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Dont get me wrong: Its not like its the first time.

I mean, seriously, Ive gotten used to right-wingers mangling my words to suit their purposes, and attempting to smear me: either as an anti-white extremist (because even though Im white, my Jewishness supposedly leads me to secretly seek the destruction of Aryan stock), or as one who is militantly anti-Christian.

And this they seek to demonstrate, typically, by digging up tweets or Facebook posts and presenting them either out of context or dishonestly representing what those statements say, hoping that those who see their version of things wont investigate my actual comments and think for themselves.

It is a particularly pernicious kind of fake news, and it is modern currency for reactionaries, especially internet savvy younger ones who tend to take a slash-and-burn approach to their politics, and have learned these methods from the likes of the Breitbart gang and James OKeefe.

Fortunately, I have the time to reply and demonstrate the depths of their duplicity. And doing so here will serve not only to make clear the disingenuousness of the smears in this particular instance, but will also serve to demonstrate the way in which right-wing media goes about its business: namely, lying in the service of their cause.

The latest smear comes from an outfit composed of student writers, one of whom either attended my presentation at Harvard this week, or watched it on the livestream provided by the school as part of their 10th annual diversity dialogue series.

If this person was in the room when I spoke, I had no idea, because he naturally never sought me out to ask questions, or seek clarification on my views, or challenge anything I had said. Likewise, if he watched the stream he never reached out via e-mail or social media to ask me about my comments. Because thats not the style for the right. They dont want clarification. They dont want accuracy. They hide in the shadows and rather than engage, they launch sneak attacks.

In this case, a sneak attack the headline for which was as follows:

Fascinating.

Needless to say, and before beginning work on this piece, I made sure to reassure my Christian wife, Christian daughters, and Christian mother that I meant them no harm and to please carry on. I wasnt able to reach my Christian best friend of 45 years to put his mind at ease, because he lives on the West Coast and it was too early. Hopefully he hasnt since seen the headline and determined that Ive just been faking it all along, waiting for the day when I could lead him and his family to jail for their faith.

But as I read the hit-piece I realized what the author had done. He had created a click-baity headline that bore no relationship to anything I had actually said. And he had apparently spent the better part of the previous 48 hours digging through years of Tweets and Facebook posts just to find a few nuggets he could pull entirely out of context to frame his story and justify said headline. Good work if you can get it, I suppose.

Before getting to the part about locking Christians up, the piece mentions that among my anti-Christian repertoire, are previous comments in which I referred to such as Jeezoids and fascists, and insisted that people who believe in a God of hell/damnation deserve to be mocked viciously and run out of the public square.

Pretty heady stuff, to be sure. But when you click the links you discover that the interpretation of my comments is, needless to say, lacking a degree of candor.

Have I used the term Jeezoids before to describe Christians? No, not Christians writ large. I dont believe most Christians are extremists, or the kinds of fundamentalists who resemble cult members. But those who do? Oh sure, those folks qualify as the kind of robots-for-Christ who merit the designation. One can still feel that the term is mean-spirited I suppose, or unkind. But to suggest I am applying it to the whole or even most of Christendom is simply a lie.

Indeed, there were two places in which this particular troll uncovered my use of the term, and exploring the context of both makes clear his dishonesty. The first was here:

Please note the context of this comment, which was in reply to an absurd and truly despicable tweet equating the treatment of Christians in America to the treatment of blacks under Jim Crow. And who had offered this vile analogy? Why, Bryan Fischer, of course formerly of the American Family Association: a notoriously bigoted anti-gay group, which ultimately fired Fischer for being such a bigot that even they couldnt keep him on anymore.

To call Fischer and his ilk Jeezoids is not bigoted, or even hyperbolic. It is accurate. To call him a Christian would be to slur millions of actual Christians who find his views repellent. That would be the true calumny.

Among other things, Fischer has said that we need an underground railroad to rescue children from same-sex households, that homosexual conduct should be criminalized, that discriminating against LGBTQ folks is not only acceptable but morally required, that practicing homosexuals should be banned from public office, that gays are to blame for the Nazi Holocaust, that First Amendment religious freedoms only apply to Christians, and that Islam is Satanic.

