It’s no small task to hijack a whole system of education to achieve a political end, but Canadian academics — “critical race scholars,” “decolonial theorists” and the like — seem to have accomplished it. Congratulations are in order. Once believed to be underdogs doomed to a life of underemployment and student debt, these scholarly activists have created a red guard of radicalized students willing to march in the street calling for intefadeh.
Ideological entrepreneurs in progressive academia (most of academia) embraced the theories of Kimberlé Crenshaw, a Columbia University professor of critical legal studies who came up with the idea that identity is the root cause of disadvantage. They then applied the work of academics like Ibram X. Kendi, who discovered the solution to oppression: “anti-racism,” or the levelling of the social justice scales by discriminating against the privileged. The takeaway: those who are considered to be privileged colonizers deserve whatever anti-oppressive resistance comes their way.
