The 'social justice' jester who would be King 

The noble civil disobedience of yesteryear cheapened today

On the morning of Saturday 6/27, North Carolinian Brittany Ann Byuarim "Bree" Newsome scaled a South Carolina statehouse flagpole and removed the Confederate flag.

Once on the ground and in police custody, she smiled and mugged for photographers.

In a foolish statement, the NAACP cheered Newsome's action. She was wrongly compared to genuine giants of legitimate civil disobedience the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, and Henry David Thoreau.

I recall no press accounts of King striking poses for CBS cameras in the 1960s South.

Called for is a word about what "civil disobedience" really means. It is a specific concept, one with certain definition. It cannot be tortuously stretched or reinvented to accommodate 2015's frivolous, self-aggrandizing play-actors.

Civil disobedience was a profoundly legitimate tool with which American citizens pushed for the elimination of unjust laws that were systemically entrenched and were not being reconsidered and abandoned by processes then in place. 

By violating unjust statutes, putting their names on the acts, and accepting punishment King and others highlighted existing, legally codified inequality. 

Too, civil disobedience urged the full respect and recognition of American citizens who had been and still were denied the constitution's promise.

There was in that era argument over law, too. But the situations in 1964 and 2015 are dramatically different. In 1964, not all Americans had access to civil government. No redress of legitimate grievances could be assumed, given a system rigged against justice. 

Therefore, 1964 assertions that civil disobedience as thankfully practiced by King constituted violations of already sound law were without integrity. King and others could not realize needed change through the political process, as it was not open to meaningful participation by them. 

Civil disobedience was a logical option. And America is a better and more just nation, truer to the promise of its constitution, for their having taken the courageous stands they did.

But in 2015 Brittany Newsome has the political access denied King in 1964. She has no need for civil disobedience, nor was her grabbing down of a flag that was already in the legislative removal process at all in the grand tradition of King. 

The Rev. Dr, Martin Luther King, Jr and fellow noble citizens who practiced true civil disobedience were American heroes as much as any president or general. They were the voice of America's conscience, putting before all the truth of this nation's failures and demanding no more than that they be acknowledged as full participants.

Think of the changes that came in their civilly disobedient wake: The right to cast a ballot in elections and hold authoritative office. Public school desegregation. The right of every citizen to enjoy equal access to public accommodations. Protections and guaranteed safeguards in the legal system. Dignified visibility in entertainment fields including films, television, musical recordings, and the stage. The freedom to progress through the educational system including upper education, and to enjoy significant and contributory related careers.

Next to all of those necessary, noble, and far-reaching advances, shimmying up a flagpole - or, for that matter, donning a plastic Anonymous mask and hurling a brick through a Baltimore store window - can be seen as undeniably meager.

Kingly? Please.

They also terrorize, who sit and type

Des Moines Register columnist Rekha Basu concluded her 6/26 "What defines a terrorist?" with the admonition: "We should consider anyone who gets and carries a gun to be capable of carrying out a mass shooting, whatever you call it."

Of course, a firearm cannot think. It cannot conceive of a crime, nor perpetrate it unilaterally. It is just a dumb object, with no will or self-mobility.

The entire, millions-strong group, "anyone who gets and carries a gun," neither committed crimes nor has offered any call for reasonable suspicion. So to doubt all of its members' characters, by simple virtue of their being in that class, is unfair and illogical.

The use or misuse to which any object, including a gun, is put turns on the choice of the individual in possession of it. Merely having access to a .38 special effects nothing.

But it was never really the inanimate object, the gun, that Basu and her ilk had in their crosshairs, if you'll excuse the phrase. It is the ability to exercise individual choice.

Rheka Basu and the Des Moines Register exert what considerable influence they have to demonize individualism and scare Iowans from conceiving that it just might be acceptable for persons to follow their own drummers and ignore the will of The Community.

Now who's the terrorist?

