A Virginia university is under fire for training student employees to treat anyone who is either male, white, heterosexual, Christian – even athletically built — as “oppressors.”
James Madison University confirmed to Fox News that specialized social justice and inclusion training was offered as an “opportunity” for students who work in the Office of Student Affairs.
That includes a woke video lesson which details the numerous groups held responsible for denying people the chance to enjoy the “Disney World of colleges,” hosts Jessica Weed and Jennifer Iwerks say in the lesson.
The pair describe oppression as “the systematic subjugation of one social group by a more powerful social group for the social, economic and political benefit of the more powerful social group,” Fox noted.
They list the privileged as people who identify as male, cisgender, heterosexual, heteroromantic, Christian, White, Western European, American, upper- to middle-class, thin/athletic build, able-bodied or in their 30s to early 50s, Fox said.
The oppressed include people who identify as black, Asian, Latin-x, non-Western European, LGBTQ+, homoromantic, Muslim, Jewish, working-class, overweight or disabled, among others.
Privilege is defined as “unearned social power accorded by the formal and informal institutions of society to ALL members of a dominant group at the expense of targeted groups.”
The hosts stress, however, that you cannot judge what group anyone falls in, even using skin color, because people may not identify that way.
Student employees were told to “not share these materials with others,” Fox News said.
The university told Fox in a statement that it was part of efforts to “strive to create an inclusive and welcoming community for all students. “
“The training was held to help ensure that every student guide for freshmen orientation had the tools and understanding to work with incoming students, who might have a different background than their own,” the statement read.
News of the training sparked a fierce backlash, with lawyer and author J. Christian Adams among those saying that students “should not have to endure this bullying.”
“College should be a place where our youth are taught HOW to think, not WHAT to think,” Utah Rep. Burgess Owens tweeted.
“How about we stop the indoctrination of hate/divisiveness and get back to academics and critical thinking?”
Mark Obenshain, a Virginia state senator, cited it as proof that critical race theory is not “just made-up conservative propaganda.”
“I hope students don’t have to buy into this woke nonsense in order to hold campus jobs,” he tweeted.
Historian and podcaster Christian Heiens bemoaned how “CRT and Radical Post-Modernism have finally made their way to my alma mater.”
“A sad but inevitable chapter in the long story of America’s declining universities,” he said.