Perhaps you are confused by so much talk lately about racism being all around you, particularly talk about variants going by names like “systemic racism” or “structural racism.” You yourself don’t seem to see much behavior that you think is racist, at least not in any overt or observable way. Are you missing something?

The answer is, you are not looking nearly closely enough at the world of left-wing colleges and their professors and administrators. That is where the really, really bad racism is pervasive.

But wait a minute, you say. Isn’t academia the central headquarters of the high priests of the woke, “anti-racist” religion? Aren’t these professors and college presidents the very same people who presume to lecture the rest of us endlessly about how to be “anti-racist” and how to atone for our sins of “oppression” and “white supremacy”? What makes the Manhattan Contrarian think that these left-wing academics and their institutions may be the worst racists of all?

The main reason we can be sure that these left-wing academics are the worst racists is that they admit it. Indeed, they regularly fall all over themselves either to confess their own grievous racist sins, or to accuse their colleagues and institutions of such sins. Also, these institutions and their leaders and faculties are constantly accused of vile racism by the black, indigenous and people of color (“BIPOCs”) in their midst, and when so accused, they invariably offer no defense, abjectly concede the wrongdoing, and promise forms of penance that become ever more extreme with each new accusation. This is not the behavior of innocent people.

And yes, another way we know that the these high priests of “anti-racism” are themselves racists is that they are unable to articulate what “anti-racism” consists of without clearly admitting that it is a code word for overt racism. Thus, for example, the current Bible of the “anti-racist” movement, How to Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, states, “[t]he only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination” (quoted by William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection). It’s hard to think of anything more overtly racist than present discrimination on the basis of race. OK, now that I think of it, there is the also the setting up of segregated campus facilities limited to blacks or BIPOCs only, another hallmark of American academia today. But these are only small examples of the extensive evidence that America’s left-wing academics today are all vile racists. The most important evidence is the veritable torrent of their own admissions of guilt.

From many dozens of illustrations of the point, I’ll pick a select few:

• Do you remember the letter of President Christopher Eisgruber to the Princeton University community last September? Excerpt: “Racism and the damage it does to people of color nevertheless persist at Princeton as in our society, sometimes by conscious intention but more often through unexamined assumptions and stereotypes, ignorance or insensitivity, and the systemic legacy of past decisions and policies. . . . Racist assumptions from the past also remain embedded in structures of the University itself.” Overall the letter was sufficiently clear in its admissions of racism on the part of the university that it prompted a federal investigation.

• At Dartmouth, the President and Trustees put out a joint statement on July 1, 2020 confessing to a sordid history of racism. Excerpt: “We know there are no easy solutions to eradicate the oppression and racism Black and other students, faculty, and staff of color experience on our campus. . . .” Nearly a thousand faculty, students and staff promptly reacted with their own letter on July 14, condemning the racism, and indeed the “white supremacy,” at the College as even far worse than the leadership was willing to admit: “We are issuing this open letter to the Dartmouth senior leadership in an effort to move the College to take concrete steps to unravel its built-in structural racism. . . . The unrepentant White supremacy evident in this history has also shaped the mission, culture, and traditions of Dartmouth College. . . . We call on the senior leadership and Board of Trustees to dismantle the structures that implicitly or explicitly work against and devalue Black, Brown, and other people of color at Dartmouth.”

• Also in July 2020, some hundreds of members of the faculty of the University of Chicago signed an open letter to the university community headed “More than Diversity—A Call to Action from University of Chicago Faculty.” The accusations of racism against UC from its own faculty can only be described as scathing. A few excerpts (there are plenty more): “Over its history, the University has consistently reproduced racist structures and social systems. Professed commitments to diversity and inclusion ring hollow. . . . [E]ffective teaching and research on race at the University of Chicago requires a Department of Critical Race Studies. It is, in fact, extraordinary that we should have to articulate this as a demand in 2020. . . . ‘Like so many other venerable American institutions, the University of Chicago is built on slavery.’ So opens . . . a working paper . . . of the Reparations at UChicago Working Group (RAUC). As the authors document empirically and convincingly, the founding of the University of Chicago is indelibly linked to the fortune of slaveholder Stephen A. Douglas as its earliest benefactor.” Whew! Who would want to be associated with such a vile racist place?

• Then there was the June 24, 2020 letter from the heads of the African American studies departments at all the most prominent Catholic universities — Georgetown, Notre Dame, Fordham, Holy Cross, Villanova, and so forth — asserting that “systemic racism and white supremacy are problems” at each of these campuses, and that “Symbolic statements, marches, token town halls, or other typical measures to pacify our campus communities are not sufficient while grave inequities persist.”

And again, these are just a few out of dozens of such examples that I could have selected.

It is remarkable how easy it is to get these people to feel this overwhelming sense of guilt. I would have thought that the welcoming of large numbers of blacks and other “BIPOCs” into elite institutions of higher learning might be recognized as a generous act that would be met with gratefulness and thanks, but then what do I know? Obviously, since the people who run these places are near unanimous in owning up to their deep racism, the rest of us should be in no position to think otherwise. The question I have is, given their admitted deep and irredeemable racism, is there any hope for saving any of these places at this point? Or should they all just be abandoned and closed down?

UPDATE, February 26: Even as I was writing the post above, fancy all-female Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, became the subject of a big front-page New York Times article on the subject of its systemic racism.

It seems that in 2018 a Smith undergraduate, Oumou Kanoute, wrote a Facebook post accusing the college of racism for its treatment of her when she was eating a meal in an otherwise-empty campus common room. Quote from Ms. Kanoute: “All I did was be Black,” Ms. Kanoute wrote. “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College, and my existence overall as a woman of color.” In her Facebook post, Ms. Kanoute named names of Smith employees who had allegedly mistreated her, who included a janitor, a cafeteria worker, and a campus police officer (all of whom were white).

An investigation of the incident commissioned by Smith found “no persuasive evidence of bias.” However, meanwhile at least one of the employees had been suspended by Smith, and the others had their lives “gravely disrupted by the student’s accusation,” according to the Times piece. Smith never offered any of the accused workers an apology, and instead embarked on the usual rounds of self-flagellating “anti-bias” training for all the low-paid workers.

In the whole event nobody at Smith ever seemed to recognize that, despite the skin colors, it was the person of privilege — a student at a $78,000 per year elite academic institution — who was making accusations of racist behavior against low-paid blue collar workers. As far as I can determine, Ms. Kanoute did not suffer any detriment for her unfounded allegations of racism. According to this article in The Sun, she went on to graduate, and currently works as a research intern at Columbia University.