If Andy Borowitz doesn't think, does that mean he isn't? 

In a recent New Yorker essay ("Many in Nation Tired of Explaining Things to Idiots'), Andy Borowitz  illustrates the absurdity and irony of his very being.

Apparently having no actual inspiration, and with a deadline perhaps looming, he rush-cobbled a thankfully brief exercise combining nose-in-air elitist bigotry and lower-form name-heaving. The practical result is to effectively posit that rigorous intellectual debate in which differing arguments about serious matters are contrasted and assayed for merit are not necessary.

A sound case could be made that such presently voguish liberalism, elevating as it does feelings and self-centeredness over logic, reason, and regard for general good, is profoundly unintellectual. How foolish and sad, then, that its placard-hefting advocates fancy themselves thinkers of high grade. They are merely feelers of little sense.

The single, flat note repeated in Borowitz's little writing here is his garbage-shoveling in each paragraph of demeaning terms for any and all ideological opponents. Any person who might disagree with Borowitz on, say, climate change or gun laws, regardless of their reason or opinion basis, is dismissed without consideration as an "idiot," "dolt," "stupid," or "moron."

It is the sort of desperate tactic one might be likely to hear cried out on a second grade playground. That it is heartily dished by a best-selling author speaks unflatteringly about the current humor level among the limousine liberals for whom Borowitz rhetorically pratfalls. (Yes, I get that the writer is indulging juvenileness for effect. But it is nonetheless pathetic.)

There is, too, an irony element. Andy Borowitz has simultaneously ridiculed and decried student loan debt. Which leads to the very real possibility that his Harvard merry-go-rounding was bankrolled by the very hard-working, tax-paying Americans he today derides as "idiots." 

Now, that's "thank you" for you.

PS. The internationally simpering Borowitz has yet to apologize for creating "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air."

.

Suddenly change

During the Fox News Channel's 6/23 O'Reilly Factor, one segment dealt with the enduring racism in some parts of American society.

As is usual on cable news, pro-wrestling-type entertainment spectacle was the goal, not serious, substantive dialogue. Exchanges were fiery. Contributor/author Kirsten Powers at one point challenged the titular host: "How many black friends do you have, Bill?"

Of course, it wasn't all that long ago that the "Some of my best friends are" line was considered a bigot's excuse, and was roundly derided.

When did that change?

The cleansing has only begun

Advocates for banning the Confederate flag argue that contrary, positive opinions of that banner (regional historic heritage, familial loyalty and respect) do not matter and should not be considered. Because truly horrible things happened under the Confederate flag, no positive interpretation or personal reality can outweigh that undeniable awfulness.

In that argument, then, is the notion that only flag banners' opinions should be consequential. And that all citizens must live according to them.

Honest consideration, of course, would result in understanding and acknowledging that many everyday American phenomena can be traced to eras in which racist philosophies held official sway. To not also challenge these, and every bit as publicly and vigorously, would be illogical.

(Yes, each does also have non-racist recommendations. But as has now been established, those don't count.)

Lest they be branded hypocrites, then, citizen pressure groups, news media, politicians, and corporate sales entities must without delay take up arms in the noble fight to eradicate these too from modern America:

- Paintings, songs, literary compositions, and film works depicting confederate era figures and/or battles;

- Songs (including the National Anthem), literature, and art works created during and/or reflecting the condemnation-worthy slavery and Jim Crow eras;

- Statues, paintings, plays, TV and film works, and all literary or educational texts referencing the founding fathers, some of whom were slave holders and all of whom approved a constitution whose principles were drawn exclusively from European sources.

- The decoration of government buildings, including court-system ones, of all words or images referencing those Founding Fathers;

- The depiction of Founding Fathers on currency;

- The racist and sexist phrase "Founding Fathers," itself.

