LIBERAL PROFESSOR Calls Non-Whites Unruly, Lying, Lazy, and Losers — Where’s the Outrage?
How is it that a liberal can say that people of color are a bunch of unruly, lying, lazy, lax, losers and not only get away with it, but to be applauded for it?
Heather Hackman, former multicultural education professor at St. Cloud University in Minnesota and now the operator of Hackman Consulting Group said as much at something called the “White Privilege Conference 2016”. The conference was held in Philadelphia and Dr. Hackman spoke during a workshop incomprehensibly entitled “No Freedom Unless We Call Out the Wizard Behind The Curtain: Critically Addressing the Corrosive Effects of Whiteness in Teacher Education and Professional Development”. Or, to strip the “white privilege” out of the title it could have simply been called “White + Education Be Bad, Activists + Education Be Good”.
Dr. Hackman explained that the “racial narrative of white tends to be like this: rugged individual, honest, hard-working, disciplined, successful”. If that’s so, even though she didn’t articulate it, Dr. Hackman is also saying that the “racial narrative of color” tends to define non-white individuals as unruly, lying, lazy, lax, losers. In fact, in Dr. Hackman’s view people of color are so exemplified by these qualities that she says they are incapable of speaking “proper English” or showing up to school on time. She explained, “…so then, the narrative of U. S. public education, individual assessments, competition, outcome over process, discipline where we care more about your attendance and making sure you’re not tardy than we care about your relationships…proper English must be spoken which is just assimilation into standard U.S. dialect, hierarchical power structure, and heavy goal orientation”.
In other words, according to Dr. Hackman, the only way people of color can succeed in an educational environment is if we throw out any means of measuring academic achievement, equalize outcomes across the board, leave the schedule open ended, and allow the classroom to exist as a populist forum where student and teacher have an equal say in all things. It’s impossible, according to Hackman, for non-white students to succeed if anything is expected of them. Such a point of view is brutally racist.
It’s also dangerous. What happens when a young man or woman reaches adulthood after spending thirteen or more years in a system that doesn’t celebrate success, remedy failure, or punish disorder? What does a young man or woman learn from spending all that time in a place that praises all the choices he/she makes and that places them at the center of their own private universe? The answer is two-fold:
– Remember Johnny Walker Lindh? He was that sheepish young man the U.S. military discovered fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan. Lindh was a lot like Dr. Hackman. He grew up in a “privileged” home. Lindh attended Tamiscal High School where he was allowed to study things Johnny Walker Lindh wanted, which included Islam and Malcolm X. He became so comfortable in his own bubble that he later went to Yemen to study in a madrassa, and from there he went to Afghanistan to join the Taliban.
– Look and listen to any Bernie Sanders rally. There, you’ll find young adults that can’t rub two brain cells together and explain a single Sanders policy proposal. But they can chant all the hip slogans. Because they believe Bernie sees them the way they think they ought to be seen – centerpieces of a world born of their own design. By virtue of breathing they believe they are the coolest, smartest, and most important human beings ever to walk upon the face of the earth and they’ve got sixteen dozen social media posts – complete with selfies — to prove it.
Those two points explain how Dr. Heather Hackman can say incredibly racist things about people of color and get away with it. She’s one of many “little Eichmanns” out there, doing her small part to help the collective drain the very life-blood of culture from the American body one drop at a time.
Image: Namibia 2002 via photopin (license)