College can be Dumb These Days

So I recently graduated from UMKC's real estate program, which meant I was receiving emails from UMKC on the regular. And most weren't from the real estate department. Most were infused with the type of drivel one would come to expect. For example, this article I saw a while back from a professor of some sort of grievance studies program,

I recently helped facilitate a training on white fragility. We asked white folks to share a story of a time when they were fragile in discussions of race, racism, or whiteness. We struggled to share examples. It’s not that we aren’t fragile, but rather, our reluctance to share is an example of our fragility. I shared a story of a time when I didn’t intervene when a colleague said something racially problematic. It was an easy story to tell. It was someone else’s racism and my reluctance to challenge white solidarity was peripheral...

"Problematic," "fragility," "whiteness".... that's a lot of buzzwords.

​But of course, it get worse,

A few years back, a family friend, an aunt really, unfriended our entire family. She divorced us because we weren’t doing enough to deconstruct our whiteness and the ways in which we manifested racism in our lives. Janine, we’ll call her, is a Jewish woman whose partner is African American and whose daughter is biracial. When she unfriended us, we’d been in each other’s lives for twenty years. Most of us don’t know anyone like Janine; she’s exceptionally anti-racist and holds people accountable even when that means sacrificing relationships she values.
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I’ll admit that at first, I didn’t understand it. I recoiled at the accusation. I called my sisters. I fumed defensively over the phone. I’d been taught to think of racists as boys who wore Confederate flag belt buckles, or the people who hurled racial slurs at passersby. I’d been taught to see racism as overtly bigoted and intentional acts of cruelty, or systemic patterns of discrimination. I couldn’t be racist. Privileged, certainly. Racist? Absolutely not.  After all, I taught about racism and white privilege every year. I infused my curriculum with controversial discussions that centered institutionalized racism. I confronted racists and advocated on behalf of people of color. I was #woke.
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When she divorced us, she did so over a blog post. It was public. And while she didn’t name names, and I’m sure few people read it, I was hurt and ashamed. It took me months to understand that she divorced us in a way that would allow her the uninterrupted space to explain herself, it afforded her safety and distance. She didn’t have to listen to us defend ourselves, argue with her, or whitesplain anything.

Whitesplain (noun): The act of a white person disagreeing with someone who isn't white or more likely, with a white hipster liberal who loves getting offended on other people's behalf.

And by the way, if someone is "divorcing you" because you won't "deconstruct your whiteness" or some other intellectual-sounding gobbledegook which effectively means nothing, thank God such a nutcase is no longer part of your life.

This kind of thing really makes me wonder if those hoax papers were even necessary to prove the insanity of the grievance studies' departments. Oh how the Humanities have fallen. Now they mostly just leach of the reputation of other departments.