- The US Constitution. It was by design not representative of all peoples and world philosophies, based as it partially was on the Magna Carta and other English legal thinking;

- Any and all state and municipal laws derived from that fundamentally discriminatory constitution;

- Any and all legal precedents rooted in early American eras when discrimination was sanctioned.

- The American flag, which was hoisted over a discriminatory nation and which to some in this increasingly divided country and elsewhere symbolizes only oppression.

This is, of course, only a partial list of targets. Such is the nature of progressivism that one struggle's successful conclusion means only that
new ones must be declared.

A proposal for one subsequent goal is the elimination of the concept of distinct nations. "Imagine there's no countries," as Lennon sang.

This is the task to which the historically revisionist culture cleansers have devoted themselves. Let them, then, embrace these logical ends.


Almost as if acting on this, progressive totalitarians in the media hurried to announce new ambitions. The 6/24 Washington Post op-ed page offered several mini-essays advocating less freedom for citizens. CUNY professor Jessie Daniels called for 'restricting online hate speech.' Lilly Workneh of the Huffington Post urged "It's Not Just the Flag: Here Are the Other Confederate Tributes That Need To Go." Workneh cited some half-dozen Change.org petitions pressing scattered local officials to "remove or rename an area fixture that in some way memorializes the confederacy." Similar notions will doubtless soon follow.  

According to TheHill.com (6/23), President Obama told an Iftar dinner held in celebration of Ramadan that, "As Americans, we insist that nobody should be targeted because of who they are, or what they look like, who they love, how they worship. We stand united against these hateful acts."

How about just insisting that no one should be targeted at all?  

On flag bans and freedom


National debate swirls about banning the Confederate flag. Those insisting that the Stars and Bars be furled cite historic race hatred and a commendable desire to eradicate vestiges of bigotry.

I understand different persons support the Southern flag for different reasons, and I do not intend to judge the validity of claims that it can represent non-racist heritage. But I do fully endorse the right to think and speak whatever ideas suit one, and to fly an unpopular banner.

Keep in mind that the US flag is the object of similar, growing challenge. Opponents of  the Stars and Stripes base their animosity on the same ground as Confederate flag banners. And it is logical that the success of a Confederate flag ban would inspire them to further action. (Progressivism means never stopping.)

Before you scramble for adjectives like 'hysterical,' know that this is hardly extremist speculation. It's already taking place.

In March, an official group of UC Irvine students who champion illegal immigration voted to banish flags, including the American one, from their California office. The reason? Some UC Irvine students in this country illegally complained that their feelings had been affronted, and that the on-campus presence of the US flag had "triggered" in them negative emotions.

According to the flag-banning student activists, "The American flag has been flown in instances of colonialism and imperialism." That same flag, of course, flew over noble efforts to undo those and other injustices, as well as raising peoples' living standards and general welfare. It was hoisted above countless, freedom-ensuring military victories, waves over democratically elected government, and was an inspirational presence over civil rights marches.

It is a globally acknowledged symbol of liberty and hope. Not without reason do so many flock to America each year, including "undocumented" lawbreakers, themselves. But nevermind the abundant positive - immature, irresponsible social justice warriors still in the spring of life do not discern gray areas. Nor do they grasp that stories generally have more than one side, or that fairness and justice may not exist solely on any single partisan bank.

I know what many might say: That that was only a single college experience, one hardly meriting wider concern. Some people are too quick to naysay.

As news media picked up on the UC Irvine anti-flag story, a national letter was drawn up supporting the flag-banning. That effort realized over 1,200 signatories, including a reported 60 California professors. Campus Reform reported that included in that number were a professor of classics, a UCI endowed chair in rhetoric, an associate professor of comparative literature, and an associate professor of Spanish and Portugese.

Hardly callow upstarts unmindful of their undertaking's significance.

"We write to support the six members who offered the resolution to remove national flags from the ASUCI lobby," their letter began. "The resolution recognized that nationalism, including US nationalism, often contributes to xenophobia and racism."

