5 things the campus left decided was racist in 2021

Throughout 2021, demands for "anti-racism" and Critical Race Theory in education have been rampant on college campuses.

Throughout 2021, demands for “anti-racism” and Critical Race Theory in education have been rampant on college campuses. 

Here are 5 things the campus left decided was racist in 2021 to perpetuate its narratives. 


1. Google

The University of Minnesota published a research guide on “Conducting research through an anti-racism lens,” insisting that statistics and search algorithms like Google’s are racist. 

Per the school’s website, the guide “was developed in response to librarians fielding multiple requests from UMN researchers looking to incorporate anti-racism into their research practices.”

One section in the guide titled, “Acknowledge that data is not objective”, condemns modern statistics for being racist and alleges that Google’s algorithms are structured in racist ways. 


2. Grades

In a November 5 lecture at the University of Tennessee titled “The Possibilities of Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies”, Aso Inoue proclaimed that, ”White language supremacy in writing classrooms is due to the uneven and diverse linguistic legacies that everyone inherits, and the racialized white discourses that are used as standards, which give privilege to those students who embody those habits of white language already.” 

In addition to the lecture, Inoue wrote a 358-page book titled Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom, which again purports that, “Grading, because it requires a single, dominant standard, is a racist and White supremacist practice.


3. Math

In July, Deborah Ball, who teaches mathematics at the University of Michigan, argued in an episode of the Ed Fix Podcast that math is “dominated by Whiteness and racism.” She also expressed that her math and science colleagues were resistant to her notion that the two disciplines are comparatively subjective in analysis and interpretation to that the humanities. 


4. Being afraid of pit bulls

The nonprofit Animal Farm Foundation announced an initiative to push back against “exclusionary dog breed restrictions in the housing insurance industry.”

In a statement, AFF cited Ann Linder, a Legislative Policy Fellow with Harvard Law School’s Animal Law and Policy Program, who claimed that pit bulls have been unfairly tied to “gang violence by urban youths, as well as the hip-hop music scene.”

The AFF also cited work from Eric Tarver, an associate professor of philosophy at Emory University who writes that pit bulls are viewed as a “perceived threat to normative whiteness.”


5. Rules

In a 2021 article titled “’Press Charges’: Art Class, White Feelings, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline,” assistant professor at Appalachian State University Albert Stabler argued that the desire to punish students for violating school rules is due to “the overvaluation of White feelings” harming people of color.

Throughout the article, Stabler, who describes himself as “a nearsighted cis white man from Ohio who spent almost eighteen years in Chicago, making art with young people around the city, and participating in the independent art world,” makes several racism claims at a high school where he formerly taught art, including that white people “express the paternalistic view that people of color are like children who cannot appreciate what they are given, nor be trusted to look after themselves.”


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