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The Theater of White Guilt
The President of the University of Missouri resigned in a dramatic, televised speech this morning. He must have done something really bad, right? If you’re like many people out there, you may be reading the news articles trying to figure out exactly what the bad thing was.
We are told there is a racial controversy at the university. Did the president get caught using the “N” word? Did he fire someone due to her skin color? Was he outed as a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan?
Answer: None of the above. Mizzou’s ousted president, Tim Wolfe, seems to have been forced out of his half-million dollar per year job — not for what he did, but rather for what he didn’t do.
The students who drove him out have been complaining that Wolfe did not respond forcibly enough in the wake of certain racist incidents on campus. The most scandalous of these several incidents involves the student body president, who is black. He says that several months ago someone drove by and insulted him with a racial slur. I also read that someone made a swastika out of feces in a campus bathroom. Black students who organized protests in recent days say they feel “marginalized” on campus.
But what did Tim Wolfe have to do with any of this?
Let me tell you a little story: Some years ago, a professor at Claremont McKenna college in Southern California who identified as Jewish (although she hadn’t officially converted) reported that someone had vandalized her car with a bunch of anti-semitic slurs, swastikas, and the like. Students, understandably, were alarmed, scared, and galvanized. There was a huge campus protest — a great show of solidarity — where students gathered by the hundreds, holding hands on the campus quad, and “intolerance” was condemned.
About a week later, this lady was proved to be a fraud. She had faked the hate crime and vandalized her own car. But the worst part of the story was that was revealed that college administrators already knew she was under investigation for lying to police about the incident. In other words, they already knew that, in all likelihood, she had faked her own hate crime. Yet those administrators went along with the anti-intolerance rally, helping to organize it and standing by silently while throngs of tearful students unknowingly battled the fake racism in their midst. Those administrators were happy to set up a theater of white guilt.
And that, my friends, is what Tim Wolfe, apparently was not willing or shrewd enough to do. He apparently didn’t take seriously the idea that the University of Missouri was plagued with institutional racism. He didn’t realize that one or two anecdotes might be enough to cost him his job if he did not act out his part in the play.
When it comes to race relations, what’s important on most American campuses today is not the facts, but rather the narrative of the social justice struggle. If you are perceived as not taking racism seriously enough, it’s off with your head. That’s why at a big football school like Missouri, where this weekend’s game is worth $1 million in revenue to the school, 30 black players could be convinced to go on strike unless Wolfe stepped down — despite the fact that Wolfe, to the best of our knowledge, has never said or done anything that could be construed as racist.
Wolfe did not realize that his job, as president of a prominent university, requires him to participate in the drama of racial grievance that saturates our college campuses — despite the fact that they are, typically, far more insulated from racism than the real world.
If someone called the student body president by the “N” word earlier this fall, that’s a bad thing. But that really isn’t what the protests (and, yes, even hunger strikes) at Missouri were all about. Wolfe released a few public statements, condemning racism and intolerance. But what he didn’t do was show his belief that the University of Missouri was in the midst of a racism crisis.
Perhaps now he wishes he had organized a rally or two. Never mind that the very existence of a black student body president would seem to disprove the idea that the University of Missouri is inhospitable to people of color.
We live in a day in which Harvard requires its staff to refer to an individual transgender student by the plural pronoun “they” if the student says that’s how he wants it. And we live in a day in which a university president can lose his job if he does not agree that a couple of racist incidents aimed at apparently unconnected individuals call for a public display of outrage and the acknowledgement of an institutional crisis.
I once heard the civil rights leader Shelby Steele say something that’s always stuck with me. “Racism will always exist,” he said. And wherever it does exist, it is worthy of our unqualified condemnation.
But what we have witnessed today in Missouri has nothing much to do with racism, at least as it concerns Mr. Wolfe. It has everything to do with his unwillingness to play the leading role in the great theater of white guilt, where our universities are the main stage.
Published in Education
Hey, it’s called “journalism school”, not “reporting school” or “news school”.
Sorta. They voted, but the ballot boxes have remained sealed. The NLRB overturned the decision allowing them to unionize, the ballots will never be counted, and the results of the vote will never be known.