The professors also noted that their opposition to nationalism - including that of the American variety - was, "a more or less uncontroversial scholarly point, and in practice the resolution has drawn admiration nationally from much of the academic community."

In actuality, the dispute is over the ideal of a distinct nation state. One with autonomously defined borders, laws, principles, customs, and, yes, flag.

The apparently desired alternative is a sort of mongrel country, in which anyone who wishes citizenship can simply walk in and declare it, all the while waving whatever foreign flag they prefer.

Unlike Confederate flag bearers - or, say, Americans displaying flags of Ireland or other lands of heritage - these belligerent separatists do not recognize overriding national loyalty. To them, there is no unifying "American Way," no singular national character, and no identity other than, well, all the world's identities.

Janet Napolitano, former Obama Administration Secretary of Homeland Security and now president of the California University system, recently declared that professors must never refer to America as "the land of opportunity." According to the latest fancy, that might strike non-citizens as discriminatory.

To undo the centuries-old American experiment in self-governance and to completely eliminate individual national character, step one would be to banish the American flag, a distinctive national symbol.

Think of a Confederate flag ban, then, as a precedent or gateway.

And remember that those who would some day defend the Stars and Stripes can expect to be slurred as racists and bigots, regardless of their actual motivation, just as are citizens today who advocate for the Stars and Bars.

- DC Larson

The crack-pot ideology made flesh

Progressives  have for decades denied philosophical opponents' racial and gender realities; Clarence Thomas was "not really black," and Phyllis Schlafly "not really a woman." Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, though, plainly merit those designations.

That argument implied that race and gender were not characterized by objective, observable physical characteristics, but rather by "proper" ideas and values.

By that standard - and only by that standard - can Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner be classed as a woman. And only by it does white Rachel Dolezal qualify as black.

The two are physical manifestations of the utterly political notion that there are no objective and immutable human realities. That all aspects can be reshaped and redefined, as suits the person in question and the fancies of the day.

They personify the idea that political ideology is supreme, a definer of each part not only of our world, but ourselves -- who we are or can be -- and that no immutable characteristics stand.

Racial, ethnic, and gender identities, then, are not determined by birth, but by belief. And they are just malleable identity-vehicles for political navigation.

Only someone sincerely disinterested in legitimate racial and gender concerns, and caring about those groups only insofar as they can be exploited to advance ideological ambitions, would wave what amounts to an illusory 'mind over matter' banner.  

(At the same time, judging exclusively by appearance is not wise, as we are each comprised of various racial influences.)

If Bruce/Caitlyn and Rachel seem laughable to reasonable observers, well. then perhaps Clarence Thomas really is a black man, and Phyllis Schlafly genuinely a woman.

When feeling is believing

In dismissing her critics in a recent interview, Rachel Dolezal sniffed that they    

couldn't grasp racial and ethnic complexities.                                                          

                                             

As the late Chris Farley of Saturday Night Live fame used to say, "Well, la-dee-   frickin'-da!"                                                                                                               

There are, of course, no entrenched demarcations between designations like black, white, asian, hispanic, etc. There may well be no %100 purity, and that's fine. Perhaps Dolezal believed herself to be black to some small degree, and elected to embrace that insignificant trace as all-encompassing definition.

She just looked silly doing it. And, judging by quotes she littered behind her, she apparently believed anti-white sourness to be a necessary component of her counterfeit "real" blackness.

In 2015, truths are not matters of objective fact, but are instead resculpted or even raised new to indulge "feelings." Individuals' emotional satisfaction have become the selfish and silly replacement of intellectualism and objective realities.

And the story of Rachel Dolezal and her fumbling "transracial" self-reinvention came along at exactly the wrong moment for cultural progressives.

'Dedicated followers of fashion' who had only recently puffed themselves up with stout, preposterous defenses and rationales for Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner, found themselves on all fours playing pop-philosophical Twister to contrive positions explaining why, if a he could magically become a she, a white woman couldn't -- Presto! Chango! -- become black.

