Passe Protest Politics

Yesterday, in what’s been called a ” title=”fraternity party”>fraternity party near UC San Diego (“UCSD”) featured a “Compton cookout” that lured partiers with the promise that it would be a slice of “life in the ghetto.”  Black students and campus activists organized, protested the “party,” demanded that more black faculty be hired and that Proposition 209 be rolled back so that more black students would be admitted.

To compound these developments, some clueless idiot left a ” title=”Jena”>Jena, Louisiana.  Subsequently, six black youths were arrested for assaulting a white teenager.  These six were dubbed the Jena Six.  The events drew the attention of national civil rights figures that converged on the small southern town, along with upwards of 20,000 angry activists and protester.  After all the dust settled, it was widely believed that racism played no role in the original noose hanging incident. This was long after the incident had spurred the charge that Jena was symbolic of a resurgent American racism.

Two years later, at Columbia University a black female professor claimed she discovered a ” title=”plagiarized”>plagiarized the work of former students as well as the work of a colleague.

But why engage in street theatre and play up racial hysterics?  Despite all the self-serving rhetoric, today race actually plays a remarkably insignificant role in the lives of blacks and other ethnic minorities. Yet, it’s almost as if these young activists are yearning for the days when someone could really sink their teeth into a “movement.”  Are we witnessing the romanticizing of racial struggle?

One year before the 1964 Civil Rights Act was made law, President John F. Kennedy said in his report to the American people on civil rights that “… race has no place in American life or law.”  How ironic that today the enemies of this simple premise are not primarily the stereotypical white bigots – but “progressive” racial activists who have hijacked the bully pulpit of civil rights.