Every age has its officious moralizers, people who try to assert their superiority by embracing the prevailing orthodoxy—whatever it happens to be—with exaggerated zeal. They want to feel righteous. So they hunt for transgressors at whom they can point an accusatory finger.

In the post-Christian West, the holier-than-thou types enforce the codes of political correctness. The proverbial witch whom these p-c Puritans long to prosecute is the white racist, who (in their minds) lurks around every corner. And since they believe the act of accusing others bestows virtue on the accuser, they cry "racism!" whenever they find a pretext for doing so.

They recently worked themselves into a lather of self-righteous indignation when they found out that the University of Regina cheer team, which happened to be all white, dressed up as cowboys and Indians for a costume party.

The outrage! The girls must be punished for their "racism," the Twitter mob demanded. The dean of kinesiology promptly ensured everyone that the team would be subjected to "cultural sensitivity training."

Now I’m not saying this is equivalent to "burn-the-witch!" hysteria. But the difference is only one of degree.

Though the p-c crowd claims to have a monopoly on tolerance, they are actually intense haters. For one thing, they hate Canada, because they’ve convinced themselves it’s a cesspool of racism.

As Holly Ann McKenzie, a UBC student who calls herself a "white settler," wrote in an article on the CBC website: In "white-settler culture" racism is so "normalized" that we white people don’t even realize we’re racist. "I believe that the U of R Cheer Team did not intend to disrespect anyone," she writes.

"Stereotypes of Indigenous people and a frontier narrative of white-settler ‘progress’ are part of our liberal ideology," and the cheer team, whether they realized it or not, "performed" stereotypes that "undermine indigenous people’s right to land, to services, to respect."

One could point out that they also "performed" stereotypes of cowboys. But the response would be that cowboys were the beneficiaries of "white privilege." Natives, on the other hand, are victims, and the cheerleaders’ costumes mocked a painful episode in their history.

But that is a demeaning way to view Aboriginals; it assumes they’re such fragile souls that they need to be treated with kid gloves.

Moreover, McKenzie’s repetitive use of "white-settler" is telling. As I read through the full version of her article (posted on her blog), the phrase came to evoke the image of an odious white bigot, stalking menacingly in overalls and chewing on a piece of straw.

Unsurprisingly, she cites a book called "The colour of democracy: Racism in Canadian Society"—part of an academic industry devoted to portraying western culture as uniquely intolerant and white people as almost inherently racist.

There’s marked vengefulness in this kind of thinking. The multiculturalist platitude goes like this: Europeans in the past had colonies and aboriginal peoples lost their culture. Now, as retribution, westerners are supposed to disavow their own culture and "accept and respect" other cultures instead.

But countless non-European cultures have had empires. Why doesn’t the p-c crowd demand the same punishment for them? Further, how many generations must be punished for the sins of their fathers? If you read the academic literature, you’ll see that it is meant to continue until western culture is annihilated.

That would be a pity, because the core idea of common-law cultures has always been this: People should be treated as individuals, not as members of groups. It’s a much more enlightened creed than the intolerant, race-obsessed fashion of political correctness.

kevin.hampson@sunmedia.ca

@kevinhampson

