If you can’t dazzle ‘em with brilliance, baffle ‘em with balderdash, I guess. This could come to mind when pondering an effort at the “demilitarization of white bodies,” as Middlebury College in Vermont puts it.
At issue is an event from late January titled “Middlebury’s Opportunity to Facilitate the Demilitarization of White Bodies” (MOFDWB), a Zoom affair that featured a talk “by Associate Professor of Education Studies Jonathan Miller-Lane and [that] was sponsored by the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs’ Program on Anti-Racist Theory and Action Around the Globe,” reported Campus Reform last Wednesday.
Middlebury described the event by writing, “Evidence that Whiteness is always weaponized is everywhere: the August 2017 Charlottesville, VA, march; dog walker Amy Cooper threatening to call the police on birdwatcher Christian Cooper in New York City’s Central Park (May 2020); US Capitol Police officers taking selfies with armed rioters and Richard Barnett sitting at the desk of the Speaker of the House of Representatives (January 2021) are just a few recent examples.”
“In order to make any progress toward establishing and sustaining a genuinely representative democracy in the United States, Whiteness must be demilitarized so that bodies designated as ‘White’ might become human,” the college continued. “Paradoxically, Middlebury College, an institution founded to embrace the value of unencumbered study is especially well placed to offer space to make progress in this essential effort for democracy’s evolution.”
The College Fix, which also reported on the event, states that its goal was to help white people “become human.” It’s not clear to me, however, whether Middlebury is talking about human bodies, institutional bodies, or both. Perhaps as with so many fiction writers, the college wants to leave it open to interpretation and entice people with mystery.
Fiction is what it is, too. Maintaining that “whiteness is always weaponized,” Miller-Lane elaborated in his talk on the example of Manhattanite dog walker Amy Cooper. After black bird watcher Christian Cooper asked her to chain her dog last Memorial Day in NYC’s Central Park, an argument apparently ensued; the woman then got upset and told the fellow that she was going to call the police and tell them “there’s an African-American man threatening my life” (video below).
Miller-Lane claims the woman was weaponizing her whiteness — that she possessed the power to “threaten his life” — and that she was only thus capable because whites occupy our racial hierarchy’s pinnacle.
But the professor is ignoring what actually happened in this clash between a “powerful” white person and a “powerless” black man. The police didn’t come and throw Christian Cooper up against a car. Rather, the video went viral, and Amy Cooper’s effort blew up in her face. She became a pariah, lost her job, had to surrender her dog, and was charged with filing a false report.
I could have predicted this, too. How? Because contrary to the professor’s illusions, I’d know that all today’s social and political pressure militates in favor of an accused minority. Filing a false police report against a black fellow in a liberal city was never going to end well (especially with the incident on video!). Amy Cooper was oblivious to this, though. Why?
Because she’s no doubt a liberal herself who shares Miller-Lane’s illusions. She’d been instilled with the notion that she possessed power she didn’t and, being an unprincipled, low-virtue leftist, was willing to violate her own principles when convenient.
As for Miller-Lane, in his talk he espoused other fanciful “white privilege” notions such as how we have to stop “prioritizing protecting white property and white lives.” His entire hour-long talk is below, if you’re interested.
Believe it or not, however, the aforementioned may not be Miller-Lane’s most toxic ideas. He also discusses how accomplishing anti-whiteness goals requires removing “humans from the center of our inquiries in favor of what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls a ‘grammar of animacy’ that places humans among, rather than atop, Earth’s life forms,” as the MOFDWB page relates it.
As to this “grammar of animacy,” this blog explains that it “helps break down the separation from the natural world that has plagued Western Civilization for centuries, even millennia.… Not only are plants and animals considered animate, but so are rocks, mountains, water, fire, and places — all are beings that have spirit and our interactions with them must therefore be seen as relationships, not simply as resources to be exploited and used.”
In other words and as the blog states, this is the pagan belief called “animism.” Kimmerer, a State University of New York environmental biology professor, advocates this — and so, apparently, does Miller-Lane.
It’s all part of the corrosive anti-Western, anti-Christian spirit permeating today’s academia and being fed to young minds. So the real problem is not Professor Miller-Lane, but that he’s not at all out of place in our now most ironically misnamed “higher” education.
