Prof. Ekow N. Yankah, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University

The words race and racism have become “devil terms” in American politics and culture—ideologically weaponized concepts to advance a cultural Marxist agenda and basically repel and silence any opposition to that agenda. In a widely-reported op-ed published recently in The New York Times (November 11, 2017), black law professor Ekow N. Yankah wrote that when he instructs his children “on the ways of the world,” he teaches them that white people cannot be trusted and that blacks cannot befriend whites. In short, white folks are evil, supremacist oppressors, not just by their traditions and history, but by their very intrinsic nature.

Then, just the other day, several items came my way that relate how a writer for the student newspaper at Texas State University at San Marcos, one Rudy Martinez [a Latino], demanded that white people “die.” “Your DNA is an abomination,” he declared in the student newspaper, the University Star [“Whiteness: Your DNA is an Abomination,” November 29, 2017:

“You were not born white, you became white…You have been estranged from yourself and, in that absence, have been instilled with an allegiance to a country that was never great. One that has continuously attempted to push non-whites into non-existence through crusades that have been defended by the law.”

Martinez, who is a senior philosophy major(!), continued his garbled screed by accusing white Europeans of unjustly possessing privilege and having actively “built…an oppressive world.” “I see white people as an aberration,” he wrote, and promised “a constant, ideological struggle…to deconstruct whiteness.” Martinez declared that he and his allies would “win” that struggle, and that “goodhearted liberals, apathetic nihilists and right-wing extremists” should accept the “death of whiteness as liberation for all.”

There was push back, of course, from both the university administration and from the student body president, Connor Clegg, who condemned Martinez’s essay. But that only elicited demands from groups such as the Pan African Action Committee [PAAC] and other powerful on-campus organizations that Clegg resign as student body president because he was “openly biased and racist.” [“Texas State Student President Will Not Resign After Condemning Campus Newspaper Article Calling for ‘White Death’,” Free Beacon, Dec. 5, 2017.

It would be comforting to think that incidents such as this one were rare and uncharacteristic of American college campuses—and American education. But the fact is that what occurred at Texas State University is far more representative of the Marxist ideological veneer—or, more precisely, the Marxist straight jacket—that dominates and, in fact, throttles what passes for “higher education” these days. The examples that can be cited are literally countless and would fill volumes.

And what is a singular and salient characteristic of this situation is that it has as much to do with the professoriate and academic over class as it has to do with the students. The chilling fact is that since the late 1960s, most of the PhDs—the future professors, teachers and university administrators—turned out by our colleges and universities have been imbued with a Marxist outlook and philosophy that now pervades nearly all academic disciplines, but most especially history, sociology, philosophy, English, anthropology, and political science, in other words, the liberal arts.

As a Jefferson Fellow grad student at the University of Virginia in the 1970s, I observed this process metastasizing at a gallop. Virginia—UVa—was still a fairly conservative Southern school at that time. Indeed, when I was there we had a number of whom I would call “refugee” grad students who had transferred to the university from places like Columbia, Berkeley and Hunter College-City University of New York to escape from the early outbreaks of Marxist violence and revolution on those campuses. Some were outright “conservatives,” others just students who wished to avoid the upheavals. One lady friend recounted how she had been physically assaulted at Hunter; she called it quits after that.

Yet, many doctoral candidates at UVa had already imbibed a Marxist vision and narrative. The student body president, if I remember correctly, was a former seminarian, but had been “converted” through his reading of texts such as The Wretched of the Earth, and Black Skin, White Masks, by black French revolutionary and anti-colonialist writer Frantz Fanon, and works by Deconstructionist ideologue Jacques Derrida. Eventually, he made his way to Mao’s China, which he claimed was the ultimate “peoples’ paradise” on earth, something to be emulated here in the United States and in Europe.

What impressed me about these Marxist students was not just their fanatical zeal and seriousness, but that they were far more “radical” and revolutionary than any of those stodgy Soviet Communists who then ruled Russia and who exercised control over Eastern Europe. I had met some of those types as an exchange student in England a few years earlier—they parroted the Moscow Communist “line,” but would not have been caught dead advocating “sexual liberation” or same sex marriage, certainly not like those I encountered at UVa in the 1970s, or that we encounter today.

This variant of Marxism was and is a much more virulent strain, a zealously globalist brand that owes far more to Leon Trotsky than to Josef Stalin, and that understands the value of emphasizing “racial liberation” as well as “sexual liberation” in the struggle against the West. The Christian West is to be undermined, not just because of its “economic injustices” and its “oppressive Capitalist system,” but because of its “white supremacy and colonialist oppression” of minorities (mostly blacks) and its “sexual oppression and exploitation” of women.

Ironically, just as the Soviet Communist system finally fell (August 1991) after seven decades of totalitarian rule and Eastern Europe was being self-liberated from its forty-five years under Moscow’s boot, what Dr. Paul Gottfried has labeled quite correctly “cultural Marxism” was triumphing in Western Europe and in the United States. In fact, Marxism did not disappear with the exit of the octogenarian Soviet commissars, but resurfaced in a significantly more dangerous and infectious formulation, and largely domestic form here in America, soon dominating our campuses, our entertainment industry, our pulpits, our media and now our politics.

