Another disturbing story out of academia. Fox News has posted an article about a former Smith College staff employee who has run into the "woke" culture on campus and has now decided to speak out. I am cross-posting the article through an outside link that has also cross-posted it (Bulldog Reports). The reason is that in many cases, Fox seems to remove their posts and some articles from Fox that I have linked have later been taken down. The article is written by Eli Steele and concerns Jodi Shaw. Jodi has also started a blog devoted to the Smith situation which I have linked on my site. It is entitled, "The Situation at Smith".
I have also added a link to Bulldog Reports.
Before commenting on the article itself, I note that I have previously posted a story out of Smith College, a private school in Northampton, Massachusetts. That was back in 2014 when the college president, Kathleen McCartney, was forced to apologize to students for saying, "All lives matter". (Unfortunately, my link to the actual account of the incident has-you guessed it- been taken down or otherwise disappeared.) McCartney and the incident in 2014 are mentioned in Shaw's article.
I should also note that as a former part-time teacher at the University of California at Irvine (1998-2016), I often spoke out on the issue of campus anti-Semitism and frequently took the university, including the entire University of California system, to task for not protecting Jewish students and free speech. To their credit, the administrators of UCI and the UC system in general never retaliated against me. They respected my right of free speech.
As for Ms. Shaw, I totally sympathize with her. It is amazing how well-intentioned whites can find themselves under attack by the woke crowd for not being sufficiently to the far left. It is a disturbing view of what goes on in our universities. Our long and torturous racial journey has led us in a direction hardly imagined by Martin Luther King and those who marched with him in a just cause. What we have now is a demonization of not just white racists, the KKK, and their ilk, but of white people in general. We are all racists. We are all privileged. We must take a back seat to the highly-celebrated and highly patronized "People of Color".
It is getting us nowhere but a bad place where we don't want to be. We've been there before just in a different way.
In Shaw's references to the South, my only critique-and it is nitpicking- is that I would have liked to see some mention of just how dramatically the situation in the South has changed in our lifetimes. Would we really say today that there is more racism in the South now than in other parts of the country? I would say no!
But to my point: What purpose does it serve to divide Americans by skin color? The Civil Rights Era taught us that it was wrong to do so. Though anti-discrimination laws are in place, the "woke" crowd wants to do just that. Some universities have shamefully agreed to create separate dorms for black students. The old segregationists of the past would be proud.
No American who truly loves this country would want to separate us by race and stir up more bad feelings. It is one thing to teach about slavery and segregation; it is quite another to teach that white people are universally racist and need to disappear from society.
It is not a question of stupidity that people who are educated and should know better really think this is good for the country. To me, it is a deliberate strategy designed to tear down this country, brick by brick. It is no accident that so much of this movement comes out of our universities. I think in the case of university presidents and administrators, it is also a case of cowardice. They know that their institutions are teaching the future leaders of our country. Don't they see the poison that has taken hold of their institutions? Where is the leadership? It seems that the leaders in our universities are the woke students and faculty.
Shame on all of them. They are doing immeasurable harm to our children and our country.
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