WASHINGTON — Psychology students at Brooklyn College are being taught about whiteness, taking BuzzFeed quizzes on their privileges, and enduring lectures about microaggressions — in a “deeply divisive” course being panned by some educational groups.
The shockingly woke class, Multicultural Counseling and Consultation, is mandatory for those seeking to complete the Psychologist program and entails “collective racial healing activities” as well as “trauma-informed interventions” to combat injustice.
“I firmly believe that if the white person is your problem, the white person could be your solution,” former NFL linebacker Emmanuel Acho explained to viewers in one of the videos in a “Weaponizing Whiteness” module, according to material compiled by conservative watchdog Defending Education.
“…That, to me, is white privilege, the ability to weaponize your whiteness and the ability to live life unconsciously, because I, as a black man, have to calculate every move I make the second I walk outside my house,” Acho later added.
Enrollees in the course, as it was designed in the fall of last year, were instructed to listen to various lecture videos, then complete reflective activities on them.
In one exercise, students were given scenarios and asked to identify the microaggression. One of the options listed in all of the scenarios was the phrase “I am not racist.”
Some of the material required students to respond to questions that were specific to their race.
The required BuzzFeed privilege quiz has students tick off qualities that make them privileged and lists factors such as “I am white,” “I have never been raped,” and “I am heterosexual” on the form.
“It should be of major concern to the public and parents that future school psychologists are required to pass a class that promotes such deeply divisive and caustic ideologies,” Defending Education’s Research Director Rhyen Staley told The Post.
“Additionally, no student regardless of race and age should have to endure discrimination based on immutable characteristics regardless of whether it is ‘best practice’ or not. This is blatant ideological indoctrination and needs to stop.”
One assigned reading from Brooklyn-born activist Peggy McIntosh described white privilege as an “invisible knapsack” of benefits.
“I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege,” she argued in the piece. “I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious.”
“White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.”
Another assignment instructed students to respond to the “concept of the American Dream is the notion that anyone who works hard enough will be rewarded—that anyone can ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps.’”
“How has this been made more difficult for people not defined as white? What is the long-term impact of that denial?” students were asked in an essay prompt worth 10% of their grade.
The woke class doesn’t just deal with racial issues; it also delves into the raft of intersectional identity gripes, such as “nativist, Eurocentric, individualist, heterosexual, patriarchal, cisgender, ableist, and sizeist” influences in the US.
The Post contacted Brooklyn College for comment.
Brooklyn College is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system.
