Public Reading—A Hate Crime
After spending so much time in grad school, and witnessing the Duke Lacrosse hoax first hand, I thought that I had built up a general immunity to academic PC—“there they go again” was my usual response to the latest advance in sensitivity training.
But even a hardened veteran like myself was a little taken aback when my friend Michael Brendan Dougherty sent me this report on Keith Sampson, a janitor at Indiana-Purdue who was convicted of “racial harassment” for—publicly reading a book!
The book in question wasn’t exactly the latest by David Duke, it was instead an academic tome lauding Notre Dame for resisting the Klu Klux Klan. One would think a janitor would be commended by the administration for being an autodidact. It seems the Affirmative Action Office would prefer that he instead study the latest from Mark Anthony Neal, the corpulent “radical intellectual” comfortably ensconced in the Duke African and African Studies department.
Here’s the letter from the AA Office in full:
”The Affirmative Action Office has completed its investigation of Ms. Nakea Vincent’s allegation that you racially harassed her by repeatedly reading the book, Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan by Todd Tucker in the presence of Black employees. In conducting this investigation, we interviewed you, Nakea Vincent, and other employees with information relevant to the mailer.
Upon review of this matter, we conclude that your conduct constitutes racial harassment in that you demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your co-workers who repeatedly requested that you refrain from reading the book which has such an inflammatory and offensive topic in their presence. You contend that you weren’t aware of the offensive nature of the topic and were reading the book about the KKK to better understand discrimination. However you used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your Black co-workers. Furthermore, employing the legal “reasonable person standard,” a majority of adults are aware of and understand how repugnant the KKK is to African Americans, their reactions to the Klan, and the reasonableness of the request that you not read the book in their presence.
During your meeting with Marguerite Watkins, Assistant Affirmative Action Officer you were instructed to stop reading the book in the immediate presence of your coworkers and when reading the book to sit apart from the immediate proximity of these co-workers. Please be advised, any future substantiated conduct of a similar nature could result in serious disciplinary action.
Racial harassment is very serious and can result in serious consequences for all involved. Please be advised that racial harassment and retaliation against any individual for having participated in the investigation of a complaint of this nature is a violation of University policy and will not be tolerated.
This concludes this matter with the Affirmative Action Office. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.”
In one of my articles for TAC I traced the trickling down of academic PC from the tenured professorate to the middling intellects of the university bureaucracy. Now it seems the university employees have joined in the fun—taking part in the accusations, denouncements, and public floggings—as a good way of bashing those they don’t like and getting “empowered” by the Affirmative Action Office.
(Hat tip to the Volokh Conspiracy and the well-intentioned if profane “Freedom and Shit.”)




Comments
So much for the “Home of the Free and the Land of the Brave.”
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PC Terror?
It will end when enough people are laughing at it instead of cringing before it. It needs to be ridiculed, not contested. Outrage only fuels its proponents’ glee: At least they’ve upset us. And fighting PC with its own weapons legitimizes those weapons; stop using silly terms like “racist” and “racism” – ugly pejoratives for white people coined at a time when doctrines of racial superiority were no longer fashionable in this country. The chronic, hysterical witch-hunt for invisible “racism” is really a campaign to dispossess whites, and relegate them to third-class status in their own countries. There are worse things than being a “racist”… For one: being a slave.
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Somehow this reminds me how the Spanish Inquisition
forbade the printing of Burke’s Reflections on the
Revolution in France, because with Revolution in its
title, it had to be a apology for revolutions…
Well, sometimes the Spanish Inquisition was just plain dumb.
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Vanquishing discursive learning and debate in the Public Schools, the “Have a Nice Day” Leisuretariet is now busy at work with their factotums, enforcing a rigor mortis of the mind within the university.
Students recover from the constraints of auto-pilot thought by running off to Daytona Beach or Cancun at Spring Break in order to engage in a kind of Cliff Notes of Bachanalia and Exhibitionism sponsored by MTV et al.
One does have to enjoy the special kind of intellectual tyranny that would punish a janitor for reading a book about anything more elevated than Big Truck Rodeo.
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Dollars to donuts while this doofus is fighting with his co-workers or reading (!), any actual “janitoring” is being done by Korean or Hispanic women, quietly and efficiently. He should insist on being given a a laptop so he can do his goofing off in private, like, you know, the people in the AA office.
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Don, I don’t think that “European Americans” should launch a “counter offensive” by calling ourselves “European Americans,” making endless complaints, and generally victimizing ourselves. Laughing at PC and treating PC bureaucrats and intellectuals with the contempt they deserve is the better option.
Your idea that we should reproduce the methods of victimology makes me believe that you completely misunderstand the situation—as if it’s now poor little whites who are oppressed by the system. Last time I checked, those who comprise the majority of the PC professoriate and bureaucracy and those most forcefully propagating PC and anti-Western ideology are of pretty pale complexion. Who exactly would join the ethno-victim-lobby that you propose?
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Anybody remember the “niggardly” incident from a few years back? Or the “future-oriented thinking is racist” nonsense in the Seattle schools a couple of years ago? The Turner Diaries might have gotten this poor slob The Chair…
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What if the janitor keeps reading the same book, only wrapped in a plain paper cover? And when challenged, claim that it’s a different book? And if further questioned about the matter, show that it actually IS a different book? And just for laughs, he should make a point by always carrying around a book with a non-descript, plain paper cover, smiling and nodding knowingly whenever near a black person. That would seriously mind-fuck the fellow employees, not to mention the AAO.
