Vermont Professor Warns Against Growing Anti-White Racism. Students Call for His Resignation.

Editor

March 18, 2021

A professor of counseling at the University of Vermont is calling awareness to a growing trend of anti-white racism on college campuses, and now students are demanding his resignation.

Dr. Aaron Kindsvatter posted a video to YouTube on March 8. In the nearly 10-minute speech, the educator said he was first told about “whiteness” by a faculty colleague, who “offered to help [him] with it, like it was some kind of disease.” The process, Kindsvatter recalled, “was dehumanizing.”

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The professor didn’t share a timeline for when his colleague told him about the concept of “whiteness” — a derogatory term — but said he “never expected” the philosophy that undergirds it, critical race theory, to endure, “because it’s so obviously discriminatory.”

“But not only has this ideology endured within the university,” Kindsvatter said, “it has flourished.”

“So ‘whiteness’ falls under the umbrella — in the derogatory meaning of the word — of critical social justice,” the educator explained. “And ‘whiteness,’ the thinking that informs it, is so crude and so lacking in infalsifiability, and it speaks so eloquently to our tribal impulses, that the same logic that informs what’s currently being called ‘whiteness’ right now can easily find its way to desperate persons who need a group to hate and who will adopt the suppositions that form ‘whiteness’ towards their own end.”

The foundation ideas of this radical ideology, he warned, “will find their way to hate groups” in the future.

Kindsvatter said he was, in a way, stunned that, “on a progressive campus,” a person would be reduced to nothing more than the color of his or her skin.

He went on to say he was particularly disturbed by a “teach in” the university’s Division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion hosted last July. During the event, titled “Turning the Conversation to Whiteness,” the instructors suggested “a number of vague social ills were associated in a causal way with people of a particular race” — an apparently racist suggestion.

It became clear to him that the university, as well as many other educational institutions around the country, are, in actuality, teaching anti-white racism while claiming it is “anti-racism” instruction.

According to Kindsvatter, his own department, the College of Education and Social Services, is slated to adopt and incorporate leftist author Ibram X. Kendi’s definitions of “racist” and “anti-racist” into its teaching philosophy. Kendi defines a “racist” as “one who is supporting a racist policy through their inactions or actions or expressing a racist idea. He defines “anti-racist” as “one who is supporting anti-racist policy through their actions or expressing an anti-racist idea.”

“So, if this policy is passed, in speaking up against what many would consider to be an anti-racist ‘teach in,’ but is one that makes a causal connection between people of a particular race and vaguely defines societal ills,” he said, “I would be considered, in a way that is consistent with program policy … a racist.”

“Do you see how clever this ideology is at protecting itself?” Kindsvatter asked. “It makes it impossible to dissent from on pain of being labeled a racist and on pain of being ostracized.”

Toward the end of the video, he asked the University of Vermont to stop “reducing [his] personhood to a racial category in your teach ins,” arguing it starts a dangerous “chain of logic in which other people will be defined by their racial categories” and “will divide us further in a time when we need to unite as one people.”

Kindsvatter also asked those at the university to quit calling his opinions “harmful” simply because they are moderate. Sharing common values and principles “doesn’t mean we all have to think the same way,” he said.

He noted he has found no wisdom in the writings of Kendi or “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo, claiming that being forced to suggest otherwise would cause him “a kind of spiritual sickness.”

Since the video was posted in early March, more than 3,000 people have signed a Change.org petition calling for Kindsvatter’s “immediate resignation.”

The petition states that a counseling professor at an institution of higher learning “should not hold this ideology employed by white supremacists.”

“The freedom of free thought is not what is being restricted here,” it continues. “It’s the fact that Aaron Kindsvatter is using his position of power and authority as a platform for spewing these ideologies.”

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