Exposing the fallacies of a postmodern education
European Studies experience:
Your jaw drops.
You’ve just been informed that the objective of your Western history class is to deconstruct the “myth of Western civilization”, which is little more than a sorry tale of violent settler-colonialists bent on destroying the Utopian societies of Asia, Africa and pre-Columbian America. Your professor prefers to identify the West with genocides, colonialism and ethno-chauvinist depravity, not with the feats of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. What is more, the accomplishments of Aristotle, Cicero, Newton, Kant and Locke are the products of the “white male hubris” and are exaggerations, and celebrating their accomplishments is accommodation with the hegemonic Euro-centrist worldview. Whiteness, you learn, is a pathology which is to be totally dismantled and utterly defeated.
Your professor strongly suggests that those who disagree with this view are either deluded, immoral, or self-serving members of the oppressive white power structure, not thoughtful dissidents.
After reading A History of White People, by Irvin Painter, you learn that the West is but a construct, an oppressive state of mind. To say that Western institutions and traditions are both real and unique is to risk dismissal as an orientalist and exclusivist. For this deviation from orthodoxy, you are rewarded with a slate of “privilege”-shaming, and are promoted the class bigot.
Needless to say, conservative historians and writers, like Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington, are assigned only to be mocked as cis-gendered, patriarchal “dead white men.”
American History experience:
In your American history class, non-victimization themes are either entirely swept aside, or are mocked as ideologically suspect. For lauding the entrepreneurial culture of American industrialists, the bravery of the pilgrims, and the wisdom of the Framers, you’re sneered at and given the distinction of class bigot.
If you mention them too frequently during class “discussions”, you risk being accused of being “blind to the more fundamentally consequential” subjects of minority and women’s discrimination. Those students deviating from (routine) talking points – inequality, white privileged and institutionalized racism – are those that are most likely to invite glares, unwelcome side glances, and outright condemnation due to their “insensitivity” to minorities and women.
Denounced as a collaborator and participant in the oppressive white power structure, you learn that you’re a secret apologist for slavery, Jim Crow, and the displacement of Native Americans. Your classmates, perceiving themselves as victims of an all-encompassing white conspiracy to demean and degrade the “Other”, interpret your questioning as microaggressive and insensitive rather than necessary and reflective. Oddly, they insist on calling themselves “liberals”, even though they silence your views in decidedly illiberal fashion.
American literature experience:
You promptly exit your American studies class in acute agitation, but not in surprise. The course syllabus outlines its all-out assault against dead white men.
You recall, with considerable distaste, the political theatrics of your high school literature teacher who fancied herself a social justice activist. Her enthusiastic, obsessive, and frankly domineering habit of shoving historical victimization themes down your throat have reemerged in a more ideologically flagrant manner here at Cornell University.
So, now, on the Hill, you’re compelled to interpret even the most politically neutral of novels through the interpretive prisms of race oppression and gender-egalitarianism. You learn that America itself is but a manifestation of oppression and greed: an imperialistic, capitalist, outpost of hegemonic white males, with few redeeming values.
By semester’s end, you’ve become a drone – a well-rehearsed wind-bag – on all questions dealing with historical victimization. Any – ANY passage that even hints at the nature of racial tensions, or gendered stereotypes, or the provocative tropes of America’s “checkered and contradictory” past, is examined at length and with considerable zeal. “No stone of oppression”, your crusading professor reminds you, “is to be left unturned”. With your grade looming over your head, you carry on like the other automatons. You’ve no choice.
Roberto Matos is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at rlm387@cornell.edu.