I see a fad coming. The day the plain paper covers took over the campus.
In near future, it would be made a punishable offence to be near black people while carrying books.
Naturally, the only conceivable step for the PC crowd would be to ban books.
Think they wouldn’t at least try?
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Looks like to me it is more about the raw exercise of power and rule by intimidation or terror. You know just like the bad old days were supposed to have been. Looks like the civil rights movements is really about putting the bottom rail on top.
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Survival in the “University Community” is a “down the rabbit-hole” sort of experience. It is very much a totalitarian theme park. The ultimate goal of this PC nonsense is to choke acceptable discourse down to duckspeak. The most important lesson learned by the students is to accept public lies and private truths. As one outrage after another is perpetrated upon us, few dare to speak the truth. Truth is hate and hate is bad. Orwell got it right. The emperor is as naked as a jaybird and those who mention this are beyond the pale. The founders understood the power of free speech and so do the Cultural Marxists.
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“It will end when enough people are laughing at it instead of cringing before it. It needs to be ridiculed, not contested.”
Amen. Everyone gets the joke, they’re just afraid to laugh out loud. Once the mockery begins in earnest the the whole regime will collapse under a wave of belly laughs.
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Mr. Spencer:
About 10 years ago I served on my (at that time) employer’s local Diversity Council (I served out of curiosity - in much the same way reasonable people once parted with their hard-earned 25 cents to see the side show or freak show whenever a circus came to town). Let me assure you the level and nature of the imperiously-PC complaints directed to that Council’s attention from the company’s most “special” and therefore most desired talent was very much like that directed to Purdue’s AA office by the janitor’s “special” and therefore desired co-workers. In a word: balderdash. Like my former employer’s famous imitation cheese food products, the company’s and Purdue’s strict adherence to PC vagaries will propagate only for as long as paying customers and coercive gov’t agencies demand it.
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They could ban black people from universities. That would solve most of the problems.
It would have just been easier to let White people enjoy thier own proud universities.
Then all those black wonder geniuses in Africa could point and laugh at the miserable low
grades of the whites at those “racist” universities, right? lol.
http://www.stormfront.org
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“Laughing it off” may be a rational response, but when we find ourselves in an insane society, rational responses no longer work.
Is it laughable that people in post-Soviet “democratic” Europe are going to prison for thought crime?
People is the US are routinely abused for thought crime and perceived thought crime. Can prison sentences be afr off?
Our civilization is crumbling and there is no laughing about it from my point of view.
And political correctness is only one aspect of the problem. We live in a hyper-politicized society which often results in unprincipled and abusive workplaces. There is often no rational pattern either. I have witnessed workers gang up on reasonable supervisors and cry “intimidation” and virtually get a decent person fired. I have also watched crazy supervisors bury select employees in unbearable amounts of work and then proceed to to excoriate them in “performance reviews”. All the while the state preaches “equal opportunity” and big business preaches “teamwork and values”. All great, except that many of the people playing the game are nuts.
What did Aldous Huxley say about being labeled crzay in an insane society? That those are actually the healthy people…
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How many books by David Duke have you read?
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Mr. Reis,
If your question is directed at me, the answer is none. Whyy do you ask?
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It seems that blacks’ only goal in life is to tear down what Whites have built up, as some sort of misguided revenge for slavery. They’re too brainwashed with this warped, “politically correct”, anti-White sentiment to realize that it was their own people who enslaved them, and the Jews that brought them here!
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Say whatever you please, read whatever you want, when confronted by the PC bullies, take them to court.
I personally will not tolerate PC,diversity non-sense or some moron trying to shove white-guilt down my throat.
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I have a simple solution to ALL ‘racism’: CHOICE. Allow white people who want to live ONLY with other white people, to do just that: find the whitest state in the U.S., and from a certain date, announce that it will be ALL WHITE people only. Then all the ‘racist’ whites would LEAVE the rest of the United States to finally be free of non-whites. And the non-whites would NEVER experience ‘racism’ again. Unfortunately for the non-whites, they’d find that 95% of the whites would want to leave, and the poor third worlders would once again be living in the same conditions as the ‘wonderful’ countries they came from. I wonder why blacks aren’t calling for separatism?
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Sigh....
More thought crime and persecution in Europe just this week.
http://www.serbianna.com/news/2008/01823.shtml
Mr. Spencer, next one could be titled “Public t-shirt wearing proclaiming a fact is hate crime”
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This is a good example of why I believe that sending children to government run schools is a form of child abuse.
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I think the board was right. When you look at it on the surface and reduce it to “HEY HE’S BEING PUNISHED FOR READING” then it looks like he’s been majorly wronged, but think about it. If you were a black person just trying to do your job would you really want some guy constantly reminding you that once upon a time white people kicked the shit out of you?
I’d probably expect someone to point out at this point that reading a book as hardly an aggressive action. However, I’d point you to the line “your co-workers who repeatedly requested that you refrain from reading the book which has such an inflammatory and offensive topic in their presence”.
These people were uncomfortable and simply asked him to not read it in their presence. Put yourself in the situation. What is the human and polite thing to do? Just drop it and read something else. Read it at home. Think of someone else’s feeling and respect that we all have our quirks. What’s the douchebag thing to do? Keep reading, piss off as many of your co-workers as possible and turn being polite into a self-righteous crusade.
The janitor doesn’t deserve to lose his job, but he’s been a dick and I’d be surprised if any of his coworkers would be happy to have him back on the team. This is hardly a censorship issue and some of the posts here are laughably righteous.
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