One example: In a 6/12 Mic essay, Feminist Wire co-manager Darnell L. Moore complained that, "[S]ome are carelessly equating the so-called 'transracial experience' with that of transgender people, ignoring, for one thing, that however socially constructed markers of racial divisions may be, skin color is hereditary."

Moore's stressing of heredity's importance seemed to indicate some regard on his part for objective biological reality. Odd, then, that his regard did not extend to explaining why, in his apparent reckoning, the immutable difference between male and female chromosomes is utterly insignificant.

Moore soldiered on, taking care to avoid the c-word: "To be clear, in attempting to pass as black, Dolezal falsely represented her identity. Trans people don't lie about their gender identities -- they express their gender according to categories that reflect who they are."

Gender, than, is not determined by nature, in the trendy pop-gospel of Feminist Wire co-manager Darnell L. Moore, but can now be reshaped according to heart-whim. In other words, anyone can be anything.

Except black.

I believe persons who choose to alter their gender have as much right to make their own life decisions as do any other of us. But I am persuaded by the idea that they then merit distinct classifications, rather than that the classical male and female ones be bent into accommodating shapes.

One frequently hurled argument favoring freshly minted "transgenderism" is that a consensus majority of the psychiatric professions today accept "gender diaspora" as a legitimate phenomenon.

But to posit that that recognition is indisputable and necessarily the 'final word' is to believe that the psychiatric majority is infallible. In championing gay rights -- a cause that I, too, support -- advocates sometimes note that once-solid consensus has changed, before. Gayness was in 1973 removed from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

But to have been on it to begin with, a misjudgement had to have been
generally accepted by a majority in the psychiatric body. Who is to say the now-voguish "gender diaspora" notion won't in the future also be acknowledged as erroneous? After all, psychiatrists are human, people do make errors in judgement, cultural passions are not without bearing, and doctors are only able to utilize the research contemporarily available to them.

The only thing we can be sure of when it comes to the psychiatric community is that we cannot be sure of anything at all.

This silly debating of observable facts did not begin with racial poser Dolezal or gender one Jenner.

The farcical 'rethinking reality' phenomenon was at the center of the 1990-2005 argument over whether comotose adult cardiac arrest/oxygen deprivation victim Terry Sciavo was literally and definitely human. Only to annoyingly fine-pointed, me-first pretenders to intellectualism can a person somehow not be a person at all.

As the poor woman lay in her hospital bed, tubes in high function, busybodies wholly removed from her circumstance jousted on cable news, unashamed that their ideological promptings and political ambitions were easily discernable.

Of course, I understand that there are considerations other than appearances, and that they can be important in making determinations. For instance, did the absence of intellectual capacity, and the likelihood that such would forever be the case, mean Terry Sciavo had already effectively ceased being human?

How do we define "human?" By capacities for higher reasoning, for awareness of not just oneself but also surrounding circumstances?

Must such be present for humanity to be actual? Isn't it more than a little slavery-era or nazi-esque, to "debate" what constitutes humanity? Isn't humanity self-evident?

Can life only be safe for those able to speak for their interests and who possess some degree of power, or at least the ability to inspire advocacy by the power-wielding majority?

The same questions arise when considering abortion. If independent viability is the standard, how can one justify prolonging the lives of adults dependent upon artificial support? Haven't they, by that reasoning, ceased being human?

For my part, I'm not nearly as stalwart in my support of reproductive choice as I once was. Oh, I understand that an embryo in early stages of development is not objectively a person, and for that reason I still support early abortion.

But when a pregnancy is in its late stages, the embryo has attained personhood. And I do not support abortion at such a point.

Considering this matter from only a single perspective, such as "women's rights to reproductive determination" leads to a conclusion that dismisses all other relevant concerns. It is supremacist thinking. There is more than one life involved. And nature decided that a long time before any of us held forth on the subject.

