Adventures in Newspeak

LITTLE ROCK — “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.”

-George Orwell “The Principles of Newspeak” These days you don’t have to believe in the innate superiority or inferiority of a particular race to be called a racist, which is why the word has lost much of its sting. It’s now widely used as a general term of invective. To render a word meaningless, just use it promiscuously.

When such clichés lose their power, others are needed to take their place. So now another term has been invented to carry the opprobrium that Racist once did: Culturally Incompetent. Here in Arkansas, a judge who doubles as a demagogue when he tires of his day job-Wendell Griffen-used the phrase the other day to criticize Governor Mike Beebe. The governor’s sin? He had appointed a white instead of a black candidate to the state Supreme Court, and a white male at that. This was proof he was “culturally incompetent,” according to Judge Griffen.

Cultural incompetence sounds so much more elevated than mere racism. So now those who don’t discriminate on the basis of race, class or sex can be called Culturally Incompetent, a phrase with the superficial sound of scholarship-almost a diagnosis rather than an insult.

It is a rare moment when you’re present at the creation of a new political label. Catch phrases in politics tend to multiply in such numbers, like barnacles, that no one may be able to identify the precise moment when the first one attached itself to the ship of state. It’s all you can do to just try to scrape them off.

But now we’re seeing the birth of not just a new shibboleth, but an entire new ideology.

A whole pseudo-science dubbed Cultural Competence has sprung up on the nation’s campuses, especially in its departments and schools of education, where an inflated vocabulary long has been used to cover a multitude of ills-from Social Promotion to Self-Esteem.

Outside of Wall Street, it’s hard to think of a greater source of frauds than American faculties of education. It’s not surprising that Bill (The Weatherman) Ayers, that intellectual refugee from the chaotic 1960s, would have wound up as a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Naturally he’s still preaching revolution, though now in a milquetoast kind of way, and living in a toney suburb. It all goes together.

This latest euphemism for a positive racism-Cultural Competence-comes with its own gnostic vocabulary designed to prove that some groups are more equal than others. Namely, those the educantists wish to favor.

Racism is back under a different name and a different race is to benefit. But the essence of the swindle remains the same: Individual merit doesn’t matter; group identity is all.

In the grand tradition of Affirmative Action, racial discrimination is now to be practiced in the elastic name of Social Justice, which is a quite different animal from just plain old, impartial justice. Social justice is justice with a peephole in its blindfold and its thumb on the scales.

To adopt this perversion of old-fashioned justice-as in equal justice for all-a new generation has to be taught to discriminate on the basis of race, creed or color. Carefully taught. By teachers who themselves have undergone Thought Reform. It requires perseverance and pretension, loads of it. For it’s not easy to muddle even young minds. The function of all the high-flown phrases is to present vague prejudices as elaborate ideas with real intellectual capital.

Here is how it’s done at the University of Minnesota, where a Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group has been organized. (The longer and more pretentious the names of these outfits, the easier it is to hide discrimination on behalf of the favored race, culture, class or gender.)

In keeping with current bureaucratic usage, committees are now inevitably dubbed Task Forces.

This one acknowledges that “cultural competence remains hard to define and that current definitions lack consensus,” but that may be an advantage. The wispier the ends, the easier to justify unsavory means. Like discrimination on the basis of race, sex or class. That’s not simple prejudice any more but Cultural Competence.

An excerpt or two from the Task Force’s communiqué sums up the flavor of this whole, dubious enterprise: “Our future teachers will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression.

. . . Future teachers will recognize & demonstrate understanding of white privilege . . . Future teachers will understand the importance of cultural identity and develop a positive sense of racial/cultural identity . . .” At least with those races and cultures now to be privileged.

The more racism changes, the more it remains the same underneath. Note the dictatorial tone here: Future teachers will do this and will not do that, no questions asked. Jawohl!

This isn’t education, of course, but indoctrination. As with any totalitarian program, the very meaning of words becomes expendable, even reversible. George Orwell would understand.

Discrimination on the basis of race or class or sex now becomes a good thing, a sign of enlightenment and Social Justice. A fog of multisyllabic words is spread over the whole agenda, the better to make it sound sophisticated, avant-garde, terribly advanced. Nothing hides bad ideas like covering them with pretentious phrases out of a bad sociology textbook-like white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, internalized oppression . . . . and, of course, cultural incompetence.

Whoever dreams up these phrases must have a lot of time on his hands, and probably a state job.

Ever since Marxism went out of fashion, the fabricators of such industrial-strength phraseology have had to find new realms to confuse with academic mumbojumbo, and the field of education was a natural, having already been confused beyond belief.

What we have here is a kind of intellectualized Ponzi scheme: The suckers are baited by a quick payoff in the form of the cheap, transient satisfactions that go with hating and despising those of another class or race-even as they are being prepared for a lifetime as bitter losers.

Only those who run the indoctrination program may profit by it, perhaps as the holder of an endowed chair at one of the more prestigious universities. Or maybe as a nationally known pulpiteer in the mode of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of a Chicago mega church. Mouthing the clichés of Cultural Competence can add up to big bucks.

As for those who resist this kind of doubletalk, and hold fast to the once plain meaning of words like culture and competence, they’re sure to be denounced as Culturally Incompetent. Which is what The Hon. Wendell Griffen called the governor. The phrase isn’t political discourse so much as name-calling. With two-dollar names.

Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at: [email protected]