A good friend of mine was born in Soviet Russia in early 1970s and later emigrated to Australia where she took graduate courses in order to become a teacher. For the first time, she encountered neo-Marxist propaganda in a Western classroom in the form of Critical Race Theory. Part of her assignment was to reflect on how she has been personally affected by her “white privilege,” and to write on how she has participated in the oppression of other races of people.
The current assignment has proven to be one of my most difficult dilemmas, not from an educational perspective, but personally…. Allow me to be upfront on the social and political context that has largely defined my identity and provided for a certain sensitivity around the language of the post-structuralist “fight against all forms of social and political tyranny and oppression.” I am a descendant of a white Russian slave. There were over 23 million white slaves that received their liberty within two years from the end of American slavery … only to be subjugated again by the Soviet proletarian revolution as free labor necessary to industrialize vast Siberian lands. My introduction to the “Critical Studies” course started with Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a framework that introduced the concept of “supremacy of whiteness” insisting on the “structural and subjective constructions of normative whiteness as universal, homogenized” (Ferfolja,T., et al., 2018, p. 11). The claim that “normative whiteness” is “universal” and “homogenized” was problematic for me, given no attempt to constrain the theory within the American socio-historic paradigm. As a descendant of a white Russian slave, whose family members were sold for less than seven rubles [a few hundred dollars in today’s money], I found it farcical to be lectured about discourses regarding “normative whiteness,” “white supremacy” and “white privilege” – all the while listening to pontification about “multiculturalism” and the “unseen half“ of diverse minority groups within our future classrooms.
Although post-structuralism may be a necessary stepping stone to a political theory beyond Liberalism in the West, postmodernist movements in general are largely irrelevant to the “white” Slavic civilization as well as the other “non-white” civilizations who are emerging in the multipolar world order.
