CRT is a Cult

 

February 10, 2023

Vince Floyd PhD is a black professor at Villanova who directs the black-studies program, lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops and published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. He lives in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, his daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and he is on the board of his local black cultural organization.  He has been dismissive of criticisms of the current discourse on race in the United States.  Even recently he dismissed John McWhorter’s book that asserted that anti-racism is a new religion.

Last summer he found that CRT and it’s perversion of anti-racism to be worse than a religion: it is a cult.

“Pushing anti-racism to its limits, what we reach isn’t just hollow doctrine, but abuse: Pathological relationships that cut us off from the world, from the give-and-take of reasons and feelings unfolding over time that makes up life in the world.”

“They [his students] had learned, in one of their workshops, that objective facts are a tool of white supremacy.

The Telluride Association maintains a low profile, even in higher-education circles, but it has played an important role in shaping the US elite. Its alumni are ideologically diverse: queer theorist Eve Sedgewick and postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak (its first female member), Georgia politician Stacey Abrams and journalist Walter Isaacson, neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz and Francis Fukuyama (who served on Telluride’s board). Launched by mining entrepreneur L.L. Nunn in 1911, a few years before he founded Deep Springs College, Telluride aims to cultivate democratic communities among high-school and college students. It runs houses near Cornell and the University of Michigan, where students receive scholarships, govern themselves, and incorporate intellectual life and service work into their residential communities. In 1954, Telluride started its high-school summer program.

Floyd taught a seminar in 2014, “Race and the Limits of Law” for Telluride’s Ithaca location.  Students came with extraordinary abilities; they asked probing questions; and they were sometimes awkward. Then, as the six weeks went by, I could see the students forming bonds with each other and with me, and I could see their commitment to the course. They always showed up on time. They always did the work. In 2014, participants in the two seminar groups lived their lives together seamlessly outside of the seminar, exploring Ithaca and the Cornell campus, eating and laughing together, and setting up a system to govern their community together.

In 2022 Floyd again tried to teach a seminar, "Race and the Limits of Law", for Telluride. In 2022, he was told that the “Critical Black Studies” students would live and learn separately, creating a fully “black space.” “Anti-Oppressive Studies” students were separated from them. Furthermore, in the 2022 community, afternoons and evenings would no longer be spent having fun and doing homework but instead being taught by 2 college-age students about anti-racism: experiencing hardship conveys authority; there is no hierarchy of oppressions—except for anti-black oppression, which is in a class of its own; trust black women; prison is never the answer; black people need black space; allyship is usually performative; all non-black people, and many black people, are guilty of anti-blackness; and, there is no way out of anti-blackness. The non-black students learned that they needed to center black voices—and to shut up. As the weeks went by, fewer and fewer students turned in written reading responses, fewer and fewer students showed up on time. They fell asleep in class, and they would walk out for extended snack breaks in the middle of the class.

Full Story: https://compactmag.com/article/a-black-professor-trapped-in-anti-racist-hell