That bit of the story didn’t get nearly as much press:
http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/13456482/northwestern-football-union-line
I keep wondering about the perceived ‘value’ of a college degree as I watch this stuff. Trade school looks more like a better investment.
Their parents didn’t go to trade school. They wouldn’t want to be the first ones in their families to stop going to college.
They aren’t going to college, Misth. They are going to the Precious Snowflake Academy.
One day, reality will sucker punch them hard.
One of the demands said that the “president and Chancellor positions be selected by a collective of students, staff, and faculty of diverse backgrounds.” So, it doesn’t have to be a Person-Of-Color, but they will be selected by Persons-Of-Color who are not in positions to actually make hiring and firing decisions, or else.
Other demands include, “funding and resources for the University of Missouri Counseling Center for the purpose of hiring additional mental health professionals — particularly those of color”. So at least they are admitting that the student body is full of mental patients.
This needs to be seen in conjunction with the pathetic capitulation of the administration at Yale over an insane ginned-up controversy over “threatening” Halloween costumes. The activists who watch this stuff have now had massive success at both Ivy and State universities. They will now duplicate this elsewhere. Expect the deluge.
Another coward, refusing to stand up to punks, expel a few, have the police arrest some others. Education is so full of these guys.
It appears they’ve taken over the asylum.
Dear God.
They have, and where does the University go from here?
In the tank unfortunately thanks to federal student loans. If we get the free money out of this system and put accountability back in the funding a lot of this nonsense ends.
Mis,
100%.
Regards,
Jim
Administrators who cave on this garbage believe in nothing.
Of course there is. Lazy students don’t care this much.
This calls for a black lesbian! Twofer!
If among those who forced out the president include the Board of Regents, then those regents need to be shown the door along with the president. If it was boosters that forced out the president, they need to be exposed and their businesses boycotted.
I would love to see this, iWe, because you would be awesome.
At some point, somebody is going to do it, and bring about a massive swing back toward sanity. It can be explained simply: racism cannot be used to combat racism, any more than stupidity is the best cure for stupidity. And the students are acting like selfish, racist little snots.
I think it would be great if any of the candidates in the next debate did this. Trump would (if he thought of it). But Cruz and Fiorina both have the temperaments for it. And it would make HUGE waves.
If I’m reading Ricochet and a guy rides by in a pickup and calls me a honky, does Rob Long get fired?
Only if you can get the Ricochet football team to boycott the big game against Breitbart.com.
No chance. I can’t wait to play in that game.
The kids at Yale are really embarrassing—you’re at YALE for crying out loud! New Haven has Persons of Color with real problems; why not wander a few blocks over and ask a few folk whether the most upsetting thing they can imagine happening to them this year is that someone will wear a disrespectful Hallowe’en costume?
Oooh, I know! Let’s make Hallowe’en a whole different holiday, one that is the exact opposite of Yom Kippur: a low holy day in which you go around telling other people how much they’ve offended you and loudly demand redress, reparations and resignations. (And candy.)
Does Wolfe deserve sympathy? My understanding is that he endorsed the idea that the alleged incidents demonstrate that Mizzou has a racism problem and said he was wrong not to have dealt with it more harshly.
I was just thinking something along the same lines.
Thought experiment: White kid at the school gets called “cracker” by black kid driving by. Black power fist, drawn in feces, found in bathroom.
Does the university president lose his job?
We know the answer.
The punishment doesn’t fit the “crime”. Was anyone hurt? Did anyone have his rights violated?
If I were the president, I would have gone all Reagan on the football team: “You don’t want to play? We don’t have to pay your tuition.”
To paraphrase Reagan: “I didn’t expel them; they expelled themselves.”
Johnny, this also made me think of Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers. Although I don’t think that would have been a tenable position, I would have hoped that the university president could have stood up like a man, and said that he wouldn’t resign and that he had done nothing wrong. Instead, he gave these people exactly what they wanted, which is only going to embolden them and encourage others to do the same elsewhere.
Bereket, that clip was sickening.
-E