White Mythologies

Katherine Timpf wrote a brief piece for NRO a couple of years ago that was so good it's hard to decide what to excerpt and what to leave out.

She described a phenomenon which at the time was incubating in the spawning grounds of ludicrous ideas, i.e. university campuses, which holds that “objectivity” and “meritocracy” are examples of “white mythologies” and have no real existence. They're merely “social constructs.”

This is presumably the sort of thing one must believe nowadays if one is to be a progressive in good standing, but it really is quite silly.

Timpf describes a course that was to be offered at several colleges the following year (2019) in which students will be taught about "white mythologies" which are defined as "long-standing, often implicit views about the place of White, male, Euro-American subjects as the norm against which the peoples of the world are to be understood and judged.”

The class is titled “White Mythologies: Objectivity, Meritocracy, and Other Social Constructions."

She tells us more:

Students [in the course] will explore how systematic logics that position ‘the West’ and ‘whiteness’ as the ideal manifest through such social constructions as objectivity, meritocracy, and race, and as justifications for colonial interventions, slavery, and the subordination of women.

It's hard to take this seriously. Why is the word logic in the above quote cast in the plural? Are "logics" like geometries which can be different depending on whether the surface is a plane or a sphere?

Is there a logic in which the principle of non-contradiction doesn't hold? Is there a logic in which it's not fallacious to beg the question or deny the antecedent of a hypothetical syllogism?

Are the creators of this course suggesting that logical thinking is a talent that only white males can master? If so, isn't that itself a racist assumption?

Timpf continues:

As crazy as this story may sound, this is far from the first time that we’ve seen this kind of thinking on a college campus. In April of 2017, a group of students at Pomona College wrote a letter to the school’s outgoing president claiming that “the idea that there is a single truth . . . is a myth and white supremacy.”

Also last year, a professor at Pennsylvania State University–Brandywine argued that “meritocracy” is a “whiteness ideology.” This year, two University of Denver professors claimed that scientific objectivity works to “spread whiteness ideology.”

This sounds very much like an unintentional rationalization for the dominance of whites (and Asians?) in the sciences. It also sounds ludicrous. Is it part of "whiteness ideology" to insist that earth's gravity objectively accelerates all falling objects at 9.8 m/s2 regardless of whether one believes that it does, or likes the fact, or thinks it's unjust, or believes that there could be lots of differing opinions on the matter?

It's an objective fact, i.e. a truth, that gravity accelerates all objects at the same rate (neglecting factors like air resistance, location on the earth, etc.), and you don't have to be white in order to understand this.

Timpf again:

The idea that objectivity is somehow a myth, or that it has anything even remotely to do with “whiteness,” is so absolutely stupid that I feel like I don’t even have to spend time explaining why. Objectivity isn’t a myth.

For example: In case you didn’t know, water is objectively wet, and that has nothing to do with “whiteness,” or with anything else. Objective truth absolutely does exist — and something that is an objective truth isn’t just dissimilar to a myth, it’s the exact opposite of a myth.

That’s not even just my opinion; that’s an absolute fact based on what words mean.

Things that are objectively true are not made more or less true by factors such as race or sex or class or anything else — they just are; the fact that some things are objectively true is not made more or less a fact by factors such as race or class or sex or anything else — it just is.

The next time you're told by a progressive that the left is the party of science, that progressives live in the world of fact-based reality, ask your interlocutor whether what he/she just told you is objectively true.

People who deny that there is objective truth and argue that, in fact, objective truth is only a "whiteness mythology," are surely not representing the "party of science." They're representing the party of delusion.