These are not the views of Christians writ large. They are not the things being taught in mainline Protestant churches, or in most Catholic churches, or in the Episcopal church to which my wife and daughters belong. They arent even accurate reflections of what all evangelicals and more conservative Christians believe. They are the bigoted and extremist positions of a sub-set of Christianity, no more reflective of it than the ISIS cult is reflective of the larger universe of Islam.

To call these kinds of Christians Jeezoids is not to mock Jesus, but to mock them for so clearly straying from the teachings of Jesus. They are the ones who by their bigotry mock the one they claim to be their savior. Not me.

The second usage of Jeezoids was here:

And once again, this was specifically in regard to a group of anti-abortion extremists who had engaged in deliberately deceptive smears against Planned Parenthood, and then violated multiple court orders during the investigation of their dishonest campaign against the family planning group. These people whose actions were exposed as lies, thereby in violation of one of those Commandments handed to Moses and which people like this insist others should live by are not representative of Christians. My use of the term Jeezoids to describe them was a way of distinguishing them from Christians. Any remotely honest person would be capable of discerning this basic truth.

As for the claim that I have called Christians fascists, again, this is not a term I have used, or would use, to describe Christians as a group. But it certainly applies to the above kinds of so-called Christians, and it is quite obviously that group to whom I was referring.

As for my desire to mock and run from the public square those who believe in a God of hellfire and damnation, let us go to the receipts in this case a couple of tweets from 2012:

Once again, the author demonstrated no interest in the context of the comment, but context matters. I was not making some rando suggestion that people who believe in God should be mocked or shut down, or institutionalized. I was responding to comments made by the Rev. Franklin Graham, who suggested in the wake of Barack Obamas re-election that God may need to basically destroy America as punishment for this grave sin and the nation having turned away from God. To believe in that kind of God one who would damn a nation for re-electing the black guy whose views you disagree with is to believe in unicorns, and especially vile ones at that.

Plenty of people who believe in a deity reject that image of God. Plenty of people who believe in a creator reject the notion that this creator is one who both loves the world so much, for instance, that he would give his only Son to redeem it but also possesses the kind of hate that would allow him to condemn to eternal damnation those who dont follow that Son as their personal savior.

As much as it might shock conservative Christians, their particularistic conception of God is not universal, even among Christians. They clearly have a hard time accepting this as one can see by the recent attacks on Pete Buttigieg by Rev. Graham and others but that doesnt make it any less true.

The only people I am critiquing here, and suggesting we should mock (or perhaps have committed, which I dont really support doing, actually) are those who believe in this vengeful, abusive God who operates more like a jealous and battering husband than a loving creator. Yes, for them mockery. Yes, for them, we should marginalize them entirely in the public square in the name of reason and logic and human decency. They can believe as they wish of course. And we can make fun of their inanity. And should. Daily. Loudly.

As someone who was regularly terrorized by this bunch as a child because they saw it as their duty to tell me, as a Jew, that I was destined for a lake of fire along with all my Jewish ancestors mockery is relatively mild retribution, and utterly deserved.

Now, to the locking Christians up thing.

Once again, lets look at what I really said. As youll see below, the allegation being made against me here is dishonest on two levels: first, because it ignores the very particular group of people I was criticizing, and second, because it conveniently leaves off the latter part of the Facebook post. Which is sort of important because it is in that portion of the post that I make it clear I really dont support locking up (as in mental hospitals) people who are Christians, or believers of any kind. In other words, if one reads the entire post, one can see I wasnt serious. I was trolling right wingers and they took the bait. Because they are the snowflakes they have warned us about.

Now to the post. First, the version provided by the right-wing rag:

Hmm, sounds pretty provocative; pretty intolerant, pretty much as if maybe the headline was right after all, right? Maybe I really do think Christians should be locked up.

But no. First, again, context. I was referring specifically to the kind of so-called Christians typified by the likes of Michelle Bachmann. And in the piece to which I was specifically responding, Bachmann suggested God might actually destroy America over the issue of marriage equality.

Of course. Because even though God wasnt sufficiently pissed over the sin of slavery, segregation, mass lynching, or campaigns of genocide against indigenous peoples at least not angry enough to destroy America over them the gays getting to wed thing has really pushed him over the edge. Mmm-k.

