Columbia University Welcomes Students Back with Wokeness

D uring our first week of classes, Columbia University’s Office of Multicultural Affairs published a promotion for “Students Exploring Whiteness.” This year-long cohort of discussions and seminars, quickly spotlighted on Columbia’s official social media, is intended to teach white students to critically examine their “whiteness, challenge internalized superiority, and seek humility and vulnerability in shaping and maintaining commitments to anti-racist action.”

A quote from a participant described “Students Exploring Whiteness” as a program for “every White person who claims and/or believes themselves to be liberal, progressive, and a champion for social justice” seeking “to critically engage with whiteness.” The program, geared toward advancing “anti-racism work by white-identified students” by “developing an anti-racist framework and toolkit,” is intended to explore “bias, privilege, systemic oppression, [and] white fragility.” This methodology claims to unload “the burden that many students of color already feel to teach their white peers,” all with the end goal of creating a space for “nourishment and accountability.” An informal survey I performed revealed that, of students who received an invitation to the program, all but one were white; meanwhile, only one non-white student I talked to received an invitation.

To those who seldom pay attention to the ordinarily out-of-touch subculture of Ivy League wokeness, a program such as this certainly may raise some eyebrows. In reality, this is hardly the beginning. At an institution where the university marching band recently self-dissolved due to its being “founded on the basis of racism,” this new program should hardly come as a surprise. Just half a year ago, Columbia’s Office of Multicultural Affairs made national headlines for holding graduation ceremonies demarcating students by race, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status. Across the nation, elite institutions have begun experimenting with radical ideas to combat racism on campus. But does it work? The evidence suggests otherwise, and that, instead, such programs only entrench progressivism and foster division on campus.

“Anti-racism” in the context of Columbia’s Exploring Whiteness program is nothing more than a facade for political correctness. To begin, “Students Exploring Whiteness” fails from the outset with the assumption that racial progress is inherently a zero-sum game. The inherent assumption of this program, that artificially challenging “whiteness” from a point of bias results in “uplifting” students of color, confuses racial progress with a race to the bottom. Furthermore, the belief that only a progressive mindset can facilitate a conversation about racism is not only ignorant beyond reprieve, but also a disappointing reflection on the current state of intellectual freedom within the university space.

Actively working toward mitigating racism and pushing for equal opportunities for all in the academic space is not fundamentally problematic. In fact, it should be encouraged. But the flawed approach that this program and academia writ large have bound themselves to has wholly failed to achieve this goal. Worse, it has exacerbated the core problem by forcing students to view their classes, friendships, and relationships solely through the lens of political correctness disguised as “anti-racism.” When racialization of every core facet of student life occurs, everything becomes a point of contention. Creating such a fixation only fosters a culture that erases many things which cannot be reduced to racism. Those who dictate the boundaries of “anti-racism” hold the cards. This creates instability within the student body and establishes an “anti-racist” apparatus that can condemn practically anything it so pleases which may challenge its legitimacy, including potential alternative methodologies for mitigating racism on campus. Just because a program or organization claims the term “anti-racist” does not speak the desired outcome into existence.

Such programs also essentially try to convince white students that, regardless of their background, they are complicit in systematically oppressing their peers. If they do not buy into the predetermined definition of “anti-racist,” they are implicated further. Being an “anti-racist” is no longer someone who stands against racism. It has become a mindset and lifestyle established in poor faith that changes depending on the narrative one must strictly adhere to. This flawed decision calculus only oversensitizes students, worsens a victimhood mentality among minority students, incentivizes performative activism, and traps individuals in a stark binary of either oppressor or oppressed simply based on the color of their skin. This only perpetuates the very problem academia seeks to tackle.

Furthermore, programs that specifically target “whiteness” only seek to stir the pot and create a racial division in realms that were not plagued by such issues before. White students are expected to submit to the parameters of what the woke mob defines as “anti-racist” or risk being canceled, even if such parameters require mental gymnastics to see the correlation with race. To claim that every corner of American society is undergirded by racism is delusional. And to continue to target one group as the antagonists works against the real racial progress that has already been accomplished.

Columbia’s Students Exploring Whiteness is part of the woke arms race that elite schools across the country have joined. It involves schools constantly seeking to best their rivals as the gold standard for diversity, equity, and inclusion. While the goal of mitigating the effects of racism by providing an equalizer for underrepresented groups certainly arises out of good intention, the execution has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Once there was a clear goal: truly deconstructing racism. But the goalposts have shifted. Now, these efforts are just a benchmark for elite institutions to virtue-signal themselves as “leaders” in social justice.

Such goalpost-shifting shouldn’t surprise us. After all, those behind these efforts have to keep their jobs. If racism were truly solved by these institutions and methods, how would the woke-industrial complex survive? America’s academic institutions have already trapped themselves in a continually self-fulfilling prophecy that fuels the need for schools to scramble to assemble incoming classes with their token minorities. The result is a process that views the value-add that prospective students provide through how their identities will stack up in the Oppression Olympics, completely overshadowing and undermining their academic and extracurricular accomplishments.

This problem is only worsened with programs such as these, as they are a direct result of tone-deaf ivory-tower academics who hastily push an agenda of wokeness. Those who are indifferent, only seeing the “good” aims, go along with it. Those who oppose are plagued by inaction, fearing cancellation.

As terrible as the behavior of those who push these programs is, it’s not surprising that those behind it would take a mile when given an inch. What is surprising is that so many others, even people inclined to be critical, have let them do so. This is not the hill to die on, they say, as they keep retreating to smaller and smaller hills. This is how we have seen a consolidation of unfettered power within academia, abetted by the tools of cancel culture, the coddling of the American mind, and the rising tide of wokeness within corporate America. It hasn’t been an ambush. It has rooted itself within decades of deafening silence from many who claim to believe in individualism, who have let fear of lost social capital or a tarnished reputation keep them from protecting the free discourse and thought on America’s college campuses. If these virtues are to be reclaimed and defended from wokeness as embodied in programs such as Columbia’s, then it is time for those who believe in them to start fighting back.