All of these matters - Jenner, Dolezal, Schiavo, abortion - have in common the phenomenon of educated persons actually arguing over what is objectively so. And that only reaffirms the truth that being educated is not necessarily the same as being smart.

_

Woman without a country

Thanks to abundant media coverage and non-stop Twitter/social media conversation, the strange case of Rachel Dolezal is internationally familiar.

By nature blond and peaches-and-cream complected, Spokane, Washington's Dolezal has for years misrepresented her identity, parentage, and past. She now claims to be black, teepee-born, a survivor of abuse, and the mother of her adopted black brother - assertions that baffle her recently interviewed white birth parents, who deny all.

Having reinvented herself, she became both an Africana studies professor at Eastern Washington University and the President of Spokane's NAACP chapter.

"I don't give two shits what you guys believe! You are so far done, and out of my life!" a belligerent, utterly caught-out Dolezal snapped today to a Sky interviewer. She huffed that her sole concern was clarifying the matter to the black community and her NAACP colleagues, not explaining it to "a community that I, quite frankly, don't think really understands the definitions of race and ethnicity."

That nose-in-air elitism, unfortunately, is not uncommon among psychologically-disheveled, unproductive academics.

To its roaring discredit, the NAACP voiced its support of the fundamentally dishonest Dolezal. That organization's sour allegiance should be remembered by anyone receiving future donation requests from it.

Note the hostility Dolezal expressed toward "you guys" who she considers "out of my life!" It was an extension of nasty racial separatist impulses she had for years cultivated.

Ruthanne Dolezal, Rachel's mother, told CNN on Friday that her daughter had in past years insisted her parents not attend her functions, lest they "blow her cover."

"Rachel has chosen to distance herself from the family and be hostile toward us," Ruthanne told the cable news network. "She doesn't want us to be where she is, she doesn't want to be seen with us because it ruins her image."

And still more fuel came from Rachel's brother, Ezra. Youngest adopted brother Izaiah lives with Rachel. In a Friday phone interview, Ezra told the Washington Post, "[Rachel] turned Isaiah kind of racist. Told Izaiah all this stuff about white people, made him really racist towards white people."

Race-hate, then, would seem to be a Rachel Dolezal faith. It is hardly a natural component of any ethnicity, but Dolezal is hardly a natural person.

Stepping back a bit, though, and considering this with a broad view, one realizes it is not without a particularly odd fellow.

Every decade or so (and this is wonderfully ironic) some obscure neo-Nazi half-wit is discovered to be of Jewish lineage. As a result, their entire crackpot and poisonous world crumbles. Counterfeit identity ended.

This is not to equate blackness and nazism; rather, the estimation points up the ludicrousness of artificiality, of denial-through-reinvention, and of attempting to pass as someone other than your true self.

That indicates a core unhappiness with one's very being, possible mental ill health, and is ultimately frail.











 

Old Hate in new academic vogue
UK, US university cases illustrate greater problem

Two untoward sophists, their respective UK and US sitations distinct, were recently the subjects of white-hot opprobrium and - here, head-shaking is appropriate - some degree of support.

Their ugly episodes merit appraisal, as do their trashy cheerers and ill-carpentered philosophical underpinnings.

"Bahar Mustafa: Goldsmiths Students' Union diversity officer to keep her job after vote of no confidence petition fails," was the
IndependentUK.com's 5/27 headline.

The professionally dyspeptic misfit Mustafa had 
gleefully perpetrated numerous rancid actions not at all befitting a "diversity officer" responsible for encouraging general harmony:

She organized and advertised a 'no white males allowed" 
strategy event, led fractious disruptions of university order, championed the segregationist "safe spaces" fancy, and slurred one critic as "white trash"
through her official Goldsmiths diversity officer email.

As press accounts spread and pressures against her mounted, Bahar Mustafa stamped her feet, balled her fists, and held a particulary bizarre support event.