So yes, I was saying this kind of thinking is deranged. It is a sign of mental illness or a particular kind of cognitive dysfunction. I say that not to stigmatize mental illness by the way. I suffer from anxiety and depression so Im nothing if not sympathetic. But I believe people who are mentally ill need treatment of some kind, just like people with other types of illnesses should get the same. I dont think, for instance, that Michelle Bachmann can simply pray the insanity away. Thats not how this works.

I believe that if you are basing your morality on the ancient story of Sodom and Gomorrah a story that you show no indication of understanding, as it was actually not about homosexuality at all then yes, you are unworthy of being taken seriously. You are not well. You need help. But do I actually believe you should be locked up in a rubber room? Nah, which you can easily see from the next part of the post, which the writer in this case cleverly did not include in the screen shot:

Its right there. I dont believe lunatics like this should be locked up.

I do say they must be politically destroyed, and yes, thats a strong word for defeated, but thats what it means.

I also note that they should be allowed to believe and worship as they choose but they should have no influence on the rules and norms of a pluralistic society. In other words, and per the context of the post in the first place, their religious beliefs about marriage are fine for the way they choose to live their lives. If they dont want a gay marriage then they neednt have one. But to impose their Biblical views on the rest of us is to establish their religion as tantamount to state policy, which violates the First Amendments religious freedom clause.

You dont have to like the tone of my original post here. Honestly, I dont either and in retrospect could have said it differently, and should have. It was four years ago, and although Ive occasionally slipped into such tone since, I am really trying to be gentler in my presentation, not only for strategic reasons but also for reasons of simply being kinder.

That said, and however one feels about how I made the points here, I simply did not say what I am accused of saying. And I surely did not apply even the things I did say to all or most Christians, or believers in God.

That these things could have been clarified for the writer who saw it as his duty to expose me as a hateful bigot is obvious. He could have raised his hand and asked a question about them were he in the room. He could have approached me afterwards at the book-signing, and asked about them there. Or, if he watched the livestream he could have e-mailed me to inquire about the comments, and whether I stood by them, or what I meant by them.

But he did none of these things. Because to him, and the right-wing media world he serves, clarification and discussion serve no purpose. It is all gotcha, all the time. All about the take-down. All about the manufactured outrage. All about posing as victims of leftist hatred while flacking for those who regularly dispense real hatred against LGBTQ folks among others as seen in the above examples.

Its a shame I even have to waste time responding to such nonsense. But in a world where lies can travel around the globe in the click of a button and where certain unstable people will believe those lies and threaten those about whom the lies are told one cannot allow such vicious slanders and misrepresentations to stand. I certainly will not.

But by all means, keep bearing false witness fellas. And dont let that pesky 9th Commandment get in the way.

Im an antiracism educator/author. I Facebook & tweet @timjacobwise, podcast at Speak Out With Tim Wise & post bonus content at patreon.com/speakoutwithtimwise

This post was previously published on Medium and is republished here with permission from the author.

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Anatomy of a Smear - The Good Men Project

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Sunday July 21, 2019 10:02 AM PDT

2019/07/21 10:02

The whole thread is worth reading, but here are some excerpts...

He also points out that focusing on fine policy pointsnormalizes Trump by shifting the focus away from theracism and vile thinking at the core of his campaign. It allows Trump to take credit for the current economy, and any lingering prosperity. It allows onepeople to give themselves an excuse to vote for him. We cant give people any excuse. All his faults and crimes should be laid bare.

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See the rest here:
Tim Wise, who helped defeat David Duke in 1990 & 1991 has ...

Wise is scheduled to give the keynote address at the upcoming Decade of Dialogue event at Harvard University. The College Fix pointed out this week the irony in Wise, a straight white man, giving the keynote address at a conference on diversity. But it is perhaps more significant to note that Wise has made several disparaging remarks about Christians in his career as an activist and writer.

In a tweet from 2017, Wise called Christians Jeezoids. In 2012, he tweeted that people who believe in a God of hell/ damnation deserve to be mocked viciously and run out of public square.

@udnore @timjacobwise sorry but people who believe in a God of hell/ damnation deserve to be mocked viciously and run out of public square

— Tim Wise (@timjacobwise) November 26, 2012

In a Facebook post in 2015, Tim Wise argued that Christians should be locked up for basing their morality on a fairy tale. The post was written in reference to comments Michele Bachmann had made against the legalization of gay marriage.

