White perspective is not the product of skin color but of culture and experience. We speak of the white perspective because it is the perspective most often held by whites and the institutions they construct and dominate. It is the perspective of the namers, the controllers, the holders of ‘natural’ privilege and invisible power, those who can take for granted the advantages of the status quo.

“Of Fish and Water,” Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society

White supremacy is more than one man and a few militia groups.

What do Americans fear? When Americans insist on carrying firearms to polling places, what do they perceive as the threat to their lives, their way of being? Is it Isis? Are they expecting an Isis soldier to vote? To come around the corner and shoot them?

What frightens most Americans?

I know self-reflection isn’t the “American way,” but look at the 2020 presidential election results. The winner is Democrat, Joe Biden. Yet, look at how many Americans voted for the incumbent, and against their interests. Against common sense. And why?

One morning before November 3rd, I was responding to an email from a friend, frustrated by the attempt of campus personnel were she is contingent faculty to stifle her commitment to teach for change. Colleges and universities, quickly adapting to this pandemic year, are offering courses online and instructing faculty, full and contingent alike, to adjust: learn to teach online and make themselves available for conference time with students and supervisors.

My friend teaches at a for-profit corporate campus where time is money. In other words, the “investors” demand profits! The bottom line is making money! Their campuses, then, are designed to offer programs that turn a profit (Center for Online Education).That faculty, including contingent faculty, work 35 hours online aren’t a concern for the managerial personnel. Salary negotiations, on the other hand, will have to wait.

Journalist André Spicer, writing in an article for The Guardian, recalls the history of Pacific Bell, a Southern California telephone company. In 1984, Bell feared what would come around the corner when “deregulation” and “competition” challenged its highly profitable bottom line. The managerial staff called for a series of brainstorming sessions to do what managers do. With little or no concern for the public or the employees, the managers at Bell considered the usual restructuring, downsizing, and rebranding strategies in an effort to alleviate their fears and that of their investors. Maybe it’s the culture at Pacific Bell. What if Bell just “didn’t have the right culture”? What if the problem resided not in the subservience of managers and greed of investors but rather in the employees who “did not understand ‘the profit concept’ and were not sufficiently entrepreneurial”?

How would Pacific Bell compete in the “new world,” the managers asked themselves. Pacific Bell would “needed an overhaul” of its culture! No doubt this game-changing idea made all the world of difference for those individual thinkers who solved a problem, even if the solution meant “overhauling” some 23,000 employees.

Equipped with a new way of speaking, employees would, in time, fall in lockstep to a new way of thinking, one that eliminated old habits of “empty talk.” Now it’s all business. No waste of time chattering among one another. No idle none-profiting activity. Thinking on the useless becomes, in time, exhausting.

Spin every issue toward the light! Be positive! Above all, happy as a worker, renter, patient, shopper, student! Anger is out, for good reason: it could suggest that someone, far from complying with corporate authority, is daring to think beyond their “pay grade!”

The idea of privatization was furled out across the land as the best thing that could happen to a failing economy. Soon the idea took on wings. “The Conservative mantra,” notes British journalist George Monbiot, last month, “repeated for 40 years like a stuck record, is that the public sector is wasteful and inefficient while the private sector is lean and competitive.”

Academia is about the business of preparing young minds for the world, but the only world in mind isn’t one in which my friend or her students dare challenge systemic violence of racism, sexism, classism by exposing America’s culpability and complacency. On the contrary, she’s not permitted to engage students in challenging the fascist and white supremacist narrative. To do so might result in further inquires such as, What should democracy look like? What should freedom look like? How is America to confront the crisis of climate change? How would a world that is just differ from the one in which Americans live now? What are the steps to take to bring about justice in the world?

She will be informed (if she hasn’t come to realize her own weariness) that there just isn’t enough time for any serious thinking beyond absorbing with all her heart and soul the “bullshit” knowledge intended to lead students up the ladder of success. Be efficient! Be like Big Brother! Everything has been thought out by those qualified to do the thinking.

In turn, my friend is too busy being busy, play her role as one cog among many in the process of making money for the “investors” she never interacts with, let alone challenges. She is too busy to write essays or to work on a book-length manuscript. An ally to the cause for racial justice, she’s being sidelined - that is, handed teaching assignments that save the campus from losing money but not its heart, it’s conscious, if it ever had either.

It’s not just a matter of sprinkling a little diversity here and there, in a course there and in a conference here. It’s just about having students read Toni Morrison, Danticat, or Rushdie, or even spending an entire semester studying women’s works from around the world. I remember taking part in campaigns asking for this kind of inclusion and receiving it back in high school and college - fifty-one and fifty-three years ago, respectively.

The question that most people of color ask in America must be asked at the college level: How does America work to address institutionalize racism in the present without at least possessing solid and honest knowledge about its participation in the violence of conquest, genocide, enslavement, torture, terrorism, and imperialism? How many Americans know that this nation has 800 military bases around the world?

Under the current regime of “education” in America, vice presidents, deans, chairs, the managerial staff, have the interests of the investors to honor, and any challenge to the authority of those investors or trustees will call for the initiation of gaslighting campaigns, targeting the uncooperative, labeling them “radicals” and “socialists.” The investors’ interest isn’t to empower the poor, the working class, Black, Indigenous, migrant families from Haiti, El Salvador, LGBTQ, disabled veterans, women’s rights, housing, and health care advocates, protesters against injustice… Think of what institutions of higher education would look like if its population of faculty, students, and managers reflected our day-to-day reality.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the look that appeals to college managers in pursuit of the big bucks. Besides, an authoritarian system prefers its population to know as little as possible: it’s easier to control and “assign” projects deemed suitable for the classroom.

