Colleges are a fertile breeding ground for all sorts of folderol, and flagship state universities especially so.
At UNC-Chapel Hill, for example, students can become certified Diversity Advocates. This is just one of the many activities of the Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs. Although Chapel Hill is and for decades has been the very model of a modern, diverse university, this office needs to look busy. After all, if your mission is to “build and sustain an inclusive campus community that values and respects all members of the University community” in a school that’s already as hospitable to “diversity” as Las Vegas is to gamblers, you have to work hard at appearing to be useful.
Any UNC student who wants to show that he or she is a true believer in the cause can, with minimal intellectual effort, obtain a Diversity Advocate Certificate. Here are the requirements:
• Attend Diversity 101 Training
• Attend four other “diversity events” on campus
• Write a 250-word statement about your experiences of diversity, or how you promoted diversity, or what you learned from the events.
• Apply for the certificate within two years of attending the events.
Just what is “diversity training?” Since virtually no American has grown up in a community so homogeneous and isolated that he has had no experiences with diversity, just what does anyone need to be “trained” to do?
The answer: trained to accept the precepts of the diversity crusade. That crusade thrives on the addled notion that the United States is a deeply unjust society that can be redeemed only through a massive transformation. Diversity training means getting students to believe in such ideas as “white privilege” and that people of color constitute an “oppressed class.”
A reading for an upcoming “Diversity 201” session on March 25 is illustrative of the nature of the material that participating students are expected to ingest. It’s a chapter from a book by Allan G. Johnson entitled Privilege, Power, and Difference, published by McGraw-Hill.
Johnson, who received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, insists that readers discard what he regards as the false mode of thinking individualistically. Johnson tells us, “If we use individualism to explain sexism, for example, it’s hard to avoid the idea that sexism exists simply because men are sexist—men have sexist feelings, beliefs, needs, and motivations that lead them to behave in sexist ways….It also encourages men who don’t think or behave in overtly sexist ways—the ones most likely to become part of the solution—to conclude that sexism has nothing to do with them, that it’s just a problem for ‘bad’ men.”
The idea that when bad things happen (such as violence against women), it’s because an individual has chosen to do that bad thing is common sense, but Johnson proceeds to (at least in his own mind) refute it. ”Individualistic thinking,” he writes, “makes us blind to the very existence of privilege, because privilege, by definition, has nothing to do with individuals, only with social categories we wind up in.” In case the reader still doesn’t get it, Johnson states, “Breaking the paralysis begins with realizing that the individualistic model is wrong, that the social world consists of a lot more than individuals.”
So, if you are a man who never employs violence against women and treats them with perfectly fairness and equality, nevertheless, you’re part of the problem! The problem is one of “male privilege” that, Johnson alleges, is part of our social structure. It isn’t enough for the great majority of men who behave with perfect rectitude toward women to favor (and perhaps even participate in) the arrest, conviction, and imprisonment of other men who commit violence against women; they are expected to do something to help overturn the unjust social structure Johnson claims to exist.
Maybe catching a unicorn would help.
Johnson never considers the possibility that “male privilege” is simply a figment of his imagination. Men who commit violence (whether against women or other men) are hunted down just as relentlessly as are other criminals. The legal code recognizes no “privilege” for men to misbehave and one of the surest ways for a man in almost any social setting to make himself an outcast is to say that he treats women badly. This “all men are responsible” idea is reminiscent of the line that “All of America is responsible for the assassination of JFK” back in the 1960s. That was nonsense and so is this.
Wait—Johnson has evidence to present for his idea. He mentions the TV sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, where the title character, Ray, routinely did things toward his wife that were, in Johnson’s words “insensitive, sexist, adolescent, and downright stupid.” (Since I have seen many episodes of the show, I can say that that’s largely correct: most of the plots revolved around Ray’s goofy antics.) So what? Johnson delivers the point we’re expected to absorb: “This sends the message that it’s reasonable for a heterosexual man to expect to ‘have’ an intelligent and beautiful woman who will love him and stay with him in spite of his behaving badly….”
Whether or not the show’s writers meant to send such a message, what person living in the real world would believe it? The number of men who would conclude from watching Raymond that they’re entitled to an attractive woman who puts up with him no matter what he does must be in single digits, if not zero.
And even if some guy were so stupid, reality would quickly disabuse him of the notion that he is somehow “privileged.”
Johnson goes on and on, wringing his hands over “privilege” and its counterpart, “oppression” when even a cursory look at the United States as it actually is would make it plain that those ideas are groundless. We are nothing like, oh, Imperial Russia, where the aristocracy truly was privileged and the serfs really were oppressed. (Under communism, neither privilege nor oppression ended, although the individuals in each class were different.) Whites and men can and do fail and end up broke. Or in prison. Women and people of all races and nationalities can and do succeed. Even elected president.
Although it doesn’t appear that he has any experience with the world of business, Johnson asserts that “managers feel drawn to employees who resemble them, which usually means those who are white, straight, male, and nondisabled.” Rubbish. Managers overwhelmingly reward and promote those employees who do good work, which makes the managers look good. Behaving in a tribal or clannish way, as Johnson imagines they do, would be irrational and self-destructive.
Getting people to mindlessly accept ideas like Johnson’s is essential to the survival of what might be called the Manufactured Grievance Industry (MGI). Considerable sums of money are made in this business. Books like Privilege, Power and Difference get published and sold; innumerable seminars and workshops are held every year; diversity consultants and more than a few college professors get their paychecks—all because lots of people are mesmerized by the claim that it’s not our individual behavior that matters, but supposed inequalities among social groups.
UNC students who get their Diversity Advocate Certificates might help to keep MGI going. Some, however, will probably realize once they’ve gotten away from academia and into the real world that they wasted their time on a hoax.