If you are basing your morality on a fairy tale written thousands of years ago, you deserve to be locked updetained for your utter inability to deal with realityNO, we are not obligated to indulge your irrationality in the name of your religious freedombut we will provide you a very comfortable room, against which walls you may hurl yourself hourly if your choose. Knock yourself out.seriously, knock yourself out, completely, for weeks at a timeIm sorta kidding but not by much.

Wise has spoken on over 600 college campuses about racial issues such as white privilege.

Stay tuned to Breitbart News for more updates on this story.

Originally posted here:
Campus Lecturer Tim Wise: Christians Should Be Locked Up

Christians deserve to be mocked viciously and run out of the public square

To celebrate a Decade of Dialogue in its annual diversity conference, Harvard Universitys Faculty of Arts & Sciences invited a straight white man to give the keynote lecture.

But not just any straight white man.

Tim Wise, an anti-racism writer, educator and activist, has denigrated Christians as Jeezoids and fascists and called Pope Francis evil. He has tweeted that people who believe in a God of hell/damnation deserve to be mocked viciously and run out of the public square.

Those who base their morality on the Hebrew Scriptures deserve to be locked up, he said in 2015, claiming to be sorta kidding but not by much.

The Diversity Dialogue Series provides a retrospective look at diversity and inclusion, a discussion of current issues, and practical guidance on how we can move toward greater inclusion and belonging at Harvard, according to the event description.

The event also featured a panel discussion on moving from diversity to inclusion and belonging. Panelists broke down the obligations of what it means to be an ally, as well as the role of privilege and gender in the workplace.

Attributes his success to multiple forms of privilege

Wise avoided inflammatory anti-religious language in his keynote, perhaps mindful that the Christians he wants to incarcerate are a racially diverse lot.

The author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son and Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority instead emphasized his own wokeness.

Wise boasted that he had never been invited to speak by ICE, distinguishing himself from a biracial consultant on the panel discussion before his keynote.

He described his teenage daughter as militant, straight and cis-gendered ally to the struggle against transphobia, cisnormativity, and heterosexism and heteronormativity. He jokingly asked the audience to pray for him and his wife as their daughter applies to colleges.

The activist emphasized the importance of identifying institutional barriers to diversity and inclusion.

White supremacy does not only exist on a case-by-case basis, but more broadly serves to shape the superstructure of society, Wise told the audience.

MORE: Anti-racist Tim Wise keynotes College of New Jersey orientation

Wises motif of American history is rich white men telling not rich white people that their enemies are black and brown. Due to this, white people take for granted their advantage of horizontal [economic] mobility, he said.

Moderator Renee Graham, associate editor and columnist at The Boston Globe, admitted she was skeptical of Wise when she first saw him speak a decade ago at a Martin Luther King Jr. celebration at another university.

The black columnist thought to herself it is just like these universitiesto [pick] a white person [to speak] at a MLK celebration, Graham told the audience.

Wise replied that was a perfectly understandable attitude. The antiracist educator credited his own career success to his white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, cisgender privilege and age privilege.

Reparations must be on the scale of the Marshall Plan

Transitioning to current events, Wise emphasized his longstanding support for reparations for African Americans. He contributed a chapter to the 2003 book Should America Pay? Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations.

But he never specified exactly whom should be compensated or what they should receive.

Weve got a lot of work to do, but the fact that the conversation is being had is fabulous, he said. It is a victory that prominent Democratic presidential candidates are being asked to establish their stance on reparations.

Another win is that colleges are considering reparations, Wise said. He cited a recent vote by Georgetown University students to tax themselves with a new student fee to pay the descendants of slaves sold by the university nearly 200 years ago.

MORE: University offers class on The Problem of Whiteness

There is moral rightness in this necessary discussion, and something morally redeeming about forcing this conversation, Wise said.

The most specific Wise got on his reparations plan was calling for a systemic, institutional massive investment, like the stuff we did to rebuild our enemies after WWII with the Marshall Plan. Reparations cannot be simply a bill in the mail.

President Donald Trump is and always was racist, Wise said. His election shows that this country is more sexist and more racist than I realized.

