug. 10, 2012:

Big Sis Janet Napolitano ‘promoted woman with whom she had a ‘long relationship’ while her female staff tormented male colleagues with ‘sexually charged games’’

Homeland Security boss Janet Napolitano is facing a mega lawsuit from an official who claims she gave a less-qualified woman with whom she has a ‘long-standing relationship’ a job over him.

The suit also accuses Napolitano of turning the department into a female-run ‘frat house’ where male staffers were routinely humiliated and on the receiving end of ‘sexually charged games’.

Napolitano’s chief of staff Suzanne Barr repeatedly targeted men because of their gender and once called a male employee's hotel room to use sexually explicit language, the suit claims.

James T. Hayes Jr., a special agent in charge of New York City investigations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, filed the lawsuit in Washington, the New York Post reported.

He claims Napolitano favoured Dora Schriro, who had worked as director of the Arizona Department of Corrections when Napolitano was governor of the state, for a job due to their relationship.

Hayes first worked as a border patrol agent in 1995 and then served as director of ICE Detention and Removal Operations in Washington, DC, but was demoted after Napolitano’s appointment, he claims.

In February 2009, she appointed Schriro as a ‘special adviser’ and began pushing him out of meetings, the lawsuit says.

It has long been rumoured that ‘Big Sis’ Napolitano is a lesbian, but in 2002 she publicly denied the claims.

Schriro is a widow; she was married for just 10 months in 1991 before her husband, St Louis's director of public safety Gay Carraway, died of cancer. He was 20 years her senior. . .

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2186507/Janet-Napolitano-favoured-woman-long-relationship-job.html

13 posted on 07/17/2015 10:57:24 AM PDT by Brad from Tennessee (A politician can't give you anything he hasn't first stolen from you.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

14 posted on 07/17/2015 11:33:57 AM PDT by SWAMPSNIPER (The Second Amendment, a Matter of Fact, Not A Matter of Opinion)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Michael.SF.

*slow-clap*


15 posted on 07/17/2015 2:15:17 PM PDT by Slings and Arrows (My music: http://hopalongginsberg.com/ | Facebook: Hopalong Ginsberg | Instagram: hopalonginsberg)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 10 | View Replies]

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson