Baked-In Wokeness

The David Austen Walsh case shows the DEI regime won’t go away anytime soon

Can a white guy be hired as a history professor at an American university? According to one left-wing academic, the answer is no. David Austin Walsh, a Yale postdoctoral fellow, posted on X this week that he’s unemployable in his profession. Why? Because he’s a “white dude.”

Walsh’s observation drew a deluge of leftist outrage. Walsh’s cohorts couldn’t believe a white guy would complain about not getting a job. As a good leftist, he’s supposed to accept unemployment due to his skin color.

Some conservatives tried to rally to Walsh’s aid, but he rejected their overtures. He insisted he could not support their “repugnant” projects, so he will stick with leftism. 

Walsh’s story demonstrates how much of wokeness is baked-in at this point. Academia still operates on an anti-white basis and true believers still pledge allegiance to it–even if they suffer from this ideology. This illustrates how deeply embedded this cancer is in our society and how much work it will be required to excise it.

Walsh is no moderate liberal. Just a few days before his “cancellation,” he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times declaring Trump a Nazi. Yet, he’s at least honest enough to realize why he can’t get an academic job. 

His claim is backed up by the evidence. Over 50 percent of history job postings now focus on minority studies. Professorships focused on African-American or Asian-American studies almost always go to the minority group in question. Other fields are also dominated by “diversity studies” and the jobs go to non-white candidates. Some academic search committees explicitly say they’re only looking for a candidate of a certain race (and it’s never a white dude). 

Even though this directly harms Walsh, he doesn’t question the system. He simply wants to be hired on the merits of his anti-white work rather than on his skin color. Unfortunately for him, DEI is not a meritocracy. Race triumphs over everything and whites are at the bottom of the hierarchy. To question it is to show one’s white privilege. The only acceptable response is to submit to this inferior status. 

Walsh grumbles, yet assents to this framework.

The historian’s acquiescence demonstrates how deeply rooted these beliefs are among leftists. Some on the Right insist that many of their political foes don’t genuinely believe their own bullshit. It’s just a cynical way to virtue signal and obtain a job and social status. However, Walsh and many like him are willing to accept worse conditions for themselves on behalf of the cause. It’s not all rewards and good times for being a leftist. There are risks and downsides with public advocacy (albeit, far less risks and downsides than being a right-winger). Many leftists are willing to be arrested and lose their jobs for Palestine. Many leftists rioted for George Floyd. Many leftists will cut off friends and family over minor political disagreements. This is not a shallow acceptance of this ideology–it’s a serious commitment. Walsh testifies to that mentality.

The Right has made strides against DEI infrastructure in universities. Red states are beginning to force public universities to scrap their diversity bureaucracies and cut down on woke indoctrination. However, the ones who are actually teaching history and other important subjects are becoming much worse. Academia has always been left-wing, but it’s becoming even more so in recent years based on who’s getting hired. These will be the people crafting our history for years to come, and their view will be very woke, to say the least. 

Americans don’t have deep historical knowledge. A sizable portion of our population can’t say who we declared independence from. What little Americans know of our history will come from what they learn in school. If the textbooks and course plans are drawn up by radical left non-white professors, kids will only remember native genocide, slavery, segregation, and other subjects that demonize whites. This will serve as the sole historical understanding for many Americans and will impact how they see the world. This is already the reality for younger generations.

This situation reveals how baked-in wokeness is. I argued back in March that elements of wokeness are in retreat. There are the aforementioned efforts against DEI in universities. Affirmative action is under attack. Corporations are cutting back on their DEI commitments and pledges to woke causes. Woke films continue to bomb at the box office. There’s a general antipathy toward the in-your-face political correctness that was pushed a few years ago. All of this is real progress, but it doesn’t mean total victory is at hand. Universities still favor woke non-whites for jobs, Pride Month is still celebrated by every institution, and HR departments still operate on DEI principles. 

Rather than being put away, wokeness is merely moderated. The fight against it will be a long battle.

Part of that fight will require us to radically reform academia. We cannot allow every subject to be dominated by the Left. We need red states to develop programs to attract conservative academics to their public universities. With conservative academics ensconced at red state universities, we can craft our own textbooks to challenge the standard left-wing ones and ensure our students get a much better perspective of American history and culture.

This won’t be created overnight. It will take long-term planning and investment to work out. But in the end, it will pay off. We cannot allow for the current anti-white paradigm to carry on indefinitely. America needs an alternative to the system David Austin Walsh both supports and bemoans.