The Safe Mode? Decline

                                                   The Safe Mode? Decline

Heather Mac Donald has an article in the WSJ that Don sent. It is enough to inspire despair in the most hopeful people. Politics has introduced a new option to the glass half full concept: Shoot the glass.

The University of Montana asked students, staff and community members to participate in an essay contest on the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. When the school released the results last month, Montana students and race activists across the country accused university officials of racism and disrespect. That’s because all four winners were white. Turns out some would rather the school had honored King by judging entrants on the color of their skin rather than the content of their submissions.

The four contest winners started receiving threats, and the African-American studies program, which had sponsored the contest, removed their photos and essays from its website. A central fact—no black students had even submitted an essay—failed to defuse the racism charge.

Critics blasted “shameful” university officials for holding a contest at all. A lecturer on the college race circuit admonished the university for thinking that “there is a universality around writing an essay,” when in reality blacks express themselves “completely different.” One black student sniffed that participating would have been a “sellout/compromise.” “Having grown up in all white spaces,” he posted on Facebook, “I often avoided events such as this because I knew the purpose was a performative gesture from the administration.” How the student determines when events are not “performative gestures” was left unspecified.

The African-American studies program was denounced for not canceling the competition when the organizers realized the skin color of the six entrants. “I cannot understand how anyone would think remembering the legacy of MLK Jr. is achieved by giving four white girls a shout out,” wrote a critic. “Do not center Whiteness on the day we are supposed to remember MLK Jr.’s legacy.”

But the contest rules had no racial prerequisites. The essay prompt—“How are you implementing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy here at the University of Montana?”—was universal.

Outraged observers accused the contest committee of not specifically soliciting submissions from black students. In fact, the committee, whose majority consisted of “persons of color,” including the presidents of the Black Student Union and the Latinx Student Union, had asked members of the Black Student Union to participate. The students’ failure to do so, despite a $250 first prize, was nonetheless deemed the university’s fault and another instance of the university silencing minority voices. Woke white students declared that they would never presume to write about MLK and racism, since doing so would be an example of “speaking OVER black voices.” If no white students had submitted an essay, that too would have demonstrated campus bigotry.

Naturally, the demographics of the University of Montana student body and faculty were cited as evidence for the white supremacy charge. The undergraduate population is 79% white and 1% black; the faculty is nearly 90% white. Never mentioned was the state’s demographics: 89% white and 0.6% black, according to the 2019 census estimate. To boost its black enrollment, the university would have to poach black students from other states, whose colleges are equally desperate to increase their own diversity numbers. The essay submission rate for white undergraduates was 0.1%. If the school’s population of black students had submitted at the same rate, 0.08% of the essay contest submissions would have been from black writers. That’s essentially zero, which is, in fact, how many such submissions were received.

The long-effect of this kind of behavior is predictable: Cautious non-participation in any project that has the slightest chance of being turned against you by creative virtue-signaling entrepreneurs.