Yes, Marxism still counts as the opium of the intellectuals, but there are some new and equally potent drugs on the market, especially “institutional racism.” On college campuses, you’ll find plenty of faculty members who know little if anything about Marx, but who are frothing at the mouth about the limitless evils done by “institutional racism.”

The people who are hooked on institutional racism don’t like anyone criticizing their drug. To do so takes some guts, because the true believers will come after you. Bucknell professor Alexander Riley doesn’t mind that. In this post, he subjects the notion of institutional racism to some desperately needed scrutiny.

Riley takes aim at a screed-filled book by Professor Michelle Alexander that has many students and academics in awe. He writes:

If you looked around at the country’s thousands of college courses on race and racism, you would certainly find Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow one of the most commonly encountered course texts. I have seen many colleagues at my university, in numerous disciplines, enthusiastically place it on their syllabi, and she was invited by my department to give a well-attended campus talk a few years ago. I frequently find students bringing the book up in class or in their writing as what they evidently take to be a universally acknowledged authoritative source of undisputed truth, whose claims are unneedful of any defense and unassailable by any criticism.

If you want to stock up on antidote against wokeness, read the whole thing