Thats why it is important to educate individuals on their privilege in this political moment, Wise told the audience. Dominant group members had never been asked to think about their identity throughout American history.

Dont let students graduate unless they demonstrate solidarity

Wise sought to clear up purported misconceptions about educating people on equity, inclusion and solidarity. It is not about shaming people, its asking [them] to be responsible, responsive and accountable for their advantages, Wise said.

Racism, sexism and classism, among others, become default positions when we do not interrogate our reality, he added.

But educating people on their privilege can be a double-edged sword, the activist said:

If I convince you that your identity provides you with advantages, if I do my job well, which is to prove that white privilege is real and that male privilege is real and that straight privilege is real and that able-bodied privilege is real and theres lots of them Why would anyone want to get rid of them?

Higher education has actually been too successful in this regard, prompting white people to hoard their privileges upon realizing they exist, Wise said. In other words, white people are inclined to internalize superiority.

Academic institutions have an obligation to embrace the struggle for social justice and solidarity, not just at the level of rhetoric but policy as well, Wise said.

Schools must make mission statements up to date, and be willing to say what it means to operationalize the implementation of inclusive ideals.

He set out vague admission and graduation requirements in order to achieve this mission. Admissions offices must consider applicants under the mind-set that if youre not down with this mission, then you dont actually fit in with us as an institution.

Current students should pay their dues by proving that theyre committed to this mission by way of community service requirements relevant to solidarity. If they dont meet this standard, then you dont graduate, he advocated.

Wise attempted to debunk what he calls the building block of American ideology, the cornerstone of our secular gospel the activists first mention of religion all day except for his prayer joke about his college-bound daughter.

Genesis 1:1 in the Bible of Americanism is the idea that anybody can make it in America if you are just willing to work hard, he said. We all know this is not true.

MORE:Harvard afraid of being seen as waging war on Christianity

Eyerolls for diversity consultant who gave ICE presentation

In the conference panel of diversity consultants, human resources consultant Allison Manswell said the nature of white privilege is to deny that it exists, but benefit from it nonetheless. The fact that American currency features white American leaders proves that white privilege exists, she said.

Speaking on gender in professional environments, LGBTQ inclusion consultant Stephanie Huckel said co-workers should avoid assumptions about others sexuality entirely.

Just because I have a husband and a four-year-old, people might assume that Im straight when I am very queer, said Huckel, who leads the global diversity and inclusion initiative at gambling technology provider IGT. She didnt explain how she is very queer.

To achieve inclusion, we must get comfortable being uncomfortable, said author and activist Michael Fosberg, whose one-man autobiographical play Incognito tells the story of Fosberg learning hes half-black.

The diversity consultant made the room uncomfortable when he admitted that his flourishing career since Trumps election which led him to delete his social media accounts included a presentation for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That provoked eyerolls and gasps on the panel and among the audience.

MORE: U. Arizona protesters face criminal charges for ICE harassment

IMAGE: FAS Human Resources/YouTube

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Keynote speaker at Harvard diversity conference says ...

As revealed last week in a federal indictment, at least 33 affluent individuals, including television actors, corporate executives and bankers, allegedly engaged in crimes such as bribery and fraud in an effort to buy admission for their children into America's most prestigious universities. These included Yale, Georgetown, Stanford, Wake Forest and other schools.

At a press conference last Tuesday, Andrew Lelling, the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, described the defendants as "a catalog of wealth and privilege. ... They include, for example, the CEOs of private and public companies, successful securities and real estate investors, two well-known actresses, a famous fashion designer and the co-chairman of a global law firm."

For those unfamiliar with the great lengths that well-resourced families will go to secure unearned and undeserved opportunities, the details of the "Varsity Blues" conspiracymight seem outlandish. The ringleader and organizer was allegedly paid tens of millions of dollars to ensure admission for his clients' children. This involved bribing athletic coaches to secure a place at these elite schools for students who did not even play the sport in question. Standardized exams were altered, "corrected", and taken by people other than the students. The consulting firm at the center of the "Varsity Blues" scandal falsified other records as well.

