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Stuart Waiton
Stuart Waiton is an academic in Scotland writing in a personal capacity.
The war against ‘whiteness’ has dragged Jews into a new, ‘radical’ antisemitic cesspit and universities are at the heart of it.
One of the most significant new ways that antisemitism has developed and spread in recent years is through the progressive hatred of the West and, more specifically, a hatred of ‘whiteness’.
The weird thing about this anti-white hatred is that it usually comes from other white people and, in fact, the ideology that pushes this perspective is embedded in our institutions – most noticeably, universities.
In 1995, the brilliant American theorist Christopher Lasch wrote The Revolt of the Elites. Here he described how those who ran American institutions had become obsessed with racism and diversity – a ‘new dogmatism’ that shielded identity-based beliefs from debate and legitimised contempt for liberal ideals in the name of humanism.
Over the last 30 years, this new approach has been institutionalised through the language of Critical Race Theory (CRT) – a cynical dogma that labels anything and everything bad in the world as a product of ‘whiteness’ and ‘white privilege’.
CRT has helped to create an imagined world where there are two types of people – the oppressors and the oppressed, the privileged and the victims. As a result, a new type of inverted racism has become normal and ‘enlightened’, and through the language and contempt for ‘white privilege’, Jews have found themselves being targeted.
Due to the relative success of many Jewish people and their assimilation over generations into Western societies, they don’t fit the minority-oppression mould. When searching for victims, it’s difficult to find the Jewish ghetto, or the Jewish boat people scrambling to get into Britain on dinghies. What’s more, you have Israel – a Western-styled democratic state, a wealthy state and one that appears to many to be a living embodiment of old colonialism.
As a result, when dumping people into the crass, oppressor-oppressed boxes, Jews are racially labelled as being white. More than this, Jews are not only white, but they are ‘hyper-white’.
Jews have power, they have wealth, they have privilege, they’re not the ‘other’, goes the argument. “It is nowadays difficult to think of the European Jews as non-white,” argues the SOAS Professor of Developmental Studies Gilbert Achcar.
Critics point out that Jews are not only hyper-white but are understood to have “Jewish hyperpower”. The result, “Jewishness functions as a kind of whiteness amplifier”. They become a race apart, but a bad race, the worst race, a power-hungry white oppressor race. What could possibly go wrong!
Describing life on an American campus, Pamela Paresky notes how in discussions about microaggressions, every imaginable group is understood to be oppressed by the everyday language being used at university. Every group that is, apart from the Jews.
Why is every minority seen as suffering racism, she asks, but not the Jews? As she explains:
Because current social justice ideology (“critical social justice”) is heavily influenced by critical theory of various kinds, including critical race theory. Despite its laudable goal of opposing racism and white supremacy, CRT relies on narratives of greed, appropriation, unmerited privilege and hidden power – themes strikingly reminiscent of familiar anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.
So white are the Jews, so dripping with supremacy, that even when they are murdered and raped by Islamist terrorists as we witnessed on October 7, this mass slaughter is celebrated by various journalists, academics and campaigners who stated that, “This is what decolonisation looks like.” Up here in Scotland, Green MSP and elected Rector of Dundee University described this barbarism as an expression of “decolonisation” not “terrorism”.
Arguments about decolonisation use the same language and the same racialised idea of good vs evil. Where CRT ideologues focus on racism at home, the decolonisers look at a black and white world, a world of Western domination, and find oppression in everything that is associated with modern liberal ideas and institutions. Universities are a case in point. Here we find that almost every dimension of university life, every subject and even the way things are taught are reconstructed through the prism of white Western privilege.
Many universities in Scotland have decolonisation policies. These include Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Strathclyde and St Andrews. Stirling University is now even part of a £250,000 project to decolonise maths, science and geography lessons.
In some universities all staff are asked to decolonise their curriculum. The extent to which this is pursued by the chief-decoloniser, I suspect, will depend upon the zealotry of the individual involved. If they’re a CRT type, academics who ignore the commandment may end up being pursued, but so far, I know of no cases where specific disciplinary action has been taken against an academic who refuses.
Don’t let that fool you though, because this approach is institutional. It has specific staff encouraging all academics to adopt it, and Academics for Academic Freedom, for example, report a moral pressure being felt by lecturers both from the institutions and from the activist students who love this stuff.
Check out the Language Matters Portfolio, part of the Anti-Racist Curriculum Project Guide – the national project developed to decolonise us all in Scottish universities. The document explains that the “decisions over whose contributions to elevate” in universities, “centres white and Western parties”. “White academics” dominate universities and get the “masses” to culturally absorb a Eurocentric perspective. Strathclyde University want less “white-male-heteronormativity”, less “white supremacy” and additionally, “white colleagues” need to take responsibility for this. “White, straight” academics block “diverse views” and build “walls of whiteness” in “white-dominated colleges”.
Whiteness is privilege, it is oppression, it is slavery, it is colonial barbarism, it dominates and excludes, it hurts, harms and destroys minorities. It is everywhere, in everything, it is structural, systemic, ingrained, it’s in our blood and our bones as we trample or step over the broken bodies of the ‘other’ both in the past and the present, at home and abroad.
Jews are not directly targeted in these decolonisation documents and practices. It’s rare to find rectors or university principals celebrating October 7. They’re progressive, enlightened and caring. They’re anti-racists who believe in fighting oppression. But they are all of these things through the looking glass of CRT and decolonial ideology. They have adopted a racialised worldview that targets whiteness, Eurocentric perspectives and white supremacy.
But the Jews are white, they are hyper-white in fact, they are supreme with their power and privilege. It doesn’t take a genius to recognise that there may be a problem here.
Decolonisation policies are the new way that racial ideas are being institutionalised. Adopting any dogma as a framework for academic life is illiberal and authoritarian. In the form of attacking all things white, our universities are blindly facilitating a reactionary and racialised view of the world that ends with the Jews.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
