When your kids apply to college, they may need to know how to parrot social-justice dogma and use racial-justice jargon effectively, if they want to maximize their chances of admission. “Incoming students” at the University of Richmond are “required to pledge allegiance to anti-racism, social justice,” reports Campus Reform. “An admissions essay … for undergraduate admissions asks students to ‘share one idea for actions or policies that you think would begin to address an issue of racial or social injustice.'”
The University of Richmond (UR) in Virginia is extending its implementation of anti-racist and social justice initiatives to admissions requirements.
One of the essay prompts for undergraduate admissions for the fall 2022 semester, for example, asked students to “share one idea for actions or policies that you think would begin to address an issue of racial or social injustice.”
UR’s Equity page has a section on “White Anti-Racism” that provides resources for students to “assist members of our campus community in learning about race, racism, and the practice of anti-racism.” It argues that “White people have important roles to play in anti-racism work.”
“Our focus on white anti-racism is an institutional effort to relieve pressure often placed on people of color to educate white people about race, as well as to support and be in solidarity with change efforts led by people of color,” the page reads.
One anti-racist initiative the university provides is a “Lunchtime Discussion Series” where white students are encouraged “to discuss and learn about whiteness, with an emphasis on how white people can be better practitioners of anti-racism.”…UR has also drawn the attention of the free-speech watchdog organization the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which has flagged the university with a Yellow Light rating.
“Yellow light colleges and universities are those institutions with at least one ambiguous policy that too easily encourages administrative abuse and arbitrary application,” FIRE explains.
FIRE specifically finds UR’s “Bias Incident” policies problematic, which defines punishable bias incidents as those which “do not appear to constitute a crime or actionable discrimination, but which may intimidate, mock, degrade, or threaten, individuals or groups” on the basis of “gender, gender identity or expression” and “sexual orientation.”
UR uses the trendy term anti-racism. What do people mean when they use the term anti-racism? Usually, it includes advocacy of discrimination against whites. The “key concept” in Ibram Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist is that discrimination against whites is the only way to achieve equality: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” writes Kendi in that book, a New York Times bestseller touted by many progressive journalists. Many school districts have shelled out $20,000 to pay Kendi to deliver presentations that last an hour or less. Kendi once wrote an op-ed suggesting that white people are aliens from outer space.
“Many high schools and middle schools are assigning” Ibram Kendi’s book Stamped to students, notes law professor David Bernstein, even though this “book associated with Critical Race Theory” is filled with factual errors, and contains “bad history.” For example, the Washington Free Beacon reports that “Amazon spent $5,000 to distribute hundreds of copies” of “Ibram X. Kendi’s book” “Stamped” “to Virginia public school students” in Arlington, Va.
