A Tale Of Two Conferences: Z! Haukeness’ White Privilege vs. Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance

01/30/2016

[Adapted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively on VDARE.com.]

You can now sign up for the 2016 White Privilege Conference, titled Re-Imagining Equity and Justice in the United States, to be held at the downtown Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia, Wednesday April 13th to Sunday April 17th. Save the date! (And don’t confuse it with the American Renaissance conference May 20-22 with speakers including (again) VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow, which I as it happens I just signed up for).

What happens at a White Privilege Conference? A whole lot of workshops, mostly. I’m just looking through the list here. [PDF]

We have a workshop titled "A History of White Supremacy and Resistance." The facilitators are listed as Z! Haukeness and Laura McNeill That first one’s Christian name is spelled "Z!," that’s uppercase "Z" and an exclamation mark: "Z!" How d'you get a name like that?

I googled it to find out.

Here he is, being interviewed by the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin: a twentysomething white guy with a long braided pigtail and big Gypsy Rose Lee earrings. Madison, Wisconsin is where he’s from, apparently.

Extract from the interview:

Interviewer: How did someone who grew up in small-town Wisconsin become committed to working for racial justice?
Z!: I had a radical teacher in 7th grade who said: "All of you are racists and your parents are too." That really challenged me to think. [ Q&A with Z! Haukeness: Fighting for racial justice, one action at a time, By Pat Schneider, Dec 10, 2010 0]

Seventh grade: so little Z! was, what? — twelve, thirteen. We're not told whether this was a public or a private school. If it was a public school, I urge the taxpaying citizens of Madison to march on the city education offices with pitchforks and flaming brands.

What’s up with that name, though? "Z!"? The interviewer asks him.

Interviewer: You call yourself Z! — where did that name come from?
Z!: It comes from the transgender pronoun "z-e." I’m transgendered, and that’s a gender-neutral pronoun, so I took out the "e" and added the exclamation point. I present pretty masculine but I’m gender queer, gender non-conforming.

Interviewer: Is Z! your legal name?

Z!: No, it’s not.

Interviewer: What is your legal name?

Z!: I'd rather not say.

I can’t say I blame you, pal.

D'you ever get the feeling that one night, while you were sleeping, some substantial portion of the human race was spirited away and replaced by Pod People from Alpha Centauri?

What else have we got in these workshops?

"Active Listening For Social Justice."

How can listening be active? Isn’t listening passive by definition? You're listening; the sounds come in at your ears; how is this active? Are we wiggling our ears?

"Blackness, Whiteness, Jewishness & Womanness: Embracing the Intersectionality of Race, Gender, and Religion While Building Relationships toward Effective Anti-Racist Practice."

Intersectionality, yeah. That’s a big thing with the Social Justice Warriors now, intersectionality. Someone tried to explain to me what it means; but I was trying to scrape something off my thumb at the time and didn’t pay attention.

"Teaching Racial Literacy and Developing Activism in Early Childhood."

I guess we're back here with Z! and his 7th-grade teacher.

Wait, no: they want to start earlier than that: "We will share a 1st — 3rd grade Social Justice Curriculum." You can’t start soon enough telling white kids how racist they are.

"Resisting White America’s Islamophobia."

Quote: "The post-9/11 era in the U.S. has exposed the large amount of hate and bigotry that White America carries towards Muslim people." Gosh, why would that be? Hard to figure.

And so on, and so on. It’s all rather silly, and you have to wonder that so many people have nothing better to do with their time than sit listening to gender queer guys from Wisconsin talk about intersectionality.

What is actually going on with the "white privilege" stuff? Black scholar John McWhorter had some good insights into this in a Daily Beast column he wrote titled Antiracism, Our Flawed New Religion. The column actually dates from July 27^th of last year, but someone just brought it to my attention.

McWhorter argues that antiracism is a religion. He develops the analogy much further, with antiracist versions of proselytizing the heathen, a Rapture, and a Day of Judgment. It’s a clever essay; he’s a clever guy.

I think he’s on to something, too. I have sat among religious Christians listening to them apologizing to God for being such contemptible worms loaded down with sin; the White Privilege Conference does sound uncannily similar.

But isn’t it all pretty harmless, though, like a convention of jugglers or bird-watchers? If it’s not your thing, don’t go — right? Is there really anything to get bothered about here?

Well, personally, I think that advising people on how to get first-graders to hate their parents and their ancestors is something the world could do without. And then there’s this, from the Campus Reform website:

Major universities across the country are offering course credit … for students to attend an annual national event known as "The White Privilege Conference"…Some universities are offering to front the cost and cover hotel and transportation fees.
For instance, Miami University of Ohio is covering more than half the cost and charging students a flat fee of only $60, potentially $240 less than the total expense of the conference…Haverford College in Pennsylvania is sending students to [the conference] free of charge.

[ Students nation-wide to attend four-day, university funded white privilege bash, By Anthony Gockowski, January 27, 2016]

That strikes me as something to object to. Haverford College is private, OK, that’s up to the alumni the next time Haverford asks them for money.

Miami U. is public, though, and there are surely other public colleges subsidizing their students to attend the White Privilege Conference. Z! and his pals are promoting their poisonous gibberish, and avoiding productive work, at my expense and yours. That’s objectionable.

Think about this: The American Renaissance conference in May is to be held once again at the very pleasant Montgomery Bell State Park in Tennessee — infinitely more pleasant than downtown Philly. American Renaissance, headed by Jared Taylor, is the main organization pushing back against anti-white racism, demographic displacement, and the de-legitimization of Western civilization.

Those are worthy causes, aren’t they? Is there a college or university in this whole wide country — is there just one — that will subsidize students to attend Jared’s conference, or award academic credits for attending?

If not, why not?

John Derbyshire writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. ) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He’s had two books published by VDARE.com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and From the Dissident Right II: Essays 2013. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.

Readers who wish to donate (tax deductible) funds specifically earmarked for John Derbyshire’s writings at VDARE.com can do so here.

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