In all the following four pieces, I lament the near-totalitarian racket of “anti-raicsm” that has taken over college campuses and much of American media and corporate life. Frankly, I would rather not have the occasion to write on racial issues at all, and if so, I would rather be writing to urge correction of old-fashioned (read: real, actual) racism than to be castigating those who claim (falsely) to be fighting against it. Racial injustice bothers me greatly, and in many ways I have worked to fight it for the past 40 years. But the rise of “wokeness,” and “cancel culture,” and especially of the pernicious idea that racial identity is the most important part of life rather than (MLK-like) something that shouldn’t define us, is a dangerous development in today’s world.
While I absolutely do not agree with U.S. Sen. Tim Scott’s recent hyperbole that “woke supremacy is as bad as white supremacy” — no, it’s not even close to the terror and other mistreatment imposed against American blacks for centuries — his intended point that woke culture is not just wrong, but a species of evil, was right on target. Read the following four pieces for some examples of, and discussions of, why. (Links to full pieces are embedded in the headlines.) — Quin
When racial grievance-mongering becomes a grievous abuse (March 1):
Without belittling the evils of racism, I feel compelled to say that it is long past time for American society to stop overreacting to every allegedly racist “offense.”
Two stories in the news on Monday highlight the problems of hair-trigger racial sensitivities. In the first, two San Francisco area families are suing a Catholic school for $20 million for expelling teenage boys over a three-year-old incident supposedly involving the wearing of “blackface.” The parents quite believably say the substance at hand was dried acne medication. …
The racist assumptions of today’s ‘anti-racism’ mob (March 10): Bari Weiss, the liberal journalist forced out from the New York Times for not being radical enough, has written perhaps the most important article of the still-young year. In “The Miseducation of America’s Elites,” published March 9 in the City Journal, Weiss reports on the devastatingly dangerous thought-policing now infecting schools across the country….
New group fights for academic freedom (March 9): This week, the remaining forces of free minds and free inquiry began fighting back against academia’s thought-crushing leftist orthodoxy. In this intellectual, all-out war, the rebels merit massive support….
Saving Dr. Seuss, old movies… and culture (March 4): Now that we hear eBay is removing some Dr. Seuss books from its offerings and Hollywood is agonizing because some old movies contain ethnic stereotypes, can we please all just stop the cultural self-flagellation?
There’s a song by the Eagles I’ve cited before, but at the risk of repetition, it’s worth citing again: Get over it.
We have become a culture of crybabies, too easily taking offense, too emotionally unable to overcome the slightest affront. Once upon a time, we were tougher, more adult….
