Brainwashing whites

Issues & Views – The Website is chockful of reports on and praise for the work of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Founded in 1999 by civil liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate and Alan Charles Kors, a professor of history, this organization was the first to focus specifically on defending the constitutional rights of students and faculty at American colleges and universities.

For many people, FIRE's revelations about a dark side of campus life, was their introduction to the mad world of brainwashing that is the American college system. Academic course work no longer suffices as the primary function of academic institutions. For years now, mandatory “re-education” sessions, designed to divest the student participants of their own beliefs and convictions, have become ritual.

Make no mistake about it, although these workshops, orientation sessions and “sensitivity training” include participants from all races and backgrounds, this elaborate attempt at reprogramming individuals was contrived primarily to recalibrate whites, most especially young whites.

It was not long before this reprogramming began to filter down into the lower grades of high school and earlier. Soon it spilled over from the campus and class room into the work force, as businesses, under pressure from multicultural enforcers, strove to obey the demands of these now powerful social engineers, in order to avoid entanglements in “race” troubles. And so a new industry was born – one made up of phony race “experts,” “consultants,” and “diversity facilitators.” Companies learned that if they paid the right price now, they could fend off possible trouble later.

In his article, "Thought Reform 101," Professor Kors cites a “multicultural educator,” who quite candidly professed, “White students need help to understand what it means to be white in a multicultural community. For the white heterosexual male who feels disconnected and marginalized by multiculturalism, we've got to do a lot of work here.”

So, young whites were given that “help” through such diversity vehicles as “Blue Eyed,” a so-called racism awareness workshop in which, says Kors, whites were “abused, ridiculed, made to fail, and taught helpless passivity.” Passivity is the operative word here. Turning whites into passive, fearful fraidy cats, uncertain of how to safely navigate the turbulent racial waters in their own country, is essential to the multiculturalist agenda.

With their fixed notions of how whites perceive the world, the stated goal of these social crusaders is to alter the values and attitudes of these young people. Using diversity orientations to probe into the most private experiences and thoughts of students, the aim is to convince the white to remold his inner life, until it is consistent with the multicultural vision. This is Thought Reform at its crudest – an attempt at mind cleansing under the guise of achieving “social justice” for society's underdogs.

Even without the heavy-handed indoctrination cited above, the white youth learns what is expected of him before he ever sets foot in school. He is taught the rules from the minute his young eyes view a TV screen and when his ears are subjected to the socially trendy platitudes of the day. The real propaganda starts long before kindergarten, but once he enters the school system, there is never any let up in the indoctrination. The impressionable child begins to learn early on the importance of becoming a “good white person” in the multicultural sense of goodness.

Sometimes, the comic nature of this movement makes one's head spin. Last year, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for instance, Kent County high school students began a “diversity and cultural sensitivity” program featuring workshops in “healing racism.” As reported in the Grand Rapids Press, conductors of these sessions were the Center for Ecumenism Racial Justice Institute, the Woodrick Diversity Training Center, and the Grace Racial Justice Institute. That so many organizations were involved demonstrates the lucrative industry that has been spawned around this profitable sham.

In a stunning example of double talk, or Newspeak, Rev. David May, a “trainer,” claimed that, while some kids might be practicing racism “unaware,” other kids might be victims of said racism and not even know it. Hence, the need to assist these youths to see the offenses that exist, even though unperceived by the youngsters themselves. Imagine these kids, getting on with their daily lives, not feeling in any way offended by the behavior of their school chums – and along come the “Diversity” folk, bringing their special brand of enlightenment.

Not surprisingly, Rev. May clarified, for anyone who didn't know it, just who were the targets of all this attention. It happened to be those “suburban kids,” he said, who must be brought to understand what they have “in common” with the ethnics.

This decades-long inundation of propaganda by the social engineers has proven wildly successful. Coupled with the almost total acceptance of pernicious feminist ideology, which has taken its toll on the male character, and helped along by the writings of authors like Shelby Steele, whose treatises on white shame and guilt have permeated academia, it is not surprising that so many whites spend a good part of their day striving to prove their “purity of heart.”

