Claudia Rankine, genius!

Claudia Rankine is a professional aggrieved-African-American. In 2014, she received the National Book Award for poetry for Citizen: An American Lyric, a tract exposing America’s “systemic racism.”

Two years later, she was awarded the $625,000 MacArthur genius grant for her poetic efforts at making people “understand that whiteness is not inevitable, and that white dominance is not inevitable.”

So thoroughly committed to its own denunciation is the American Establishment, that Rankine is now teaching a combined English/African American Studies course at Yale.

Yale Course Catalog:

* ENGL 233B/AFAM 232B, CONSTRUCTIONS OF WHITENESS Claudia Rankine
An interdisciplinary approach to the study of whiteness. Discussion of whiteness as a culturally constructed and economically incorporated entity, which touches upon and assigns value to nearly every aspect of American life and culture. HU [meaning its a “Humanities” area course]
T 1:30 PM — 3:20 PM

The College Fix obtained a copy of the course syllabus, which explains that the goal of the class is to “create a lab for the construction of counternarratives around whiteness in any creative form: play, poem, memoir, etc.”

The class is divided into eight topics: Constructions of Whiteness, White Property, White Masculinity, White Femininity, White Speech, White Prosperity, White Spaces and White Imagination.

Readings include: Michael Kimmel’s “Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era,” Richard Dyer’s “White: Essays on Race and Culture,” and Richard Delgado’s and Jean Stefanic’s “Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror,” Hazel Carby’s “White Woman, Listen!,” Juliana Spahr’s “My White Feminism,” and Professor Rankine’s own work, “The White Card.”

Obviously, if you are a normal person, you would think that the United States has for the last 60-odd years made constant and extravagant, even sometimes highly questionable, efforts to eliminate racism and to integrate and advance African-Americans.

It is painfully obvious that Ms. Rankine’s awards, recognition as a poet and “genius,” her opportunity to teach at Yale, and the very recognition of the nonsense and stupidity that she professionally spouts as some kind of serious discourse worthy of inclusion in the curriculum of a great university constitutes racial favoritism requiring the most extreme kind of intellectual and moral acrobatics on the part of the precise tippy-top of this society’s establishment.

But when you can get $625,000 genius awards, national literary prizes, an apartment in a Manhattan high rise, and a teaching gig at Yale, all for whining, complaining, and kicking your benefactor culture and society in the teeth, you are obviously going to bitch, and whine, and kick to a fare-thee-well.

Personally, I’d rather pay these kinds of people to sing about Jesus and play the banjo.