Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof
Offering absolutely zero psychological or sociological evidence to back up her extraordinary claim, a student editor at the University of Alabama has written in the school’s newspaper: “If you’re white, you’re probably racist.”
“I don’t necessarily mean you say openly bigoted things or that you like spending your weekends defending Confederate monuments,” writes Marissa Cornelius, the opinions editor at The Crimson White, in a recent op-ed. “…I just mean that you probably have a lot of internalized racist beliefs that you most likely haven’t spent a lot of time unpacking.”
Cornelius does not provide readers with any proof whatsoever to justify her assertion.
“You being racist might not be entirely your fault,” Cornelius writes, failing to offer any corroborating evidence—even the tiniest bit—to prove that you are, in fact, racist. In spite of presenting even the slightest shred of evidence-based confirmation to bolster her case, Cornelius claims: “It’s time for us as white people to accept that racism is embedded in all of us.”
From the poorly-sourced and -cited op-ed:
You being racist might not be entirely your fault…Here’s what is your fault, though: failing to recognize the fact that, yes, you have racist beliefs and attitudes, and these might even sometimes be manifested into racist words or actions. Recent headlines regarding Bill Maher make for an exemplary case study of the “woke” white liberal who refuses to acknowledge that they’re probably more than a little racist. Though he has publicly apologized many times for using the n-word flippantly in a televised interview, he has excused his racism as something that “happened once” and petulantly resisted Ice Cube’s assertions that when it comes to race, he has been problematically toeing the line his entire career. Maher even went so far as to say that since he “grew up in an all-white town in New Jersey, not Alabama,” that “race wasn’t even an issue,” clutching dearly on to the old security blanket of Northern and West Coast white liberals that real racism can only exist south of the Mason-Dixon.
Maher refuses to see this incident as possibly being indicative of his larger attitudes towards race, but how could it not be? He felt comfortable using one of the most culturally loaded and offensive words casually on TV. And while he knows it was bad, he doesn’t want to participate in any sort of work getting to “the root of the psyche,” as Ice Cube suggested he and other line-toeing white guys should do. Bill Maher, like almost all of white America, wants to believe that he is post-racial. But by holding on to this belief, we engage in a dangerous sort of erasure of the racism that still plagues this country, extinguishing any chance we might have to address these issues and to attempt to fix them. When we pretend we are post-racial, we ensure that this will never be the case.
“You shouldn’t feel guilty for being white,” Cornelius assures her readers. “You should feel guilty for judging someone or treating them differently because of a difference in pigmentation, and then not working to change this conduct.” This is, of course, great advice, though Cornelius still refuses to offer any kind of evidence that white people in general “judge” or “treat” people different “because of a difference in pigmentation.”
MORE: Ohio U. asst. director of Global Studies Program: ‘White people are responsible for racism’
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