Any incident is good enough when it’s something you want to do anyway: Connecticut College cancels classes to discuss problems of racism. A couple weeks ago someone wrote “nigger” on a poster relating to Black History Month, and a few days later someone told a “student of color” [sic] to “go back where she came from.” In response to these incidents, which hardly seem to justify tying up the whole institution, the president of the college guaranteed vigorous pursuit of the perpetrators, declared the incidents an “extraordinary opportunity for collective learning and growth,” cancelled classes for a day of community discussions, and promised “strong measures to affirm the solidarity of our community and our collective commitment to diversity, tolerance and civility.” Which, one supposes, is what he wanted all along: a more energetic and thorough version of PC in a world in which “commitment to diversity” is the ticket to advancement for academic administrators.
One is tempted to call these
One is tempted to call these incidents the expression of a religion, with the difference that such religious manifestations in the past—say, the charges of witchcraft in 17th century Massachusetts—had NOT been repeatedly proven to be frauds, whereas virtually every incident of an anti-black epithet being scrawled on the door of a college dorm room in contemporary America has turned out to have been perpetrated by a black student. Despite that fact, each new such “racist” incident is treated with total credibility and leads to the usual cries for racial reform, racial sensitivity sessions, increased racial quotas for minorities, and so on.
The moral? Our current, liberal witchhunters are MORE irrational than the Puritan witchhunters of the 17th century.