Ancients might sacrifice animals or even people to prove their “goodness.” Muslims today may beat themselves bloody during Ashura. Modern secular academics may do it differently:
They sacrifice Truth while bloodying our history and human relations with divisive confessions of “white privilege” and racial guilt.
Enter Crystal Duncan Lane, Ph.D., a professor who teaches in Virginia Tech University’s Department of Human Development and Family Science. Lane has been pushing students to tackle “racism” and “inherent bias.” She also issued an über-woke mea culpa in her Human Development 1134 syllabus in which she apologized to “students of color” for her whiteness and sex normalcy and stated that her privileged life is an “injustice” she didn’t ask for.
Whether or not she’s planning to give her high-paying position to a non-white person, which many would say is the next logical step, was not reported.
Lane’s apology appeared in a “Who I Am” section in her syllabus. It reads in full:
I am a Caucasian cisgender female and first-generation college student from Appalachia who is of Scottish, British, and Norwegian heritage.
I am married to a cisgender male, and we are middle class.
While I did not ‘ask’ for the many privileges in my life: I have benefitted from them and will continue to benefit from them whether I like it or not.
This is injustice. I am and will continue to work on a daily basis to be antiracist and confront the innate racism within myself that is the reality and history of white people.
I want to be better: Every day. I will transform: Every day. This work terrifies me: Every day.
I invite my white students to join me on this journey.
And to my students of color: I apologize for the inexcusable horrors within our shared history.
One could first note that Lane hails from what’s home to some of America’s poorest people — Appalachia — virtually all of whom are white. But according to the Critical Race Theory she apparently espouses, they’d still be “privileged” by virtue of their skin color. Now, what is it called, again (it escapes me), when you pigeonhole every member of a group based solely on race?
Furthermore, if there can be collective guilt, there can also be collective credit. As to this, “inexcusable horrors” aren’t unique in man’s history; they’re the norm. Truly anomalous are the luxuries, comforts, safety, rights, and privileges Western Civilization offers all its citizens (and even non-citizens). Would Lane credit white people for these triumphs just as she condemns them for the sins the West led the world in eliminating (e.g., slavery)?
Of course, this truth would create even more waves than anti-white lies. This said, some students did take issue with Lane’s not staying in her lane. “It is a class about disabilities, not political opinion, affiliation, nor judgment in any sort,” Virginia Tech student Natalie Rhodes told Campus Reform. “If you are discussing disabilities, stick to your course.”
Campus Reformalso spoke with another student, who requested anonymity. “It hurts that someone says I was born with ‘innate racism’ because of my skin color,” the individual told the site. “[It] makes me feel like I should hide and worry about everything I say.”
Interestingly, these students apparently aren’t the only ones uncomfortable with Lane’s woke flagellation. After all, while Campus Reform had linked to the professor’s apology at the Virginia Tech website, that page has now gone “poof!” It currently reads, “Oh no, you’ve found 404 Error page! Sorry, but the page you are looking for doesn’t seem to exist.”
Actually, the real error was what that page displayed before it was scrubbed (and the current error is preferable).
Speaking of errors, one lamentable aspect of this woke racialism is how pathetically unintellectual it is. Lane knows and uses politically correct terminology such as “cisgender” — i.e., “denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex.”
That is to say, a normal person.
Yet this and the racial theories in question were, speaking loosely, originated just last Thursday. It’s reminiscent of philosopher G.K. Chesterton’s 1910 observation that “in a school to-day the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of four actually has more experience, and has weathered the world longer, than the dogma to which he is made to submit.”
This applies double for college students, and the academic dogma now, 111 years later, is even more juvenile. It’s what happens when people are detached from the eternal, Truth. They’re left with the ephemeral: tastes — of the times.
Harking back to my opening line, however, this is also what happens when people seek justification in all the wrong places: They value signal what are actually vices.
Note that Lane wrote, “I want to be better: Every day.” It’s a noble sentiment. A God-centered person, however, will use Truth as his yardstick for goodness and measuring self-improvement. He may know that becoming “better” means growing in holiness and that this is not some nebulous concept; it means applying the (actual) virtues. It’s also a matter of purging personal sin — not collective sin.
Yet as a rule, the woke guilt peddlers aren’t confessing their own sins, not the least of which is teaching young students lies, but those of the wider “society” and people long dead who aren’t around to defend themselves. Then they say that despite this, they’ll “take one for the team,” issuing a mea culpa that’s too often vanity masquerading as confession. “Look at me! I’m so noble that I’ll make amends for sins I didn’t even commit!” they say, even as they refuse to give up their pocketbook, position, prestige, and power in reparation’s name.
Speaking of sacrifice, a good theologian might understand that a person should relinquish ego (pride is the father of all sin) and “die to himself.” But the woke racialists’ penance is only a sacrifice of our history, traditions, and institutions as they bloodily slaughter all that is great and good on the altar of self-aggrandizement.
Even the best among them are only involved in a superficially sincere, but intellectually dishonest, effort at self-image enhancement. Yet they’re only avoiding the Truth: The darkness they need to confront lies not in our history, but in their own hearts.
