Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Sacramento State is one of the many California state universities that offer a four-year program of education. It tends to be a little bit more pragmatic for teacher education, business, and agriculture than are the UC campuses, the nine UCs. And Sac State, as we call it, is near UC Davis. They’re kind of twin—University of California and State University—campuses.

They have a new president, fairly new—he has been there about a year. Dr. Luke Wood came from UC San Diego, as I remember. And he was famous, in that area, as a black educator who advocated a particular approach to the education, K-12 and college, of black students. And I guess you would call it “a rejection of white standards.”

In other words, he believed that black students on test scores or GPA or by traditional criteria were not competitive with other groups because this method of evaluation was intrinsically biased or racist, or did not take into account historical disparities, Jim Crow or slavery, etc.

And so, therefore, he called this term, I think, “blacklighting”— kind of a play on “gaslighting”—that the way white people spoke about student achievement was intrinsically insulting to black students or had the effect of discouraging them. And therefore, you had to have a different type of vocabulary, a different type of approach for black students, in a way you wouldn’t for other students.

This is not gonna work. We have tried that for 50 or 60 years. And we’ve seen that the Great Society specialization and fixation on race did not work. It increased separatism, distrust, racial tensions. And I think we’ve seen that, in the last four or five years, reach a zenith with diversity, equity, and inclusion.

But here’s my point. Dr. Luke Wood just gave an interview to a conservative black radio host, podcaster host, in which he said he wanted to “eliminate whiteness.” He was pressed on that question very effectively. And he said, “Well, you wanna eliminate whiteness, but then that comes from white people. So, if you want to eliminate the manifestation of white people, do you want to eliminate white people?” He said, “No.”

But he found himself in a dilemma, a rhetorical dilemma, an analytical dilemma, because if you apply that logic and you say, “I want to eliminate blackness,” what does that mean? You don’t wanna eliminate blacks. If you say, “I want to eliminate Jewishness,” does that mean you wanna eliminate Jews?

So, what did he mean? He couldn’t define whiteness when he was pressed. Apparently, what he was trying to refer to—and I don’t think he had the knowledge or the historical background or the analytical skills to explain what he meant—but he’s talking about the dominant culture in the United States. And he associates that with “whiteness” because the Founders, of course, were 95% white.

The Founders came from a British empirical, enlightened tradition. But in fact, they were just one offshoot of a larger Western tradition, a Western tradition that began with olive-colored Greeks and olive-colored Italians in Rome. And it transmogrified into Europe. After the end of the Roman Empire, it was enhanced during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the British/Scottish Enlightenments, the transference of Western culture to America under the Constitution.

What was it? It was an independent judiciary. It was a constitutional government. A tripartite: legislative, executive, judicial. It was an emphasis on individual inquiry, free thought. The separation from religious thought and government or the tolerance for free speech. The Bill of Rights. The free market system. The ability to make money in a capitalist free enterprise system. The idea that the military is separate from the government.

All of these ingredients were created in Rome and Greece—enhanced, modified, rejection, reappearing again during these various stages of Western thought. And then they were transferred to the modern world, and most prominently with our Founders.

But it’s not connected with “whiteness” necessarily. It doesn’t matter. It transcends its skin. It’s the only culture in the world in which you can be Chinese American, you can be black American, you can be Hispanic American, and you can be as Western as anybody else. It’s not predicated on white.

So, he associates this with whiteness. And he does that because he can’t define it. What would he say the dominant culture of America is if it’s not Western? I don’t think he can make that distinction.

In fact, African Americans are as Western as anybody. It’s just a matter of choice. Do you want to believe in consensual government or not? Do you believe in free enterprise or not? Do you believe in free speech or not? Do you believe in the separation of religious authority and secular authority or not? Do you believe in the Enlightenment and rationalism, empiricism, disinterested inquiry or not?

What’s really dangerous is that you have a president at a major university here in California—Cal State, Sacramento—who says he wants to “eliminate whiteness.” He’s trying to inaugurate a black scholars program.

This is in the age of post-DEI, in a very reactionary, retrograde approach, that you’re going to single out particular groups and you’re going to emphasize particular plans, programs based on the color of their skin at a time when we’re all trying to transcend it because when we have done that, it didn’t work. It created tensions rather than alleviated them. It created suspicion and distrust rather than ending such things. It’s a retrograde tribal thought that goes back to pre-civilizational ideas.

Whiteness, Dr. Wood, whiteness is Western civilization. Blackness is Western civilization. Hispanics are Western civilization. It’s a choice of the mind. It’s not the color of your skin. We are Western in this country. You call it “whiteness” because you’re angry, because you perceive particular discriminations or unfairness in the system.

The system says to you, “Everybody is equal under the law, only in the United States. They’re free to do what they want. If people are systematically racist or prejudicial, it’s a self-correcting legal system.”

But what we do not want to do is emphasize pre-civilizational ideas that the color of our skin matters more than the content of our character and race is absolutely essential to what we are rather than just incidental.

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