Twenty-five years ago, I was sitting in an education camp, run by a lesbian and a Ghanaian. We had been force marched to the camp by our company’s human resource department. Everyone in the camp was white, but most of inmates were women. The point of the exercise was to lecture us about discrimination and racism. I came very close to being sent to the hot-box for pointing out to the Ghanaian that he chose to leave a black country and come to America. He was welcome to return, if he did not like it in America.

All joking aside, the funny part of the exchange was that the Ghanaian obviously never thought much about what he was doing. The company offered him this cushy gig where he spent a few hours a month lecturing white people about racism. It was better than working so he never bothered to think it through until I confronted him. The poor guy was so upset by the experience that he quit being the diversity counselor. It turned out that having the whip hand on whitey was more work than he was willing to do, so he quit.

The other thing that I recall about the camp was a women with a last name that looked like an eye chart. She was pretty and very polite, but she did not like being in diversity camp one bit. She tore into the lesbian about the fact it was just an excuse to lecture white men, which at the time was a keen observation. The prevailing opinion at the time was that the diversity movement was just a cover for giving blacks jobs they could not do, in order to make the company brochure look good. This gal saw where it was heading right away.

Here we are in the current year and that’s a reality that most everyone has figured out, even if no one bothers saying it. In fact, the casual acceptance of this reality is quite remarkable. The most under represented group in America now is white men. Look around the college campus, the government office or the workplace and that is the reality. One-legged trans-black Elvis impersonators have a box they can tick, but the straight white man has no box. This is the thing everyone knows, but no one dares mention in public.

All mass movements need a bogeyman, but the anti-white crusaders are struggling to find examples of evil white men, who are oppressing the the good people. Sure, the perverts, who decorate the news of late all look white, but, well, you know. Larry David tried to point this out, but we are so far down the taboo cul-de-sac that it is impossible to turn back. The white women will keep yelling “he touched me” until the last white-looking man is driven from the media, even if it is starting to look like a scene from Schindler’s List.

That’s what I suspect is at the root of the white privilege nonsense. Rather than locate an actual bad white man and haul him into the public square to be pilloried, they have invented this miasma they call “privilege.” It’s not actually privilege, as in a special right or immunity from certain laws. Instead it is a mysterious force that can only be realized through a set of sacred rituals. A shaman of sorts, usually called a diversity counselor, guides the white person through the process so they can see their privilege.

That’s what you see in this article about Privileged Identity Exploration Model being used at universities, to help white people overcome their whiteness, so they can engage in social justice causes. It’s a lot like brainwashing, where the initiate is forced to deny reality to the point where they no longer trust their own eyes. Instead, they accept whatever the cult leader tells them. It’s also reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, where intellectuals were forced to confess to crimes that they did not commit, because they did not exist.

It is easy to be offended by this stuff. That’s intentional. As Theodore Dalrymple observed about communist regimes, the point is to humiliate.

“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

Modern society is riddled with special privileges. We even have a term in the law, protected class, which is the name for groups that have special rights. The trouble is those special set-asides and carve-outs only make sense if there is the evil white man lurking around every corner. The stunning lack of evil white men has forced these people to create a mystery version, one that only exists in the imagination of the offender, after they are properly coached in the Privileged Identity Exploration Model.

I should note the Maoist flavor to all of this campus activism. It is rather stunning just how similar the social justice warriors are to the Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution. What that suggests is the non-whites launching these campaigns on campus see themselves as the victors of the culture war. Their aim now is to solidify their position by sweeping up the remaining pockets of resistance. Mao Zedong did not launch the Cultural Revolution from a position of weakness. He thought he was working from a position of strength.

Strangely, that’s the glimmer of hope. While the Red Guards were running wild, reformers were quietly organizing to put an end to Maoist communism. These reformers, led by Deng Xiaoping, took over after the death of Mao and set about the task of rooting out Maoism. Five years after Mao died, the Party declared that the Cultural Revolution was “responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic”.

Professor Sherry K. Watt should enjoy her time on campus.