In fact, this scandal offers only an amplified version of the broken system of American higher education, where well-resourced individuals, families and communities can place their children in elite private and public schools and pay for educational counselors, tutors and test preparation, as well as other opportunities which are not generally available for most people. "Opportunity hoarding" -- the means whereby social and economic capital and all the opportunities which come from it are held almost exclusively in the hands of the rich or upper middle class and rich -- is one of the main day-to-day methods through which intergenerational economic inequality is perpetuated in the United States.

Because race and class are inseparably intertwined in American society, the "Varsity Blues" bribery and fraud conspiracy is also a gross example of white privilege and unearned advantages. In the United States the average white family has at least 15 times more wealth than the average black or Latino family. (Some estimates suggest that this difference is closer to 30 times if vehicles are removed as an asset in these calculations.) This disparity in wealth remains even when comparing white and black families who earn similar incomes.

Ultimately, this extreme disparity in wealth is a human story about how certain individuals and groups are able to expand their affluence and opportunities across generations while others are weighed down with the twin societal disadvantages of not being white and not having access to even modest amounts of intergenerational wealth.

How does America's educational system amplify both white privilege and class privilege? What does the "Varsity Blues" scandal reveal about the cultural pathologies of the rich and powerful? How should the students implicated in the "Varsity Blues" scandal be punished? How does standardized testing perpetuate racial and economic inequality? How is this scandal being twisted by white conservatives into another way of blaming black and brown Americans for the bad behavior of white elites?

In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with Tim Wise, one of the nation's leading anti-racism activists and a frequent guest on MSNBC and other news outlets. Wise is the author of numerous books, including Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority and Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich and Sacrificing the Future of America. This is the second part of a two-part conversation. The first installment can be read here.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.You can hear our full conversationon my podcast, "The Chauncey DeVega Show."

What does the "Varsity Blues" cheating and bribery scandal reveal about white privilege and its intersection with income inequality and class privilege? The whole story is both funny and damning: There are so many legal ways for the rich to manipulate college admissions that to go to such great lengths seems unnecessary -- unless the students involved are really that dim and unqualified.

Either their kids are incredibly unintelligent and incompetent or at least these parents must think that is the case. Otherwise all these young people would need to get into college, given their parents' money, would be a ACT or SAT prep course or maybe just have mom and dad write a check to the school as a "donation" -- which is completely legal, whether or not it's ethical. But apparently that was not enough to guarantee admission for their kid.

Beyond the 50 or so examples we know of from this alleged college bribery case, what this really shows is a bigger problem with our culture that is rarely discussed. We're very quick in the United States to call out the so-called "culture of poverty" to disparage poor people -- especially those who are black -- or to say that poor people have bad values and poor impulse control. But what could be a better example of short-term thinking than a parent who breaks the law and cheats to get their kid into a college that they are really not qualified to be in?

When rich people make these types of bad decisions they are not generally discussed and criticized as representing a "culture of affluence" or a "culture of wealth." When Wall Street grifters tanked the economy that was not broadly attributed to a "culture of affluence." I hope that we can use this moment to flip the script on this cultural critique that we have put on the people at the bottom for so long, and examine the corruption and bad behavior of the country's elites.

We are seeing the standard deflections and denials of responsibility, which are central to how white privilege and other unearned white advantages function in American society. These are nonsense claims like, "These students didn't know what was happening" or "How will they be hurt emotionally by discovering that they are frauds?" The excuse-making is really sickening and pathetic.

I don't care. Look, I'm the parent of a high school junior right now who is looking at colleges. She's in the process of trying to winnow down where she wants to go.. As a parent of a child in that situation, the idea that she would not know if we interfered is absurd. She doesn't even like it when we look up stuff online. She doesn't want even that level of interference, and that's the norm. First of all, if you didn't take the test, how can you possibly not know that? If there was someone next to you correcting your answers and giving you help, how can you not know that? If you got to take the SAT or ACT. test home at night or got all sorts of extra time, how can you not know that is abnormal?

How can these children of the rich who were apparently admitted to these schools through fraud not know that lies were told on their behalf about them being elite high school athletes? They were also magically diagnosed with learning disabilities right before they had to take a standardized test. Again, this is absurd. There is this other defense that the parents mailed in the applications for some of the students and they might not have known their parents altered them. If you can't figure out how to submit an application, then you just don't need to go to college, period. Just stay home.

