University Pulls Out of ‘White Privilege Conference’

The University of Colorado’s Colorado Springs campus has decided it won’t be involved in the White Privilege Conference anymore. Since 2007 the campus’s Matrix Center for Social Equity and Inclusion, directed by UCCS sociology professor Abby Ferber, had lent the controversial conference some academic sheen, including the fact that UCCS students could get academic credits for attending the conference as part of a UCCS course. Although the annual conference is headed by its 1999 founder, Eddie Moore Jr., diversity counselor at the Brooklyn Friends School, the Matrix Center had been its official home and Ferber one of its key organizers.

According to UCCS spokesman Tom Hutton, the university began pulling out of the conference in the spring of 2013. “The relationship with the conference ended as a result of confusion about its name and the negative attention generated by it. University leadership, in concert with the conference organizers, determined the distraction caused by the conference was not beneficial to our student body,” Hutton told me in an email.

I like to think that my cover story for the May 27, 2013, issue of The Weekly Standard, “Beyond the Pale,” was a key part of the “negative attention” that the White Privilege Conference had received. I had attended that year’s White Privilege Conference near Seattle, and it had struck me as a three-day festival of white self-loathing coupled with finger-pointing at white people for their supposedly “unearned” wealth and social status afforded them simply by reason of their skin color. The same went for males, heterosexuals and Christians — which necessitated the four solid days of white-bashing, male-bashing, heterosexual-bashing, and Christian-bashing that made up the conference agenda. The bashing was supposed to be good, not just for guilty whites but for members of minority groups whose private paranoias about the way they thought white people secretly felt about them found expression in the conference’s offerings. Workshops bore such titles as “Talking Back to White Entitlement,” “Follow the White Supremacist Money,” and “Engaging White People in the Fight for Racial & Economic Justice”). {snip}

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Still it would be grandiose to claim sole credit for UCCS’s White Privilege pullout. Hutton told me that the university had “utilized many inputs” in making its decision.

Some of the inputs, according to a source, were trustees of the University of Colorado who weren’t happy about the therapeutic paleskin-beating that seemed to be the conferences’ main agenda. More input came from Colorado Republican State Sen. Kent Lambert, who spent some time with UCCS’s chancellor, Pam Shockley-Zalabak, discussing the campus’s severing of its White Privilege relationship.

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