Although Steele's books have won acclaim for his premise that whites should not carry the burden of guilt for this country's past history, he seems to consider it perfectly appropriate that whites live with shame. Guilt, it seems, is worthless, because it leads nowhere. Harboring shame, however, shows that the person recognizes the need for some form of repentance. Shame offers a reminder of past offenses for which the individual can compensate by transforming his inherent attitudes and, perhaps, behavior. This is obviously something that Steele believes whites should work to do.

Since, in Steele's world, whites can have no legitimate “white” interests, notions of racial identity should be shunned. Whites are not to indulge in thinking in terms of the “group,” which conceivably could lead to notions of “superiority,” a vice from which whites must flee. Asserting special regard for the group demonstrates “atavistic” thinking, which excludes others and, therefore, is injurious to “our democracy of individuals.”

Steele stands ready to paint with a broad brush those whites who deviate from this neutral (or might one say neutered) stance as “white supremacists.” The European imperialist who reached across the seas and colonized foreign lands demonstrated his white supremacist hubris, and the white who today strives to preserve the racial and cultural uniqueness of his group, according to Steele, demonstrates the same “white supremacist” tendencies. Whites do not possess the option to operate in their own self-interest.

Sensitivity sessions, diversity workshops, re-education programs, ceaseless media propaganda via films and television, along with the cleverly disguised anti-white writings of scholars like Steele, and the not-so-disguised biases of academics like Noel Ignatiev, have taken their toll on white confidence, backing whites into a corner, where their defensiveness often looks like downright surrender.

Proving their “goodness” has now become a preoccupation with a great many whites. Such people are beside themselves with joy at this moment, now that the candidacy of Barack Obama gives them the chance to vote for a black man. Open advocacy for Obama is the route to proving that one is not a racist. Such an act should prove, once and for all time, that “good” whites are no longer in need of sensitivity sessions or diversity workshops, or other vehicles to teach them lessons in racial justice.

But don't for a minute think that this is a fixation from which only white liberals suffer. Listen to those self-professed conservatives calling talk shows, and proudly proclaiming, “I would like to see Condoleezza Rice or Colin Powell run for President, so I could vote for them and prove I am not a racist.” Those exact words have been expressed on the airwaves over and over again. In making this proclamation, the callers seem so proud of themselves. These whites consider it perfectly rational to live one's life in anxiety over how they might be perceived by invisible race monitors. The political ideologue seeks out “our blacks” as opposed to “your blacks.”

I have had whites voice this Rice-Powell scenario to me, in an obvious bid for my approval. I dare not inform them that, at that moment, I am contemplating whether to feel contempt or pity for them. I ponder the distressed white guy who wanders the earth every day worrying about whether someone, somewhere, might not know what a good person he is. I imagine such a man, during initial introductions of himself to strangers, announcing, “Hi, I'm John Smith, and I am NOT a racist!” Such people should wear a button or tag on their clothing, or, better yet, wear a sandwich board that declares, on both sides, “I am NOT a racist!” This troubled soul seems to believe that when he proves his love and total acceptance of the coloreds, and pointedly rejects all initiatives pertaining to his own white self-interest, he proves his worth as a human being.

With news of China's current incursions into Tibet, it's not unusual to turn on the TV or radio and encounter pundits and scholarly experts frankly supporting Tibet, whose “unique culture deserves to be protected,” as one academic recently put it. Europeans and Euro-Americans are granted the right to no such protection, and are looked upon with suspicion for even voicing such heresy.

As Steele has written, “Mr. Obama's extraordinary dash to the forefront of American politics is less a measure of the man than of the hunger in white America for racial innocence.” And, “For whites, here is the opportunity to document their deliverance from the shames of their forbearers.”

Millions of whites seem determined to prove him right. The brainwashing is, indeed, complete.

---

See also:
The everlasting quest: To transform whites
It's about power