I don't know if I hope you have or if you have not seen this. The link I give you here is to a story too sad to be hysterically funny -- http://www.mrctv.org/blog/videostudents-sign-petition-boycott-racist-song-white-christmas.
Yes, although you didn't know it, that terrible Christmas song "White Christmas", whose rendition by Bing Crosby is the top performance of a single song of all time, is actually racist. I kid you not. And it is racist because it dreams of, yes, a Christmas that is the color of the snow which, being white, happens to resemble more the hue of Cauacasians.
That postulate was put in person before a series of passer-by students at George Mason University, a public (state) university in Fairfax, Virginia, amazingly close to where I used to live. And, perhaps, frighteningly so. What is, of course, more frightening is that plenty of students -- 18 in an hour -- were perfectly willing to sign a petition to support taking "White Christmas" completely off the radio waves as an expression of racial protest.
I can grit my teeth only mildly at the fact that some of the students had never heard the song, and some had never heard of Harry Lillis Crosby himself. I mean, there seems to be no real use for songs with actual melodies in them, so I get that.
What I would grit my teeth into powder thinking about, is that anyone, let alone someone who graduated an American high school and is now attending a real-life college, is stupid enough to miss the message of "White Christmas." Combine that with the capacity to be duped into thinking that it is somehow about racial something-or-other, and we are in pretty sad shape.
Lest you think that George Mason University is simply not a sophisticated enough school and its students are just Southern hicks, I can happily point you 500 or so miles north to Harvard, the "Harvard of Eastern Massachusetts" (colleges are always calling themselves the Harvard of this or that, so we MIT grads are always willing to poke our Cambridge neighbor).
At the "real" Harvard, we had a parallel exercise in stupidity last year.
In this case, it was by the "Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion". I suppose that if I were paying full tuition and fees to Harvard, I would wonder why part of my hard-earned money was paying for people to be employed in an office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, but I am not, so I digress.
No, as the story points out, that office put out a bunch of -- get this -- placemats, as in things you put under your dinner plate to keep crumbs off hallowed Harvard tables. The placemats instruct poor, unfortunate students unable to think for themselves, as to how to answer when thy are posed simple questions. The questions were ones like why we shouldn't be taking in 10,000 undocumented people claiming to be Syrian refugees, even though their demographics are skewed toward military-age males and the then-FBI director, since fired in disgrace, assured us that we can't prove anything about any of them.
Apparently, even though the intended users of the placemats are Harvard students, they aren't bright enough to figure out the right answer themselves, and so need to be instructed with the proper, liberal answer by the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. They may all know who Bing Crosby was, but they may not have the proper education in offering leftist Hillary-speak, and need their university to tell them.
Needless to say, there was some outrage, and the esteemed institution was forced to back down and -- get this -- apologize. Since liberals never, ever apologize, except for the USA and for being Americans, it was pretty remarkable when the school issued this statement:
"We write to acknowledge that the placemat distributed in some of your dining halls this week failed to account for the many viewpoints that exist on our campus on some of the most complex issues we confront as a community and society today. Our goal was to provide a framework for you to engage in conversations with peers and family members as you return home for the winter break, however, it was not effectively presented and it ultimately caused confusion in our community… Academic freedom is central to all that Harvard College stands for [aside for brief chuckle]. To suggest that there is only one point of view on each of these issues runs counter to our educational goals ..."
Oh, golly. First, the punctuation after "winter break" should have been a semicolon, not a comma. This is Harvard; even we from MIT know that. Then there's this -- if "academic freedom is central to all that Harvard College stands for", then how did the placemat thing even get started? Is anyone from Equity, Diversity and Inclusion being fired because of this? Reprimanded? Suspended? Given "Diversity of Ideas is Actually OK" training?
At the end of the day, what is significant is that there are now thousands of college students out there who, owing to their lack of a civilized discussion forum and the liberal pressure from their campuses, are incapable of distinguishing a pretty, old Christmas song from a racist chant. And that they apparently need to be trained to lecture their racist parents.
These people are able to vote. If that doesn't frighten you that 18 people so dumb as to think "White Christmas" is a racist song have the vote, or that Harvard students are so dumb that they need an Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion to tell them ho to answer questions, then perhaps you should be sentenced to an hour in a "safe zone" pondering how Barack Obama ever became president.
Hint: it wasn't my fault.
Copyright 2017, 2015 by Robert Sutton