Lyell Asher, Special to National Post
October 31, 2022
Racial “fracking” on American campuses — subjecting students to high-powered anti-racism programs that promise to extract hidden quantities of bigotry — only worsens divisions and creates new ones as the student body is fractured, writes Professor Lyell Asher in a three-part series.
This past August, when a Duke University volleyball player claimed she’d been heckled with the “N-word” every time she served in a game against Brigham Young University, mainstream media companies in the United States were quick to assume the allegation was true. After investigators failed to find evidence for the player’s claims, it was inevitable that the notorious — and more serious — Duke lacrosse case would be invoked as a point of comparison.
That case ended in April of 2007 with the formal exoneration of three Duke lacrosse players who’d been falsely accused of raping a Black woman at a party a year earlier. With nothing more than accusations to go on, much of the press, as well as the Duke administration, all but proclaimed the players’ guilt. A group of 88 Duke faculty published their rush to judgment in a full page ad in Duke’s student newspaper.
A few months after the players’ exoneration, Duke President Richard Brodhead spoke publicly about the “deepest lesson” he’d learned from that case, “the danger of prejudgment,” and was emphatic that the Duke lacrosse story be remembered in the right way. It should be remembered, he said, “as a call to caution in a world where certainty and judgment come far too quickly.”
But the case has not been remembered that way. On the contrary, in American higher education especially, the lesson taken from the case has been just the opposite: as long as the allegations involve racial hatred, reckless presumption is always the best strategy.
Consider just the latest exemplar of that lesson — an administrator at Oberlin College, Meredith Raimondo, who helped students spread baseless claims of racism against a local bakery. In doing so she exposed Oberlin to the US$36-million defamation judgment which, as of Sept. 9, the college has finally agreed to pay. Raimondo was recently hired away from Oberlin by Oglethorpe University, where she plans to build still more “intentional learning communities” as Oglethorpe’s new vice-president for student affairs.
The truth is, the “deepest lesson” of the Duke lacrosse case was never what President Brodhead claimed — not even at Duke. The president and his administrators all kept their jobs, and as Stuart Taylor documented, the most fervent witch hunters on the faculty flourished.
No surprise then, that on April 1 of 2015 they rushed to judgment yet again when a cord with a noose on the end was found hanging from a small tree on campus. Without hesitation, the Dean of Students Larry Moneta (who’d recklessly prejudged the lacrosse case, too) wrote to the campus about a “cowardly (act) of bias and hatred” whose “hateful message will sadly pervade (sic) and persist for a long time.” Counselling services were offered to those “struggling with the news and needing support.” Protests were organized with hundreds of students, faculty and administrators decrying the scourge of racism.
But within a day it became clear that there’d been no threat. An international student had come forward to explain that a scrap of nylon cord had been used as a prop in a text message asking friends to come “hang out.” The student had neglected to take the cord down.
Remarkably, the Duke administration withheld this news from the campus for a full month, until the last day of final exams when most students had gone home. They thus allowed that threatening noose to hang in the imaginations of the minority students, whose mental health they claimed to care so much about, for 30 days, when their fear could have been eradicated within the first 30 hours.
To anyone outside the academe, it probably beggars belief that adults in positions of authority would be as reluctant to admit that an act of racial hatred had not occurred, as they had been impatient to declare that it had. But when incentives cluster around fearmongering and race baiting, such behaviour is the norm.
What kind of incentives? A full year after the truth about that noose was revealed, a “racial equity expert” writing in the Washington Post acted as if he didn’t know it. In an op-ed on campus racism he referred to “nooses” being “hung around campuses,” and through a weblink directed readers not to the many updated reports about a foreign student’s honest mistake, which had been in the news for a year, but to the original, discredited story about a “cowardly act of bias and hatred” at Duke.
The author was ed-school professor Shaun Harper who at the time directed the Center for Race and Equity in Education at the University of Pennsylvania, a centre that charges what Harper himself admits are “enormous sum(s) of money” to conduct racial climate surveys and make recommendations. These recommendations typically include hiring still more ed-school-trained “diversity professionals.”
These “professionals” then institute programs that encourage the racial divisions their “climate studies” supposedly detect. When, for example, “anti-racist” organizations like “Courageous Conversations” insist that participants racially label themselves before speaking, they cultivate racist thinking in the guise of combatting it. When administrators segregate students into groups of “oppressors” and “oppressed” according to skin colour, they stoke the racial animosities they pretend to find.
If incentives were on the side of building interracial understanding, would American colleges be doing any of these things? Of course not. They’d be doing the opposite. A study from the Journal of Experimental Psychology merely ratified common sense when it found that the most effective anti-bias programs encourage “individuating” — viewing others according to personal, rather than racial characteristics. Who could have guessed that the best way to realize the dream of Martin Luther King is by practicing it?
But for industries that get oxygen from racial animus, the prospect of judging people by character rather than colour is a dream that’s best derailed. In its place, they fabricate an interminable nightmare in which even the documents and principles of liberation and enlightenment — from the Constitution and Bill of Rights to academic freedom and objective judgment — are draped in the spectral robes of white supremacy.
It’s not that the racial fracking industries can’t understand why their promotion of racial mistrust and division leads to — surprise — more racial mistrust and division. It’s that they won’t understand it, for the reason elucidated by Upton Sinclair when he observed that “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Special to National Post, which you can READ HERE
Lyell Asher is an associate professor of English at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore. Listen here to his YouTube video series on “Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults.”