There was even a segment on Tucker Carlson's show about how this scandal is really an example of a broken admissions system where affirmative action creates all this corruption and unfairness -- for white people. In this especially broken logic, somehow when rich white people do something wrong it is really black and brown people's fault.

This is coming from a guy, Tucker Carlson, who has also amplified the racist "white genocide" concept on his show. Carlson also talks repeatedly about immigration replacing "our culture." Ultimately, what Carlson and his guest are saying is that if we get rid of these programs that offer opportunities to people of color who've actually faced systemic and interpersonal hardship and inequality in their lives and overcome it enough to be qualified to go to these elite schools, then rich white people will somehow stop gaming the system.

This is putting the cart before the horse. It's precisely because the system of education in America specifically, and higher education more generally, has been so tilted towards white people that affirmative action was originally created and is still needed. That's the whole point. If the system had not been rigged from the start, affirmative action would not have been necessary. And beyond the super-rich who are being implicated in this "Varsity Blues" criminal case there is a whole system where the likes of Jared Kushner's dad can write a $2.5 million check to get his incompetent, pathetic son into Harvard University, where he did not belong.

It's also a system of K-12 education whereby black kids and Latino kids are in schools that are approximately 10 to 12 times more likely to be places of concentrated poverty. Racial preferences for whites in America have existed for almost 400-years in the United States. Only willful ignorance prevents people from seeing that fact.

There is also the narrative of presumed inferiority of black and brown folks, regardless of their academic and professional accomplishment. This is the whole "You took a white person's place" cultural script. The soft bigotry of low expectations.

Well, this cheating scandal by rich white people should blow that narrative out of the water, because we have the data in terms of legacy admissions at Harvard, for example -- never mind the Abigail Fisher case at the University of Texas --that it is really mediocre white folks who benefit from the system far more than black and brown folks, who have to be 10 times as good to get half as far.

Admission involves many variables. You cannot blame one factor on why you did not get into the school that you preferred. Moreover, at the most selective colleges in America, black and brown folks combined are about 14 percent of all students. By definition, they did not bump a white person to get that spot. For example, at Harvard, they have enough people applying who have perfect SATs and perfect GPAs that they could fill out their entire freshman class two or three times over most years.

Is it frustrating when one does not get into the school they wanted to? Sure. But again, it is not black and brown folks who "took" a white student's "rightful place." There also needs to be more discussion of the role of geography in how universities decide who to admit. Potential students from rural white communities are viewed as much more desirable for purposes of "geographic diversity" in an entering first-year college class than are those from more populated regions. That is a type of built-in "affirmative action" for white students.

There are serious proposals to make college admissions at elite schools into a lottery system where a minimum set of criteria -- albeit still very competitive -- are used. But ultimately what this all points to is a need to completely overhaul college admissions for the betterment of all these kids and families. We don't need a generation of neurotic kids and neurotic parents who are fighting over the pieces of these small pies known as the admissions process. We need kids to be healthy and just live their lives and realize that where they go to college is not going to define who they are. Unfortunately, we have a lot of parents who have raised them to believe that is the end-all and be-all of their existence.

This "Varsity Blues" cheating scandal also exposes other fictions about meritocracy and the rigor of these elite institutions. There are many examples of students matriculating into these elite colleges and universities -- doing well and graduating -- and then it is discovered that their credentials were falsified. Moreover, we also know that standardized tests do not predict success in college.

That is correct. Why then are these standardized tests still being used? Why are we using them in private prep schools? Why are we using them in colleges? Very simply, standardized tests are still used because they produce the biggest benefit for the people who have always had the largest amount of privilege in America. The scores on these tests correlate first and foremost with zip code. If you ask any college administrator or any college president, in private, when there are no funders or cameras around, "Do you believe that the SAT, the ACT, the GRE, MCAT, LSAT have any real importance in terms of predicting a person's ability?" They will tell you "no".

But these administrators and university officers cannot allow themselves to say such things publicly because the people who do the best with the current testing regime are the people who write the checks, and they are the people who count in this world.

As you said, SATs and ACTs really only predict how well a student will do during the first semester or year of college. The fact that students are chosen based on tests with such little predictive power is fundamentally absurd.

This cheating scandal also came to light while we are awaiting the Supreme Court decision about Harvard University and "affirmative action."

