September 25, 2024 - 4:00pm

If this week’s one-year suspension of law professor Amy Wax for “incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic actions and statements” teaches us anything, it’s the pervasiveness of the moral double standard defining elite spaces today.

Surely, the remarks attributed to Wax over the years are unprofessional, offensive, derogatory and so unbecoming of a tenured Ivy League law professor that even her defenders acknowledge she pushes the outer limits of tolerance. But over the past decade, scores of academics, journalists and nonprofit leaders have lost their jobs and ruined their reputations over much less serious accusations than those lodged against Wax, an outspoken conservative refusenik at the University of Pennsylvania.

According to allegations and news reports over the years, Wax has publicly stated that “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites”, that “on average, Blacks have lower cognitive ability than whites”, that “gay couples are not fit to raise children”, and that “women, on average, are less knowledgeable than men.” Heady stuff indeed, but Wax insists she is merely telling the truth that woke elites refuse to acknowledge. Her defenders agree: they say that academic freedom is designed to protect controversial speech, and that the principle of free speech trumps the social justice imperative to create non-threatening, inoffensive, comfortable spaces for the intersectional identity demographic.

Students have been trying to get the incendiary professor ousted ever since Wax co-authored a 2017 opinion piece arguing that “all cultures are not equal”, in which, according to the New York Times, she blamed some working-class whites, inner-city black people and Hispanic immigrants for dysfunctional values.

As troubling as Wax’s comments are, her statements are in the same league as numerous declarations in Robin DiAngelo’s best-selling DEI tutorial, White Fragility, the 2018 book that is found on every academic and corporate antiracist reading list. White Fragility collapses the distinction between “white” and “white supremacy”, offering such sweeping claims as “Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identity as white people”, and “the white collective fundamentally hates blackness.” In DiAngelo’s telling, white people are socially programmed for domination, control, power and racial self-dealing.

Some DEI trainers have advocated for “abolishing whiteness” and counselled white people to “be less white”, a form of moral instruction that DEI advocates insist is not personal or prejudicial. DiAngelo’s casual anti-whiteness is on par with boilerplate DEI language about white culture being rooted in entitlement, privilege and other demeaning stereotypes catalogued in various DEI documents.

Most importantly, though, for all her lapses in tactfulness, Wax is not prone to eliminationist rhetoric, which makes her unlike some radical professors who have been caught on video advocating for shooting or exterminating white people, or characterising whiteness as “a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility”. This often happens with the full protection of their academic employer defending the inviolable principles of free speech.

Wax’s case illustrates a gaping chasm between the progressive culture of “kindness” and the same group’s sneering disregard for historic oppressors which urges white people to lean into their own guilt. By the moral criteria applied to Professor Wax, hundreds of professors and administrators should be disciplined for offensive, insensitive, dehumanising language.


John Murawski is a journalist based in Raleigh, NC. His work has appeared in RealClearInvestigations, WSJ Pro AI and Religion News Service, among other outlets.