When talking about race-relations in America these days one cannot overstate
how corrupt the use of language has become. “Racism” is now a term of art reserved for
demagogues, ideologues, character assassins and “professionals” who make a
career of their race. An honest,
dispassionate discussion of race in America is verboten, and nowhere does the
production of verbal smog with its semantic deformation and fake moralism on
this subject rise more rapidly to match the level of Soviet-era, Pravda-style
Newspeak than on the campuses of American universities.
In most American universities there are now firmly entrenched
“diversity” commissars -- here a Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion, there
an Associate Provost of Multiculturalism, everywhere a PC zealot with a hefty
title, a heftier salary, and a job description written in the indecipherable argot of "Diversity-speak." These are people with no real
jobs. Installed by craven university presidents they serve as scolds and
busybodies, self-proclaimed authorities on whatever might hurt the feelings of
those in the currently certified victim classes. Within their purview are
micro-aggressions, trigger warnings, safe spaces and correct usage of pronouns
in the service of transgenderism. Since
these czars, are charged with conjuring into reality such elusive and nebulous
abstractions like diversity, inclusion, equity, etc., who can ever remotely
guess what it is that they are actually doing?
The language of academic Diversity-Speak is a subgenre of Newspeak. Its
constricted vocabulary and closely regulated grammar make it into a straight
jacket of ideological orthodoxy the constraints of which no one is supposed to
break out of. The key words, in typical Orwellian fashion, are twisted beyond
normal recognition. Everyone knows this: everyone pretends otherwise.
The diversity VP at any typical university now serves as the
institutional superego. He/she plays the role of the priest, a stern moralist
who intones the politically correct incantations, but, most importantly, functions
as the living symbol of the university’s vigilance against what must never be
tolerated in even the slightest degree, racism and its spin offs – sexism, ableism,
homophobia, the forced march on to infinity. This
is no small task since racism and its feral cousins are now so pervasive and manifest
themselves in so much abundance, some of their forms so recondite, only to be discernible by
the priest and his acolytes. Thus:
institutional racism, systemic racism, casual racism, overt racism, covert racism, legacy
racism, environmental racism, economic racism -- on it metastasizes with an ever more complex taxonomy yet to be constructed and guaranteed job security for the well-paid necromancers.
These high level diversity positions are steeped in perversity so
glaringly obvious that the fact that no one can mention it (resistance is
futile) suggests that higher education is now firmly in the grip of political
extortionists and con-artists posing as moralists. The ludicrous perversity is
that of the inevitable motive of self-interest built into the heart of the “diversity
profession.” The more racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic an institution is
(the more victims there are to attend to), of course, the greater the role, the
higher the charge, the larger the entourage, the more power there will be for
the officially anointed voices of the voiceless. Attending to lots of victims requires lots of
resources – increased personnel, more offices, bigger budgets for travel to
conferences on diversity, the Diversity & Inclusion Conference &
Exposition in San Francisco, October 2017, for example. https://conferences.shrm.org/diversity-conference What chief diversity officer anywhere, even
if he wanted to, would admit to a serious reduction in all the “isms” and
“phobias” in the institution where he is employed? Fewer “isms” and “phobias” mean fewer staff,
diminished influence, less visibility, ultimately another line of work with
more accountability.
But to return to the notion of the corruption of language, specifically
Diversity-Speak, focus for a moment on the recent official announcement (below)
of the appointment of a Diversity Chief at Wright State University in Dayton,
Ohio. The announcement is worth parsing since it is so generic and tediously
formulary that it could come out of almost any American university or college. The language in the announcement, as should
become obvious momentarily, is stereotypical, banal Diversity-Speak. Its design, ironically, is to say nothing that
any remotely thoughtful and reasonable person would say depicts any aspect of reality.
This is not language that is meant to reveal or describe anything but rather to
soothe and misdirect.