First, I would encourage the Asian-American folks who are being used, and perhaps are vulnerable to the siren song of this right-wing argument that they go and study the history of Ed Blum, the guy who is the driving force behind this Harvard affirmative action case. For years Blum has been trying to get rid of affirmative action and he's always picked supposedly aggrieved white people who he claims have been harmed, such as Abigail Fisher -- who certainly was not qualified to go to the University of Texas, by the way.

Bloom got tired of losing, and I think he decided that one of the ways he could do better with public opinion and the courts would be to find a nonwhite face to be his new face of victimization.

The second thing I would suggest is that Asian brothers and sisters who may not know this information -- it was actually Asian folks who alerted me to this fact -- go back and look at the history of the "model minority' myth. People like Ed Blum and other right-wingers are using that myth to make it seem as though their opposition to affirmative action programs for black and brown folks is not racist at its core.

The history of the "model minority" concept in which Asians are stereotyped as all being hard-working, studious people who deserve our support, and that we should all be more like them, has its origins in the early 1960s. As that concept started to get circulated in print and elsewhere the subtext was, "Why can't minorities just keep their noses clean and their heads down like these folks?"

What's going on in 1961? The United States is in the middle of the civil rights rebellion. What better way to throw cold water on the civil rights uprising than to essentially argue with the model-minority myth that, "Hey, you know? Those black folks over there, if they would just be more like these hard-working Asians, they wouldn't have all these problems."

Context is key here in another way: The model-minority myth was created by white people when the United States still had immigration restrictions on Asians. The United States is getting ready to start bombing Southeast Asia into oblivion. More than 100,000 Japanese-Americans had been locked up in internment camps only two decades earlier. America has a long history of anti-Asian bias but all of a sudden there is this new right-wing narrative where we love Asians -- but only so far as we can use them as a weapon against black and brown folks.

The good news from this Harvard trial is that there are many Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders who have been pushing back against the model-minority myth and the efforts to use their group as a wedge and tool against black Americans and other nonwhite groups. Blum and other conservatives are not really interested in helping Asian folks. It is about hurting black and brown folks with the goal of ultimately helping whites.

What do you think should happen to the students who are implicated in this college admission bribery scandal?

They have to be put out of school. Again, I do not believe that any of them are innocent. But for the sake of the conversation, let us assume the possibility that a few of them may have been innocent in terms of knowing the particulars of what happened with the cheating and bribery. But these students have still received ill-gotten gains. Here is an analogy. If a person who stole $1 million put the money in my bank account, I know that I didn't earn it. I am not entitled to keep it just because I'm not the one who stole it.

If it could be shown that any of these young people truly and honestly did not know what was happening, then they should reapply. If they can apply and get in through the normal means, fine, give them a shot. But if these rich white kids knew, as I suspect they did, that strings had been pulled and the scam had been run on their behalf, they should be expelled. Put their property out on the street. Clean out their dorms. I also think students who benefited from this scam should be permanently blackballed from higher education -- at least at any of those elite institutions.

I have very little sympathy for them at this particular moment unless they can demonstrate some significant restitution. Perhaps if they want to publicly admit It: "You know what? This was horrible. We'd like to donate X million dollars to set up scholarship funds for folks who are marginalized to get into these schools and then be able to afford it."

Maybe if these rich white students did something like that with their money, then I might say, "All right, give them another chance. Let them apply through the normal means." But if they're not willing to do that -- and I suspect absolutely zero of them will be -- then let the chips fall where they may and they can struggle like the rest of the students.

This political and social moment in the United States is an example of a particularly malignant type of white entitlement. How are we doing as a society in terms of confronting this problem?

White entitlement is baked into the DNA of the United States of America. But there is value in repetition. There is value in reminding people of that fact over and over again. Sometimes it feels like we're banging our heads against the wall and we're not getting anywhere. But I think as much as things are coming off the rails at this particular moment in American history, it is also the case that you have more people talking about and actually naming concepts, facts, social problems and realities such as "white privilege." "white fragility," "white entitlement" and "institutional racism."

This language has now entered the mainstream of American public discourse. Now that we have the language being used, that is another step in confronting racial inequality and injustice and deploying those concepts to do the work of real social and political change to make American society better and healthier.

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Anti-racism activist Tim Wise: How white privilege shaped ...