"There have been charges made against me that I am racist 
and sexist to white men…" the Independent quotes her as bleating, before she offered this self-serving, funhouse mirror redefinition of "racism:"

"I, an ethnic minority woman, cannot be racist or sexist towards white men because racism and sexism describe structures of privilege based on race and gender and therefore women of colour and minority genders cannot be racist or sexist, since we do not stand to benefit from such a system."

A videotape of the oddball pep rally shows the ranting Mustafa backed by a gaggle of unsightly irregulars, who occasionally murmur affirmation noises. There are even a few male adherents at the mob-fringe; their
apparent glumness needs no explanation. Surely, they were hoping to impress someone -- perhaps anyone. Critics of the campus Social Justice Warrior phenomenon term such pathetic and prideless affection-courting sorts, "White Knights."

(And more than one commentator noted that Mustafa delivered her pre-prepared idea-jumble into a microphone held for her by a black woman. The mind reels at the optic wrongness.)

That enough students at Goldsmiths University of London did not find Bahar Mustafa's racial bigotry, calls for seperatism and genocide objectionable shows old hate's favor in 2015 SJW precincts. (#KillAllWhiteMen, a favored Mustafa hashtag, is one whose casual employ she still defends; an 'expression of irony among the marginalized,' she called it -- or some such philosophical detritus.)

Fortunately, the vile, bigoted SJW twits of Goldsmiths 
are not barometers of world sensibility. And they may soon get real-life cold showers, once they have left the the bubble-shelters of an affluent campus and Mummy and Daddy's costly compounds. (One UK paper reported that Bahar Mustafa plots her 'peoples' struggle' schemes from her parents' half-million dollar luxury home.)

Doubtless, they then will find little comfort in school days-cherished paperbacks extolling insurrectionary, factionalist outlooks.   

But pseudo-justifications of racial and gender hostility and division identical to the me-centered redefinition favored by Goldsmith's little Bahar are also thought quite the thing to think by some in certain intellectually disheveled sectors of U.S. academia. Consider the case of Saida Grundy, an incoming Boston University professor of African-American studies.

Earlier this year, Grundy shared her own hostile 
and historically innaccurate views in a recent series of  Twitter messages:

"White masculinity isn't a problem for america's [sic] 
colleges. White masculinity is THE problem for america's 
[sic] colleges" (In a subsequent tweet, she termed white 
males an inherently"problem population.")

"Every MLK week I commit myself  to not spending a 
dime in a white-owned business, and every year I find it 
nearly impossible."

"For the record, NO race outside of europeans had a 
system that made slavery a personhood instead of t
emporarycondition."

"There is also no race except for europeans 
who kidnapped and transported human beings 
in order to enslave them and their offspring for 
life."

"Before europeans invented it as such, slavery 
was not a condition that was defacto inherited from 
parent to child." Grundy would damn an entire racial 
group as immutably wicked. As traditionally 
understood, "racism" entails exactly that sort of 
condemnation of whole shared-inherent 
characteristics groups. 

But again, as with Bahar Mustafa at Goldsmiths in the 
UK, we are confronted by tilted, trendy reimagining. In 
Grundy's twilit flights, racism is a matter of 'oppressive structure,' and necessarily predicated on "access to 
levers of systemic, institutional, political, and 
economic influence." 

As such, goes the unwieldy propaganda line, racism 
is the exclusive province of "the oppressing class." 
No one else can possibly be racist. At all. In any way. 
Ever. 

(And it gets worse: with the contemporary coining of the 
"white privilege" concept, guilt-by-group-membership 
can be extended into perpetuity. Sort of a caste 
phenomenon.)

Clear-headed onlookers, hewing to the orthodox, clearly

objective definition, recognized that Grundy's Twitter 
rants belied an unquestionably racist nature. 

