ASU: The border problem is "whiteness"

Gabrielle Temaat reports for The College Fix (link) about another insightful event at ASU’s School for Social Transformation. This time, the speaker tells us that the idea of borders is due to “whiteness.” This school at ASU offers resources to “undocumented students"—is this in violation of federal law?

The speaker made the profound statement that “Colonial borders never merely represent existing differences, instead, they produce the differences that they govern,” Munshi said.

“In other words, within the American imaginary, the southern border divides white from indigenous, purity from heterogeneity, civilization from savagery, settler from Indian,” she said.

This might be news to you if you are not white but live north of the border. Yet, this is the lens you can expect from professors at ASU.

It is another demonstration of the superficiality of the contemporary university mind. All problems are reduced to race and sex. There is no depth of analysis or nuance of meaning. Why did that bad thing happen? “Whiteness.” Duh.

Does the border demonstrate the outcome of different understandings of law and the purpose of human life? Is it a result of how worldviews and religions produce different ways of living? No, of course not; it’s all about skin color to these deep thinkers. Even asking this means (you guessed it) you’re a racist. But don’t worry, the School of Social Transformation can re-educate you.

As your friendly neighborhood philosopher, I would be remiss if I didn’t give you a sound argument to counter their specious reasoning.

Their argument is that borders are historically contingent and not logically necessary. Therefore, the U.S./Mexico border is contingent and not necessary.

Furthermore, whatever is historically contingent is the result of unjust power. The U.S./Mexico border is historically continent; therefore, it is the result of unjust power.

Can you spot the problem? The obvious one is that the historically contingent need not be unjust. It might be both contingent and correct. But here is another problem: the border was set by the same means that the “indigenous” populations also determined boundaries. If the current border is unjust, then so were the previous borders or boundaries extending back thousands of years.

Their analysis only works on a student population that doesn’t know the history or what life was like “on the border” before the United States, before Mexico, and before Spain. Relying on that ignorance, these “professors” can tell students that “land was stolen” and “unjust power blah blah blah.”

Take some time to read what life was like and how borders were determined before Spain.