(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) I was struck recently by a tweet from noted conservative blogger and American Mind essayist Peachy Keenan, in which she offered a personal anecdote that revealed just how far over the top the college admissions have gone while embracing woke orthodoxy.
The tweet about a friend’s niece said that the young woman (who appeared to have some inexplicable desire to attend school in California) had been rejected from every four-year institution to which she applied, despite having an exceptional grade-point average and SAT scores.
College admission season update – From a friend:
“Niece got 1450 SAT, 4.2 GPA, competitive athlete. She didn’t even get into her safety schools. Going to junior college this year and is very depressed. The POC kids in her class, C students at best, are all headed to Berkeley,… https://t.co/AQV0PjF6sd
— Peachy Keenan (@KeenanPeachy) February 24, 2023
Barring some unknown circumstance that was excluded from the context (Was she a convicted felon? Was her essay full of typos?), this snub ordinarily would be a travesty unto itself.
But, adding insult to injury, her rather unremarkable minority classmates had secured spots at the state’s—and some of the nation’s—top-ranked schools, including the University of California’s Berkeley and Los Angeles branches, the University of Southern California and Stanford University.
Instead, the high-achieving student is “[g]oing to junior college this year and is very depressed,” Keenan noted.
THE LOWERING OF HIGHER ED
Having had my own very short-lived experience as an employee within the University of California system, I cannot, for the life of me, understand what the young lady thinks she will be missing out on—apart from an expensive piece of paper after four years of intensive brainwashing.
Still, it is sad to see those who spent years working toward the highest pinnacles of achievement, persevering through the pandemic and other contemporary crises that would be more than enough for the normal person to want to walk away, have their dreams crushed by the arbitrary whims of the latest woke social revolution.
The one saving grace, perhaps, is knowing that the folly of elite universities will be the gain of less pompous (and less expensive) junior colleges, which may one day supplant their more well-endowed counterparts.
In a purely capitalist business model, schools that put a higher premium on virtue-signaling than the quality of their product would eventually suffer the consequences as demand lowered.
Of course, being propped up artificially by the world’s fourth-largest economy means that California’s state schools are in no danger of going under any time soon. And it seems highly unlikely that capitalism weighs on their minds in the least, apart from their efforts to dismantle it.
THE LEFT’S MISSING LINK
Among the California elite’s most prized assets is Angela Davis—the communist, lesbian, black-liberation feminist most famous for her arrest as an accomplice in an attempted 1970 courtroom jailbreak that killed Superior Court Judge Harold Haley and three others.
Davis, currently a professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has managed to translate her 16-month incarceration for allegedly buying the gun that killed the judge into a 45-year career as an accomplished scholar of social justice at some of the nation’s most prestigious schools.
She also offers a direct link between the black-liberation movement (BLM) and the group of left-wing German academics who first sought to spread neo-Marxism into America’s educational institutions via the Frankfurt School, which had its U.S. origins at Columbia University after its thought-leaders fled the ascendant Nazi party in 1935.
Davis was the student of Herbert Marcuse, a so-called philosopher who can be credited with giving the malcontents of the 1960s counterculture movement the intellectual cover and cachet that they needed to be validated at the highest levels of academia.
But, as with all that the Left props up as sacred, Davis’s claim to be a civil-rights activist crumbles under the slightest stress-test.
In fact, one could argue that—even though she probably cast her ballot for Joe Biden in the 2020 election—she ain’t really black.
As Biden heads to Gettysburg to try to “unify” the country, remember:
Joe Biden told Charlamagne that “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.”pic.twitter.com/UvYZTjcPqZ
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 6, 2020
REDEFINING WHITENESS
Based on the flimsy and fluid laws of intersectionality, even though black people can’t be racist, it is possible for some conservative-leaning blacks to be white supremacists.
By syllogism, thus, it is possible that some people who are, for all intents and purposes, African–American, may not be black at all.
We have seen the same phenomenon arise with recent efforts to redefine gender, so it was only a matter of time before one’s heritage, genetics and skin-tone ceased to be the principle criteria for discerning one’s race.
Consequently, it is necessary to come up with a new working definition for what defines whiteness.
According to the adherents of Critical Race Theory, an area of scholarship that Marcuse and Davis were instrumental in helping popularize, one of the most fundamental components of whiteness is “white privilege,” or the idea that one might systemically benefit from one’s physical appearance, upbringing and other attributes.
It is inherently unfair, they argue, because it runs counter to the notion of meritocracy—the American dream that everyone should be able to have equal access to all of the country’s cultural institutions, public and private.
It is the original sin within the wokeist dogma: a birthright for which all melanin-deficient Americans must pay pennance by actively genuflecting to the demands of marginalized and oppressed communities.
And nobody may have greater “white privilege” than the descendants of those original European colonizers, the passengers of the Mayflower.
With them came all of the systemic advantages established by the Mayflower Compact, the white man’s first governing document in America—and the wellspring from whence all other iterations of U.S. democracy originated.
Surely anyone associated with the original Pilgrims ought, under the new laws of whiteness, to be considered among the whitest people in America.
Of course, the passage of time assures that some, through their own circumstances or other extrinsic factors, may lose that privilege over time.
So a necessary stipulation must also be that one’s whiteness is proportionate to the amount of unearned privilege that one directly derives during the course of one’s lived experiences (another popular term within the CRT lexicon).
That brings us back to Angela Davis, who—by the textbook standard of modern whiteness—may be whiter even than Sarah Palin, who boasts five Mayflower ancestors.
A LIFE OF ABJECT PRIVILEGE
Although Davis—a product of the segregation era in Birmingham, Ala.—was not, herself, born into privilege, she seems to have enjoyed a relatively middle-class childhood with remarkably few hindrances to her family’s social mobility.
Moreover, she clearly was able to derive a direct benefit from her race and heritage, using them to secure a spot at New York’s Brandeis University and later traveling abroad to continue her postgraduate education at Paris’s Sorbonne and the aforementioned University of Frankfurt.
Even when she ran afoul of the criminal-justice system, Davis was able to use her race to receive a lighter consequence than less-privileged individuals, and she ultimately was acquitted by an all-white jury in Marin County after white liberals rallied to her side.
Indeed, it seems that there is very little that this poster-child of the black-liberation movement has in common with the black experience, except the extent to which other blacks might likewise derive some privileged benefit from their racial identity.
Fittingly, Davis recently was revealed to be the descendant of a Mayflower passenger, but the point of tracing her white lineage almost seems moot.
“Do you know what you’re looking at? That is a list of the passengers on the Mayflower.”
Our researchers discovered #AngelaDavis’s ancestors traveled to the US on the Mayflower and here is her reaction. #FindingYourRoots pic.twitter.com/G2HhA9BSrT
— Henry Louis Gates Jr (@HenryLouisGates) February 22, 2023
It is but a coda to the long life of whiteness that she has enjoyed as a member of the elite, privileged few who are able to commoditize their race as a defined benefit.
It’s safe to say that Angela Davis is—and always has been—one of the white faces of black supremacy.
Her tale, however, really serves as a case study for all that is wrong with the Left’s racial identity politics and Marxist dogma.
On one hand, her efforts to take down America’s capitalist power structures have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of what Frankfurters like Marcuse might have envisioned.
They have made Davis, a middle-class black child who was on the periphery of the front lines in the civil-rights movement, into a wealthy success story.
But for many others, both black and white, this new system has been an abject failure—a bait-and-switch that simply replaces one form of class privilege with another.
And, somehow, the ones who least need or deserve it still manage to float to the top of the social hierarchy.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.