Trump isn’t the first American to weaponize words in defense of corporate capitalist interests. Strategic use of violent rhetoric to cut down a perceived enemy is as old as that American apple pie. The “busyness” of a managerial approach at the college and university works hand-in-hand with smear campaigns to deflect attention away from the naysayers, designated “radicals,” “leftists,” “crazies,” and establishes a managerial mentality that assumes “the trappings of established professions such as doctors and lawyers.” The shift from the faculty to a “professional” class of managers, wearing dress suits, ties, heels, carrying clipboards, and cup mugs, is an impressive sight for students entering the college campus for the first time, carrying only hopes of being as “successful” as the managers.

And the managerial staff will see to it: Where better to reproduce “apprentices” for the global distribution of managerial mentality?

Think positive thoughts!

For faculty, particularly contingent faculty, to ask impertinent questions is frowned upon just as it should be in the classroom if a student exposes what has been distorted in a discussion, say, on women’s rights or how the media’s (mis) characterization of Black trans caters to violence against that segment of the American population. It’s not much different at a tradition public or private nonprofit campus, where the corporation’s battleground is the new student recreation center, featuring a room of pool tables and cafeterias serving brand name pizzas, coffee, chicken. A new bookstore solved the flaw with the old structure. This new store sells brand-named paraphernalia: sweatshirts and jackets with the logos of NFL teams as well as merchandise with the campuses own mascot! The managers supervising the merchandise are sure family and friends back home would love to own a cup, a cap, a T-shirt with the university’s logo.

Don’t ask about the cost of textbooks.

This battleground comes with a hefty prize and it’s not visible on the menu boards! The corporations have co-opted the revolution - galvanized the masses to die for what they offer!

The corporations enjoy a 360° view of the world. They familiarized the American youth in particular with a vision of Horatio Alger, marketing rags-to-riches tales in exchange for a negotiated program of study just right for the taker. A student needs only to know what is generally accepted for “getting ahead” in America, and it is this: This is the land of opportunity. For all!

Believe it and be saved!

The invisible hand of the corporation illuminates the pathway to hope. Citizens need only to relinquish their right to think for themselves. It’s the most cost effective way of maintaining the agency of the corporation!

To deny that the visibility of statues honoring the memory of Confederate soldiers and hoisted Confederate flags themselves isn’t an official declaration of a land still nostalgic for the days of African American enslavement is to deny the right of African Americans to be stalwarts in protests against ignorance. Everyone hopes to “get ahead” of the communists, of the socialists, of the terrorists groups of organizers and activists nestled among those “minorities,” particularly those Blacks lurching around the corner. Menacing.

How frightening it must be to receive a glimpse of a culture centered around the ideas of equality, justice, democracy, freedom.

It’s no wonder so many Americans learn to fear the unknown. And the unknown is always threatening to take something from them!

Forgo common sense for the “American way!”

My friend is white, a former student, with two M. A. degrees. Already in debt in pursuit of those degrees, she struggles to pay the mortgage and bills. Her teaching contract isn’t intended to compensate her for the effort and sacrifice of years of study.

“I think it’s safe to say the majority of for-profit schools do not have good outcomes,” argues Robin Howarth, senior researcher at the nonprofit Center for Responsible Lending, sited in an article for US News in 2019. “There are probably a few that are good at what they do, but without really delving into reputations, a general wariness about the sector is warranted.”

Some 80% of graduates from for-profit institutions owed an average of $39,900 in student debt in 2016. In comparison, student graduates from private nonprofits owed 68% of that debt while those graduating from public institutions owed 66% to corporate banks and corporate lending institutions.

“For many who have graduated from for-profit vocational schools, paying off this huge debt is an endless task since with every missed payment, monthly interest charges increase the amount owed,” (EducationCorner.com). When students fall behind, default results in lost wages from employment requiring information about those who are in default. Even corporate real estate agencies inquire about outstanding student loans when determining whether or not to rent to someone. It seems these corporations want nothing to do with the people they’ve entrapped in their net.

Meanwhile, back on the campuses, newbies have arrived - and not just at the for-profit institutions. The virus of the greedy, racist, xenophobes dishes out grants and foundational funding like so much candy to any 2-or 4-year institution private or public. The managerial personnel are happy to receive a deposit of cash to stay competitive - with another building project.

If the new students look out the classroom window, they’ll be able to watch as an athletic hall and stadium, cluttered with corporate logos, becomes a reality. Is there a moment in which the student sees herself as less significant than the cranes lifting a beam of steel?

Death is always the required outcome of any exchange with the corporate world. And make no mistake, destroying the ability of people to recognize themselves outside of a corporate prism, destroying the right of people to be creative, to be free of coercion intended to situate a few at the top of the food chain is criminal. What is democratic about this arraignment of humanity?

No one is living when the many are forced to “die” for a few. This is the ideology of white supremacy disguised as progress. We are to think only from “the perspective of the namers, the controllers, the holders of ‘natural’ privilege and invisible power.”

The cabal of the small-minded mentality needs to be sent packing, once and for all! Change comes with the abolition of greed, injustice, and the mocking of democratic ideas. Despite the setbacks of one kind or another in recent years, the abolition of old habits of thinking that sustains white supremacy is underway.