GUTFELD: Colleges are brain-free zones, so they are not learning from history. Why blame them for how they are?
The other day the New York Times printed the following:
“‘I Am a White Man, Hear Me YELL!’ By a Black Teen Student After Being Taught To ‘Stop Being Black’ At His College.”
The article’s headline was an overreaction to what might seem innocuous — the words “black” and “diversity” appear no less than 17 times per page.
However, the title and opening sentence in the actual article are the same:
“I Am a White Man, Hear Me YELL!” By a Black Teen Student After Being Taught To ‘Stop Being Black’ At His College.”
The only difference is that the words “white” and “black” are replaced by the words “college” and “diversity,” respectively.
Yet the NYT uses the words “white” and “black” so often that its entire argument is premised on a singular narrative. The paper’s own headline — which is in turn the lead sentence in the entire article — is not only about the headline but also about white people not learning from history, specifically their own history of slavery. That narrative is inescapable.
The New York Times is an institution of white supremacy, and many white people in particular are guilty of propagating it in their own social media and beyond.
It is not news that white people have for decades claimed to be “diverse,” and “multiculturally aware” — even by the standards of the time, at least as measured by the standard of then-President Barack Obama. In an essay in the August 2014 New York Review of Books, author Kimberlé Crenshaw wrote:
“[M]ulticultural awareness…is in fact a category and not a binary. It requires listening to and learning from those who are different from oneself.”
We’re not talking about