Cornell University devoted its annual Krieger Lecture in American Political Culture to propagating the idea that White people vote against their own interests due to a supposed resentment of minorities, leading to their own untimely demise.
The speech titled “Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Shaped the American Pandemic” was given by Vanderbilt professor Jonathan Metzl, who wrote the book Dying of Whiteness for which the event was named.
Metzl’s book “brings similar questions to the recent past, exploring how racial resentment has led lower and middle-class white Americans to vote and act against their own self-preservation, most centrally in gun control and healthcare,” according to the university.
The event description, which has now been deleted, read, “In this essential presentation based on his critically acclaimed book, Mr. Metzl will reveal why racial hierarchy, or the struggle to preserve white supremacy, is leading our nation towards its demise.”
At the Dying of Whiteness event, students learned “How racial resentment impacts public health” and “How right-wing policies have made life in the U.S. sicker, harder, and shorter.”
The event discussed the “disproportionate spread of the pandemic in underserved communities, the problem of racial attitudes in the U.S.,” according to Cornell’s director of American Studies and professor of Literatures in English Shirley Samuels in a comment to the Cornell Chronicle.
It further discussed “the way that resistance to the motto of ‘Black lives matter’ has intersected with anti-Asian prejudice to make attitudes about masking and vaccination hinge on ideas about race, specifically whiteness,” she continued.
The concept of “whiteness” has faced vast academic scrutiny outside Cornell, as Campus Reform has reported on a number of the most prestigious universities in the country partnering to organize an event titled “Whiteness is a Sankhara: Racial Justice as Buddhist Practice” which argued that “whiteness is based on delusion, produces suffering, and must be relinquished.”