Matthew Boaz, Wright State University’s director of equity and inclusion, has been named to the new position of chief diversity
officer….. Boaz is a nationally recognized leader in diversity, inclusion,
equity and access. He has extensive experience in helping underrepresented
students, strengthening recruiting efforts and coordinating Title IX policies. As
chief diversity officer, Boaz will provide leadership in promoting a campus
culture that supports diversity and inclusion, forging strong partnerships with
students, faculty and staff. “One of my goals as chief diversity officer is to
create and maintain an environment in which every member of the Wright State
community will feel valued because of their unique identity and authentic self
so they are proud of their experience with the university,”….. http://webapp2.wright.edu/web1/newsroom/2017/02/21/matthew-boaz-named-chief-diversity-officer-at-wright-state/
To begin: “Boaz is a nationally
recognized leader in diversity, inclusion, equity and access.” “Nationally recognized leader”? Beyond a ten mile radius from Dayton, Ohio no one could be found who ever heard of this guy. This
lead-off talking point is a throw-away line, sufficiently vague and ill-defined
as to be meaningless. One might ponder the dubious premise behind this fake
encomium and speculate that anyone with a ‘diversity’ title can rise to this
stature since there are no recognized standards or measurement of achievement
that could be offered in support.
To continue: “He has extensive
experience in helping underrepresented students….” Who were these students? Where were they? What did he do to help them? What did he help
them do? Why did they need help? No clue (wink-wink, it is obvious, isn’t
it?). All we are supposed to know is that he is a guy who helps people, well, the right sort of people. What else does one
need to be to be a diversity VP? Just string
together a few more of those vague generalities and bolster the fiction that
there is a large contingent of needy people who will flounder without him.
On to “partnerships”: As chief
diversity officer, Boaz will provide leadership… in forging strong partnerships
with students, faculty and staff. Ah,
yes, the obligatory “forging partnerships”, another key filler phrase to signal
how busy he will be but with no clue about what he will be doing. What kind of partnerships? Why are they
necessary? What have these partnerships achieved in the past that make them
valuable?
It gets worse: “One of my goals
as chief diversity officer is to create and maintain an environment in which
every member of the Wright State community will feel valued because of their
unique identity and authentic self so they are proud of their experience with
the university,” Boaz said.
Clearly, Mr. Boaz won’t
be wasting his time on trying to appear modest. The sum total of “every member of the Wright
State community” if you count students, faculty and staff, would be in excess
of 20,000 people, each with a “unique identity and authentic self”. Unclear is how he will have time for any other
goals, much less time for basics like eating, sleeping and finding the men's room -- Oops, the gender neutral restroom. Still, given that Wright State University draws many of its students
from the surrounding conservative rural counties, it seems reasonable to
conjecture that some them might possess an “authentic self” (perhaps a
traditional Christian self) that will not sit well with the pronoun-neutral apparatchiks
in Student Affairs who warm the seats in (are you ready?) The Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer &
Ally Affairs. One needs to twist furiously away on the Diversity hermeneutical-decoder magic ring
just to decipher the meaning of the office title and to guess at how the people
inside fill their days. Those members of the “WSU community” who can’t quite
get the hang of transgenderism and its Talmudic pronoun assignment challenges might
have to undergo a compulsory “attitude adjustment”, a correction to their
not-quite authentic selves so as to emerge proud of their experience.
This announcement is PR gobbledygook.
No one should take it seriously and it is likely that few people do. It was written and issued no doubt with the
hope that no one would pay it too much attention, and thus suggests how crude
and cynical is the rationalizing of what diversity people are all about and how spineless the university administrators are who sic them on everyone else.
Leonard Shapiro, a prolific historian of Soviet history and politics in
attempting to distill the essence of Stalinist era propaganda wrote that “the true object of propaganda is neither to
convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public
utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought reveals itself as
jarring dissonance.” (The Communist Party of the
Soviet Union, Random House, 1971, p. 477) The above example of Diversity-Speak
resembles the propaganda described by Shapiro -- no attempt to convince or persuade
-- just a predictable uniform public utterance to discourage dissonant thinking
and remind everyone that the right people are still in charge.
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