Hating whitey at Stanford

That’s the title of this article by Rod Dreher. Actually, the article doesn’t show contempt for Whitey at Stanford, just for poor or rural whites from the South. Other whites may be okay at Stanford as long as they keep their heads down and aren’t into the American flag.

Dreher’s article is based on this report from the Stanford Review:

A week ago, residents of Enchanted Broccoli Forest [apparently the actual name of a residential co-op at the university] discovered the words “No crackers!” scrawled in paint across their bus. Targeted towards whites from the South, especially ones who are poor and rural, the term “cracker” is widely recognized as a racial slur.

You would think that residents of a supposedly progressive and racially conscious house would jump to remove a racial epithet from house property. Not so. When a resident posted a picture in the EBF GroupMe last Thursday, peers brushed aside the incident with off-color jokes.

When a white Southerner resident in the house asked that the graffiti be removed, as it is racist and classist, other residents accused him of piggybacking on the complaints of people of color to raise his less-important “white” concerns, while others shamefully tried to excuse the slur as “deserved.”

Residents repeatedly brushed aside [his] discomfort with the racist graffiti. Finally, a staff member explicitly endorsed the message on the bus, telling him (erroneously) that since “the word cracker, has been historically defined to mean ‘racist white person,’” she agreed with the graffiti.

Apparently too enlightened to take ten seconds to read the definition of “cracker” as a term “for white people, used especially against poor rural whites in the Southern United States” (never including the idea of racism), she told her first-generation white Southern resident: “I hope we have no crackers here.”

Dreher concludes:

Students at Stanford, no matter what their color, are among the most privileged people in this country, and on this planet. And yet, look: they justify hating poor white people on the basis of their class and their color, and they exalt themselves based not on anything they’ve done, but merely on the basis of their skin color and sexual desire.

To what extent does a Stanford education produce or reinforce the racist and classist mentality on display at Enchanted Broccoli Forest (I still can’t get over the name)? I don’t know, but some of what the students expressed — e.g., the notion that complaining about racism directed at whites is cultural appropriation — seems to come straight from the modern left-wing humanities professor playbook.

If Stanford isn’t supplying the racism, I strongly suspect it’s supplying the jargon. And if Stanford doesn’t take the “cracker” incident seriously, and punish the adviser who hopes there are no “crackers” in her “enchanted forest,” Stanford will be condoning racism.

In any case, Stanford doesn’t seem to be providing its students a liberal education. Rather, the “cracker” incident suggests that Stanford is providing its students a liberal-fascist bubble — an enchanted forest for infantiles.

Will these students be able to cope after they leave that bubble? Only if America becomes dysfunctional.

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