Prof: ‘invention of white race’ created racism
Prof. Joseph Kuilema of Calvin College wrote an op-ed in the school’s newspaper condemning members of his community for being white supremacists and blaming racism on the “invention of the ‘white race.’”
“It must be clearly stated that those who deny white privilege functionally believe in white supremacy, whether they have the courage to write it on a car or not,” Kuilema stated in his article, referring to a Nov. 22 incident in which two students reportedly etched swastikas and the words “white power” in the snow on several cars on campus.
President Michael Le Roy of Calvin College confirmed in a statement to the campus community that the perpetrators were identified using on-campus video surveillance.
"Racism is one subcategory of sin and so all of us are corrupted by sin and all of us have prejudices that hold us captive and hold us back from the kind of deep and meaningful relationships that we believe God calls us to," Le Roy said later during a college event.
The names of the two individuals have not been released, leading The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Blake Neff to suggest the incident was a hoax or petty prank.
Indeed, there have been several false campus hate-crimes on across the country recently. Last month, the creator of an anonymous anti-black social media account was found to be an activist in the African-American community at Kean University. At Harvard Law School, the vandalism of a series of photos of black professors led one of the affected professors to speculatethat “maybe it was meant to protest the perceived marginalization of black professors, or was a hoax meant to look like a racial insult in order to provoke a crisis.”
In a separate case, a three suspected nooses at the University of Delaware turned out to be trash left over from an event earlier in the year.
At Calvin College, however, Kuilema is convinced the acts were racist hate-crimes and blames them on institutionalized racism in America.
“I, Joseph Kuilema, am certainly a racist. As a white male, I benefit tremendously from institutions and systems that have been built by and for people like me. This is how the social sciences define racism, not as merely the product of prejudice, explicit or implicit bias, but a system of power based on the invention of the ‘white race’ by people in power,” Kuilema wrote.
Kuilema goes on to say Calvin College, the state of Michigan, and America are the products of systematic racism and white privilege.
“Racism built America and its systems and institutions. Those systems and institutions, from Congress to Calvin College, tend to disproportionately benefit white people because that’s who built them,” he said, going on to say that, “white supremacy created slavery and Jim Crow, but when it was combined with its Calvinist cousin Manifest Destiny, it also created Michigan.”
Kuilema cites “From Every Nation,” a document produced by Calvin College, in his arguments.
“Calvin College would not exist without racism,” Kuilema said. “To put it in the words of Calvin’s own ‘From Every Nation’ (FEN) document, ‘the early builders of the Christian Reformed Church and Calvin College benefited from this racial differentiation, and in the process they inherited a national legacy of white privilege and the subjugation of people of color.’”
Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @AGockowski