Once the national spotlight had fallen on her, and once donating Boston University alumni 
began voicing objections,Grundy did issue a faint 'apology.' Most who 
read it, though, noted that while she did call her original statements

"indelicate," she did not at all renounce their horrible philosophical foundation.

The UK students who back Mustafa have a good deal in

common with Grundy's US campus advocates, beginning
with  a fabricated and self-serving ethos.

Shorn of its particulars and reduced to logical essence, 
the recently-minted 'new definition' these papier-
mache musketeers heft in reeling parade is at base 
identical to its claimed foe - for each depends for utility 
on a supposed inherently inferior/dastardly demographic 
group.

By their beclouded adolescent adherents' stunt-reasoning, 
all whites are the inherently racist enemy -- save for themselves, of course. Many of Mustafa's and Grundy's raggedy collegiate stalwarts are themselves pasty as 
can be. They just never quite get about the business of 
accounting for that rip in their pretended reality.

To the motley and callow choir - unsophisticated, 
unintellectual, and unflaggingly PC, all persons can be 
neatly compartmentalized into two camps: themselves 
and "right wingers." 

That cheap and cowardly trick-move allows them to 
simply sweep aside without consideration all 
contrary arguments, never mind how such might be 
reasoned. It is the way of tyrants, not of thoughtful 
persons.

(And readers may recall that the counterfeit tactic of 
evading explanation by preemptorily dismissing all 
critics as uniformly arch-conservative, and thus ignorable, 
was also recently essayed by 3rd Wave feminist 
squawkbox and bragging child molester Lena 
Dunham.)

It is simple to seem victorious and of redoubtable nobility 
when jousting a fictitious foe of one's own crafting. But it 
is a lie, and I will not let it pass unexposed.

For, in their foolish play, they do not acknowledge, and 
perhaps do not even grasp, that they do not own anti-
racism. There is a purer, more principled form that, 
unlike their tender, flawed model, objects equally and 
as a matter of genuine, unvarying principle to all racial 
bigotry, regardless of its source; one which is hardly 'of

the right,' being further ideologically distanced from
that bent than are they.

Too, our eyes belong on those dust-blanketed academics 
who wheezed to Grundy's banner. She did not originate 
the rigged fantasy that racism is exclusive to whites 
and is necessarily manifested in systemic and 
structural ways.

That curious and rigged construct enjoys popularity 

in many unproductive, navel-gazing ivory towers. 
One nationally recognizable academic figure 
sympathetic to similar silliness is Georgetown 
University Professor Michael Eric Dyson, a frequent 
guest on the fast fading MSNBC. (When exercising 
my sardonic muscles, I term Dyson "Professor Popinjay.")

Hurriedly hopping onto Twitter to take up for the 
beleaguered Grundy were growling and generally un-
pleasant academics who shared her toy definition and 
hate rationale. Surely, they perceived themselves as 
potentially imperiled.

Of course, exploring unorthodox avenues and testing 
for soundness nontraditional theories are legitimate 
academic functions, not ones to be discouraged.
(Regrettably, a scattered few vile white racist posters 
joined the Twitter criticism of Grundy. The damage they 
did was two-fold: They were, of course, noxious and socially injurious in their own right -- and I certainly object to them no less vigorously than I do to Grundy -- and they gave 
her unethical backers the opportunity to misrepresent the occasional, foul message as typifying the nature of Grundy's opposition. Of course, when someone cultivates a disingenuous tactic, that signals that they are conscious of the frailty of their argument, as well as proving character deficit 

on their own part. Too, lending support to the bigoted 
professor have been a couple of crude black racist 
posters. To the present author's knowledge, Grundy 
never rejected their backing.)

It is doubtful that the hard-working taxpayers who fund
institutions of higher learning would be pleased by the 
news that they are providing for their own demise.

The Mustafa and Grundy episodes demonstrate the need 
for public scrutiny of accepted teachings in higher 
education and, to be frank, the abolition of trivial positions 
and departments.

end