The latest in an apparently endless stream of outrages from
college campuses
, this one from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, should make clear we’re at a cultural impasse until we solve a heretofore unsolvable riddle.
Namely, how can reasonable people reach the hearts and minds of
collegians
who don’t even operate from the same logical universe, much less the same moral one?
‘BE LESS FRAGILE’: BLACK PLAYWRIGHT SCHOOLS COLLEGE STUDENTS WHO SHUT DOWN HIS SHOW
According to The College Fix, UNC
has a new art club called “Earthtones”
that is really focused on shades of brown. Alas, the shades aren’t on canvases but in the hands of those holding the paintbrushes. White students, according to the publication, are explicitly excluded from membership of what The Daily Tarheel calls an “all-BIPOC art collective.” (BIPOC is a woke-speak acronym for “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.”)
Eliyambuya Baker, Earthtones’s head of two-dimensional art and design, told the Tarheel: “I think the idea of Earthtones is just to celebrate the brown people in our community and just pay homage to the beautiful color spectrum we create.” The club creates “an atmosphere that cultivates a community free from tokenization, filtering, or exploitation,” the Google sign-up
form
reads.
As reported by The College Fix, “The no-whites-allowed club has sparked an interest in creating other groups that shut out white people,” with a non-white theater company now in the planning stages as well.
Even aside from making a fetish of nonsense woke-speak words such as “tokenism” and “filtering,” along with misuse of other words such as “exploitation,” these semi-adults seem oblivious to the notion that what they are practicing is the long-standing
dictionary definition of racism
. Volunteers during decades of the civil rights movement in the 20th century, who risked social standing and sometimes their very lives to ensure that people of all races could freely intermingle and integrate, would be appalled to see people of any skin tone exclude people of other skin tones at a government-funded institution. Meanwhile, it is self-evident nonsense to suggest that the experience of creating and appreciating art is dependent on the hue of the practitioner or beholder.
In terms of logic disappearing in
rabbit holes
, students embracing these all-brown clubs at UNC are a parallel to those students — there are plenty — who demand that their elders must actively persuade them that it’s wrong to shout down, physically block, or punish people who offer opinions the students dislike or claim to find offensive. The parallel questions are: 1.) How can someone have a reasonable discussion with a student who thinks it’s OK to shut down a discussion he doesn’t like, and 2.) how does it make sense to engage in overt racism in the name of
fighting racism
?
In both cases, one side (the students) refuses even to accept bedrock principles of logic and decency or foundational rules of conduct. By very rough comparison, it’s as if one football team demands that the other play the game between the two sidelines on an ordinary football field while the first team reserves the right to completely ignore the sideline boundaries. Or as if the Queen in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland didn’t merely demand the “
sentence first; verdict afterwards
,” but also insisted that the evidence itself be withheld until the sentence was inflicted.
It is difficult to see how American culture can be saved if even a plurality, much less a majority, of the numerically growing younger generations have their brains and hearts so addled by university brainwashing that their entire frame of reference is an inversion of right reason and, frankly, of reality itself.
Right now, trying to reason with many of these brainwashed collegians is like yelling into the wind. This column ends not with a prescriptive answer, but with a plaintive question: Does anybody have good suggestions for how to communicate with such wayward souls?
