Listen to “The Plague of Victim Breeding: From Campus to Our Culture” on Spreaker.
Most college campuses don’t just support students claiming victim status over their race or sex, but they deliberately reward victimhood in an effort to create a monopoly of thought throughout our society.
That’s the thesis of “The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture” by best-selling author and Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald.
Liberal administrators and faculty have dominated most American campuses for decades, but Mac Donald says the initial effort to convince students to shift their politics to the left has now given way to intolerance for any contrary opinions. How did we get here?
“It’s because we have now experienced 40 years of oppression studies that have cultivated in students a conviction in the power of victimhood and a delusional belief that to be on a college campus is to be the subject of life-threatening bigotry,” said Mac Donald.
And she says that leads to students being told they are victims based on skin color and sex.
“We are breeding students who have no understanding of civil discourse, Even worse than that, they are being taught to think of themselves as victims of ubiquitous racism and sexism. That’s a lie but they’re bringing that perspective into the world with them and they’re transforming virtually all of our mainstream institutions accordingly,” said Mac Donald.
This is not just theoretical for Mac Donald. Last year, she gave many talks in connection with her best-selling book “The War on Cops.” While in California, Mac Donald had to have security escort her from the stage at UCLA. The next stop was even worse, when hundreds of students at Claremont McKenna College prevented her from giving her speech in the same room as her audience.
A few students got suspended at Claremont KcKenna, leading to professors around the nation condemning the school for punishing the students at all. Mac Donald says she was guilty of the new and moving definition of hate speech, which now encompasses mainstream thought as opposed to speech usually linked to the likes of the KKK or Nazis.
“I am viewed as a white supremacist and perpetrator of hate speech simply because I have argued that there is unacknowledged but significant support for the police in high-crime minority communities. That is seen as a form of hate speech,” she said.
But she says even mainstream speech must be crushed if it conflicts with the victimhood culture.
“The equation is hate speech equals behavior that threatens minorities and women and, therefore, as conduct and as behavior, it must be silenced with force if necessary,” said Mac Donald.
That’s what happened to her in California, and Mac Donald says the only surprise is that there was any punishment for those shutting her event down. She says like-minded and weak-willed administrators usually reward such behavior if it is perpetrated by the right people.
“Students who get to check off multiple boxes of victimhood on a college campus get to break every rule of civility and now respect (for such protests) is absolutely standard. The faculty are enabling this outbreak of boorish violence and thuggery. The administrators enable it,” said Mac Donald.
“Presidents have actually thanked the students for making them feel proud of their student body. At Yale, after one of the most egregious incidents of fascist behavior, Yale conferred a racial reconciliation prize on two of the participants,” said Mac Donald.
And she says this victimhood mentality is not confined to campus. It’s permeating many aspects of our culture, as witnessed in 2017, when Google engineer James Damore was fired after explaining in an open letter that the gender gap at the company was not a result of sexism but that men in general were more inclined to abstract and numerical disciplines and women gravitated to fields where they could directly help people.
Damore specifically noted those were general observations and not true of each male and female individual. But Google didn’t want to hear it.
“This contradicted Google’s own feminist orthodoxy, which said that the only possible explanation for why there weren’t 50 percent female engineers at Google was Google’s own sexism. Google would rather blame itself for sexism than acknowledge any alternative explanation. That got Damore fired,” said Mac Donald.
Listen here for the first part of our conversation with Heather Mac Donald. In our next installment, we’ll look more closely at the diversity delusion over sex and gender on campus.
