The privilege walk comes to medical school

(I keep revealing more and more details that will eventually make it possible for someone to determine which school I go to and "out" me in real life. I know this is a danger, but I think it is a risk worth taking to blog about these issues.)

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse: last week, as part of our weekly liberalism seminar, our class had a group interview with a patient and her doctor. The patient was black, and said some things which were funny, at which both she and the class laughed. Apparently, some of the many left-wing members of the class thought that she reinforced black stereotypes and that it was insensitive of the class to laugh, and found this discomfiting. Word has it that they are proposing a "solution" to this "problem:" host a "privilege walk." You know, the college orientation-type left-wing indoctrination exercise where someone reads off a series of yes-or-no questions about how privileged you are, and everyone takes one step backward or forward depending on their answer to each question, and all the white men end up at the front and have to turn around and see how far behind the nonwhites, women, homosexuals, and immigrants are, and feel guilty about being such horrible racist sexist oppressors. Worse, this is being proposed not as an ad hoc event, but as the main event of one of our weekly liberalism seminars at some undetermined future date.

I've thought about this, and realized that I need to take a stand. I cannot in good conscience participate in this anti-white, anti-American activity, but I'm not sure how to make my views known. I will almost certainly stand alone in refusing to participate: I'd estimate that about 50% of my class would say that this is a great idea that will be a really powerful, eye-opening, consciousness-raising experience, 45% probably thinks it would be somewhat interesting, 5% (libertarians or mainstream Republican types) would roll their eyes and go through the motions, and then there's me: the only one I know of who is strongly opposed in principle to this sort of thing. I'd appreciate any advice on how to stand up against it.

By the way, John Derbyshire did a good job of taking apart this privilege walk. I suspect that, like him, I'd actually end up farther toward the back than the front.

Links

I apologize to the (few) appreciative readers I garnered over the first few months of this blog's existence. I really had planned to post more often, but school has only grown ever-more time-consuming, and my poor time-management skills (there's a downside to having been the type who could get away with goofing off and then cramming the night before tests when you were younger) have caught up with me. As those skills improve, my hope is to at least get something up every weekend, though I can't guarantee even that. Unfortunately, blogging in mid-week has become all but impossible.

I have a substantial backlog of drafts or post ideas I just need to get around to finishing. In the meantime, I'd like to spotlight two links. The first, via Dennis Mangan, is a blog I've just added to my blogroll: Delenda est Carthago. The blogger there, Phi (like Mr. Mangan, I have no idea how to reproduce the Greek letter,) has some excellent observations on race and sex. The second, Free Market Cure, is devoted to combating socialized medicine and promoting fixes that preserve freedom in health care, something you should care about if you want to uphold the traditional American value of self sufficiency, especially the self-sufficiency of the family.