Despite our suspicions that the current administration’s views are free from formal thought and intellectual moorings, a New Yorker article by Isaac Chotiner suggests otherwise. In a rather startling interview, Amy Wax, a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania, gives cover to the darkest and most inhumane policy proscriptions of the Trump administration. In his breathtakingly explicit article, “A Penn Law Professor Wants to Make America White Again,” Chotiner surveys the landscape of white supremacy through the eyes of a sophist. According to Wax,
“...we are better off if our country is dominated numerically, demographically, politically, at least in fact if not formally, by people from the first world, from the West, than by people from countries that had failed to advance. Let us be candid. Europe and the first world, to which the United States belongs, remain mostly white, for now; and the third world, although mixed, contains a lot of non-white people. Embracing cultural distance, cultural-distance nationalism, means, in effect, taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites.”
New Yorker, Isaac Chotiner August 23, 2019
Wax believes, and in fact, deduces her theory by means of her own rather limited “empiric” evidence. She excuses her controversial views by claiming her candor, willingness to speak the truth in the face of criticism, is a bromide for her lack of rigorous thought. Chotiner suggests that Wax’s core beliefs emanate from specious studies that Wax herself points to, but only when pressed, apparently without embarrassment:
“She described these views as the outcome of rigorous and realistic thinking, while offering evidence that ranged from two studies by a eugenicist to personal anecdotes, several of which concerned her conviction that white people litter less than people of color.”
Her “evidence” (Wax is a law professor) includes the personal observations that, “
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half”, for which she can offer no proof, nor defend with a scintilla of intellectual rationalization. Wax, in her haste to provide cover for a highbrow form of justifiable racism, can only manage to deflect her blatant sophistry by asking Chotiner several times during the long interview, to define racism—as if the term itself is somehow too subtle and, therefore, difficult to comprehend. A cursory Wiki search comes up with a rather apt definition with a simple click:
Racism is any action, speech, thought or other applicable activity which is prejudice, discriminatory, or antagonistic directed against, and based on the grounds of, a race or races different to one's own based on the belief that one's own race is superior.
-Wikipedia
Providing cover for an irrational belief, and making room for policy based upon it, is precisely what many of the best minds in Germany provided for the nazis. What the professor fails to realize is that regardless of her presumptive beliefs, the history of America has been the laboratory that disproves her notion. While she cites ‘western civilization,” and the white Europeans who created it, as being the source of all that is enlightened in the modern world, she fails to mention how southern and eastern European immigrants were regarded as inferiors in previous eras. She fails to account for the rapid development and ascension in western societies of brown, black and Asian immigrants from throughout the world and their undeniable contributions to current American ascendancy. She also fails to mention the negative contributions by her white and pristine predecessors that have included genocides, wars, mass annihilations, and the creation of unenlightened subsets like the native-born Klan, European-bred national socialism, the European and continental colonialism that enslaved, abused, and denied all they deemed as others.
That a learned law professor with the benefits provided to her, for no better reason than the date and place of her birth, could reject the evidence that confronts her daily at a university like Penn is disheartening. The University of Pennsylvania, for the record, has a diversity ranking of 96 out of 100 and a diverse population that exceeds the average diversity of other doctoral universities in the U.S. Considering the limiting factors of cost and entrance requirements of Penn, is it not a wonder her own lack of understanding--that class and the limitations imposed by a general neglect of educational opportunity for non-whites-- skews her rather naive observations?
Wax’s experience should lead her to a far different conclusion: that racism is more likely an intended residue of the limitation of intellectual advantage to an underclass. Wax, the daughter of European immigrants of modest means, flourished and has been compensated by a culture that valued her peculiar and singular skills, for sure, but certainly, one that accepted her as an equal. Attributing her own success and her freedoms to think and speak with authority—even if those thoughts and words are antithetical to the sensibilities of others, even if they are wrong, even if they are acted upon by others who would use them to demean and enslave others—is the measure that proves her mistaken beliefs are just that. They are beliefs that are held without evidence and lacking the rigor required by a culture so white, so European, and so prescient as to have devised countervailing political philosophy to renounce it. Her self-described “culture” evolved from baser autocratic forms of government and came up with a better form, democracy. The current model that has benefitted Ms. Wax and others who were not born to wealth or privilege, though imperfect, yearns to evolve further from the backwardness of Wax and her like-minded cohorts.
Amy Wax’s “empirical” belief that proof of her speculation lay in her own personal observation suggesting the intellectual mediocrity of minority and mostly black students elicited a deafening response from officials at Penn:
University of Pennsylvania Law School Dean Theodore Ruger responded, "Black students have graduated in the top of the class at Penn Law, and the Law Review does not have a diversity mandate. Rather, its editors are selected based on a competitive process."
Chotiner’s article reveals the breadth of ignorance that supports the Trump era policies that have diminished our national integrity and has rejoined the sins of our past. In a nation that has overcome so much intolerance and bigotry and has opened opportunities and a way forward for the very immigrants it had overlooked and marginalized over the years, professor Wax gives cover for the worse of our angels—to the devils who preside over the details of our innermost prejudices. In her own words, she has done for us what she so shamelessly had demanded of her interviewer, she has explicitly and definitively defined racism, placing her likeness in its margin.