The Culture, Waxing and Waning

Amy Wax, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, co-authored an article in a Philadelphia newspaper on poverty. It found its way into a white paper by Hillsboro College and, last weekend, into the front of the WSJ Forum section. As an  opinion piece, it seems a bit bland, as if she is merely stating generalities that everyone can agree upon. But the reaction to it proves that the obvious in America has become clouded. Outrage and bitterness, seemingly out of proportion to any perceived offense, boiled up and spilled everywhere. Reading the article and the response could make one disbelieve in Newton.
One could hope this is just a tempest looking for a teapot. But, if it is not, it implies something important. These opinions confer value on all social systems, large and small, successful and failed. It declares an unwillingness to come to any decisions on hierarchy on any scale and opposes both judgment and decision as twisted and compromised. It denies any sanctuary; the academic has no shield. And, finally, it demands the observer to support and live with individual and cultural bad decisions of others as if they were his own.


This is a segment:


"All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy. The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-“acting white” rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants. These cultural orientations are not only incompatible with what an advanced free-market economy and a viable democracy require, they are also destructive of a sense of solidarity and reciprocity among Americans. If the bourgeois cultural script — which the upper-middle class still largely observes but now hesitates to preach — cannot be widely reinstated, things are likely to get worse for us all."


A letter by Penn students and alumni objected to, among many things,


"...extolling the virtues of white cultural practices of the ‘50s that, if understood within their sociocultural context, stem from the very same malignant logic of hetero-patriarchal, class-based, white supremacy that plagues our country today. These cultural values and logics are steeped in anti-blackness and white hetero-patriarchal respectability, i.e. two-hetero-parent homes, divorce is a vice and the denouncement of all groups perceived as not acting white enough i.e. black Americans, Latino communities and immigrants in particular."


They continued:


"We call for the denunciation, not of racism as some abstract concept “out there” — in Charlottesville, in America, by the poor uneducated white or by an individual racist ideologue — but for a denunciation of racism at the University of Pennsylvania. In particular we must denounce faculty members that are complicit in and uphold white supremacy, normalizing it as if it were just another viable opinion in our educational tenures at the University. We call for the University of Pennsylvania administration — Penn President Gutmann and the deans of each school — as well as faculty to directly confront Wax and Alexander’s op-ed as racist and white supremacist discourse and to push for an investigation into Wax’s advocacy for white supremacy."


33 of her colleagues at Penn Law School responded: 


"We write to condemn recent statements our colleague Amy Wax, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at Penn Law School, has made in popular media pieces. "

As an aside, the University fired Ms. Wax.