And its major ideological weapons of choice are: the imposition of a race-based narrative culturally and politically, and the demand for sexual liberation, specifically concerning the role of women in society.

A couple of weeks ago the local PBS station (WUNC-TV) featured a program they called “Focus,” featuring a discussion of historic monuments honoring Confederate veterans and “what should be done about them.” Of the approximately seventeen participants in this on-camera “dialogue,” only two represented what I would term the opposition to taking down those monuments. Of the supporters for removal, one young black woman gave away the whole narrative and plan: American history, she explained, was totally infected, based in and on, “racism” (as well as “sexism”). Thus, that history needed to be “cleansed” and purified, and that must be begun with the removal of those obviously “racist” reminders of the Southern Confederacy, since, as “we all know,” the “war was about slavery…and that was why the South was fighting.”

This was, now fully blown, the excited but jejune theorization I had first heard forty-five years ago in graduate seminars at the University of Virginia, then spouted by young doctoral students who would in a few decades’ time occupy the endowed chairs in history, philosophy, English, and other subjects at our major universities. This was the narrative that also had infected the thinking of university administrators and basically turned our academic institutions into Marxist “communes” dedicated to the indoctrination of those students sent off, at exorbitant tuition expense, by parents who believed the “myth” that all you had to do in life to succeed was get a college education.

It was and is a dogmatic standard, a new canon of faith, that indicts white (read=European) Christians, mostly (but not always) males, making them the culprits and responsible parties for the near entirety of the defined (by Marxist theory) “ills of the world.” Into our vocabulary have come such terms as “white supremacy,” “white racism” (there is no other kind), “white oppression,” “white privilege,” and the “need to deconstruct ‘whiteness’.” And as dogma it must be imposed, no questions asked…with so-called traditional “academic freedom” discarded by the wayside if it stands in the way.

The most prominent group responsible for the violent tearing down of the Confederate veterans’ monument in Durham, NC, three months ago (August 14) was a Marxist organization self-denominated the Workers World Party (www.workers.org) whose essential platform includes the following points: “Abolish Capitalism – Disarm the Police & ICE Agents – Fight for Socialist Revolution – Support Black Lives Matter.” And their overarching template is: “Smash White Supremacy.”

There have always been such fringe groups on the far Left, but what gives the Workers World Party and groups such as Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and others like them more cache’ and prominence in America in 2017 is that one of the nation’s two major political parties, the Democratic Party, basically buys into their narrative, at least politically, and the opposition Republican Party—most of its leadership—is deathly afraid of entering any type of negative discussion involving “race,” for fear of being accused of that dreadfully unforgivable and ineradicable “sin” of racism—by far the worst offense that any politician or public figure can be guilty of in our modern society (save perhaps for predatory male-on-female sexual abuse).

Creating a standard and unquestionable narrative on race has been undoubtedly the most successful strategy of cultural Marxist theory and its theoreticians. It first captured the academy, from which it was able to dictate the education of several generations of Americans. It has shaped and limited debate, and defined its parameters, which always continue to evolve, and always toward additional “deconstruction” and “liberation,” which, in fact, means the continued marginalization and destruction of our historic European and Christian civilization.

It should have been clear decades ago what was occurring—there were visible signs and markers. We had seen the disastrous experiences of “de-colonization” in Africa and revolution in Latin America (e.g., Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, etc.), inspired largely by Marxist-dominated secular and religious thought.

In the United States a few farsighted conservative critics of the “civil rights movement” and the mad rush to embrace egalitarianism understood that the results could be just as severe and revolutionary. The idea of equality—what the late scholar Mel Bradford termed “the Heresy of Equality” [See his long essay, “The Heresy of Equality,” Modern Age, Winter 1976, vol. 20, no.1]—underlay the cultural Marxist template. That idea violated the very lineaments and laws of Nature, itself, not to mention an essential understanding of the American republic’s Founding and the vision of the Framers of the Constitution. [cf. Barry Alan Shain’s massive study, The Declaration of Independence in Historical Context: American State Papers, Petitions, Proclamations & Letters of the Delegates to the First National Congress, for ample documentation of Bradford’s exposition.]

But by the 1980s those cautionary voices were largely muted, as the self-denominated “Neoconservatives” forcibly gained control of the “conservative movement” and soon served as the intellectual brain trust for the GOP political class. As the Neocons shared the same philosophical origins—Trotskyite globalism—as the “farther Left” cultural Marxists, their intellectual parameters and ability to argue fundamentals were severely circumscribed. They were and are inherently incapable—and basically unwilling—to make the necessary case and usually end up as enablers of continued leftist revolution.

Until the fraudulent template of “equality” is acknowledged—Until the Marxist template of “race and racism” as the critical factor underlying all of American history and the necessary imperative to erase, correct and make reparations for racist “injustice”—“white guilt”—are overturned and rejected—Until our very language of communication on this topic is reformed, until then, we shall continue to be at the mercy of this authoritarian cultural “gestalt” that despoils our heritage, perverts our history, and infects and deforms our very existence as a people.