The best way to prove your anti-racism is to condemn someone else.
I had just moved from Chicago’s Lawndale to North Park and ended up in Miss M’s eighth-grade class. Miss M was a fervent patriot, an admirer of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and a staunch anti-communist. She was suspicious of the new kids whose families came out of Lawndale. At the time, 70 percent of the people living in Lawndale were immigrants. One day, Miss M asked me where my parents were from. When I said my mother was from Russia, Miss M went ballistic. “RUSSIA!” she exclaimed. “I’ve got my eye on you!”
Political hysteria causes opportunities for the manifestation of psychopathologies in politics, as H. D. Lasswell noted in his seminal work, Psychopathology and Politics. Now we have a new hysteria over race relations built on hypocrisy. Those who would assert their constitutional right to take a knee for the national anthem or refuse to recite the pledge of allegiance want you to commit to their agenda of fighting racism — after you confess to your racism, of course.
Universities across the nation are being flooded with such proposals emanating from the agenda of Black Lives Matter. And university administrators are falling all over themselves to show their anti-racism by embracing those proposals, just as those of a previous generation did to show their anti-communism through loyalty oaths.
There is no neutrality in the universities today. To be neutral is to be racist, as in a previous era to be neutral about communism was to be a communist. These non-negotiable demands inundating our universities violate not only the First Amendment but also the time-honored tradition of academic freedom.
Abraham H. Miller – The American Spectator – June 21, 2020.
