Posted on 05/16/2018 6:21:44 AM PDT by Breyean
Southern California houses don’t have gutters. Not enough rain. I wish I could say I noticed this, with my keen journalist’s eye. But it was my wife who, strolling around the lovely college town of Claremont, east of Los Angeles, pointed it out. That happens a lot.
What I noticed was the sign for the “Black Graduation Ceremony” two days before commencement at Pomona College, the liberal arts school where my kid got his degree Sunday.
The sign was the first thing I saw stepping on campus, and set the tone. What could black graduation be? Like black proms at southern high schools? A sign of fracture? Even here, at an epicenter of inclusion? Pomona placed 9th out of 2,475 colleges on a ranking of the most diverse schools.
I started with my kid: what gives? He said there are several separate graduations — also a “Lavender Commencement” for LGBTQ community. No big deal.
We had come 2,000 miles to attend three events. The first, a pair of brunches for the Economics and International Studies departments — his degree is in both. We got to meet his friends, teachers. It was great.
Next to me in the buffet line was someone who seemed a good a place to continue my investigation. Lorn S. Foster, the Charles and Henrietta Johnson Detoy Professor of American Government, whose field of study is “race, community and power.” I asked about black commencement.
“For kids who don’t have a place at Pomoma,” he said. “It’s a space for them to be expressive.”
Do they not have a place in the larger school because they are denied it? Or because they refuse it? It seems an important distinction.
Foster, retiring after 40 years, mentioned the LGBTQ commencement and similar events.
“They’re celebrations,” he said.
Fair enough, and I tried to enter into the spirit of celebration, but kept getting nudged out
The next day, Class Day, in cool weather — California’s “May Gray.” The class day address was by Shahriar Shahriari, a respected, popular math professor. I would summarize his talk as: the United States is an imperialist power meddling in the affairs of nations across the globe, including his home of Iran.
True enough, though if he has lived here for the past 40 years for reasons beyond this country being an iron fist of repression crushing the dreams of freedom worldwide, he kept those reasons to himself. I wish he hadn’t.
The rest of that program nestled in that sweet spot of mundanity that isn’t bad enough to be comic, alas, but never rose to the level of actually being interesting. When I looked over at my son to gauge his reaction, he formed his fingers into a pistol, placed it to his temple and pulled the trigger.
“Maybe we should have crashed the black commencement,” I suggested.
The next day, at graduation, class speaker Maria Jose Vides Orellana gave me my first trigger warning.
“I want to give a general content warning, for references and mentions of violence, deportation, anti-blackness, police brutality and sexual assault,” she began, also offering up a fair summary of how the college experience was presented to us parents.
Much talk of “marginalization,” and I was tempted to shout, “If you want to be marginalized, try being a newspaper reporter in 2018, or a conservative white Jewish male at a liberal arts college.” But the truth is, sympathizing with yourself is a skill everyone masters all too thoroughly. What’s the point of being woke, as the kids say, if the take-away, “I’m better than you,” is the same conclusion every hater comes to, no college necessary?
Trump’s America offers a steady drumbeat that certain people don’t belong. So it’s heartbreaking, if perhaps expected, that the object of this scorn concludes: “Hey, we don’t belong.”
Belonging can be seized without fanfare. One of my kid’s roommates is a U.S. Marine studying water management — he’s off to Stanford for his masters. He showed us an engraved K-bar knife his buddies gave him as a graduation present. We all admired it, and while I wished one moment in the two-day ceremony acknowledged the presence of guys like him, or my son, they both seem to know who they are and what they are doing, no public validation necessary. I guess that’s white privilege.
‘they both seem to know who they are and what they are doing, no public validation necessary. I guess that’s white privilege.’
Money shot!
Get a time machine and invite a few Civil Rights activists from 1963 to pay us a visit. They would look around at our segregated, racially polarized society and say, “We failed! There has been no progress!”
Those clever little Democrats found a way to have Jim Crow even after they had to get rid of Jim Crow.
“Higher Education” has become a left-progressive social engineering project and a lucrative home for the radical leftist base. And it’s all funded by Fed.gov and massive debt at zero interest rates in our printed, fiat money
I don’t see how change or reform of this political-industrial education complex is possible without great political struggle and concurrent economic pain. It’s like having cancer
It’s California, Pamona, not America
The younger generations are so easily threatened. To a degree, I understand as our nuclear families unravel and their upbringings have been more chaotic. But I think they have no frame of reference to the past.
I wish that were true, but they are pulling stuff like this at SMU. It’s a cancer.
I wonder if college history classes still cover the effects of Balkanization.
“Those clever little Democrats found a way to have Jim Crow even after they had to get rid of Jim Crow.”
Excellent observation.
MLK and the entire era of his day wanted integration, and the Democrats found a way to have segregation...they just call it ‘special’.
“You’re a very special black person, so you get your very own special graduation away from all those nasty white people, because you’re a victim.”
Pure genius. Victimology. They have Jim Crow, they just call it something else with a different excuse.
The goal is to separate the country into multiple, opposed, warring factions. Then they turn one against another. Class struggle. Class warfare.
Marxist way of doing things.
They have succeeded. This is not a united country. It’s many small groups each suspicious of the other.
Politicians did it. F*ck you, politicians.
And yet he wrote many, many large checks to this institution.
Fool.
L
“For kids who don’t have a place at Pomoma,” he said. “It’s a space for them to be expressive”
They want to strut and preen across the stage while their relatives hoot and holler like.... they do. Heaven forbid there be any dignity imposed by the evil white patriarchy.
If you let your kids attend a liberal cesspool like Claremont or Pomona, you can’t be too surprised when they’re exposed to this kind of racist poison.
Admiral William McRaven, Commander, JSOC and Navy SEAL, at the University of Texas: McRaven at UT 2014
Bill Whittle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83P11kZuMtQ Bill Whittle - A Real Commencement Speech
My son just graduated from a small “geek” school. 25% minority. No racial nonsense. Just a bunch of new engineers.
I’ve put two thru college and one starts in the fall at CU Boulder. All have come OK without “transforming” into lefty loons. If you raised them well thru high school, they’ll survive college.
Curious....what school did your son graduate from?
Agreed. All three of my kids considered SMU but decided elsewhere. I figured that SMU would be mostly conservative but the stories I hear convinced me otherwise.
Even at SMU the LGBTQ community runs wild and the traditional kids have to keep quiet or else.
All three of mine have come out fine, two are through college and one starts this fall.
These students are not children....they are adults. Never pay for this insane ‘education’... They want to go, let them figure it out. Might make for a few rough years in your relationship, but a good wake up call to a budding, Leftist, Snowflake... This does not apply to hard science programs.
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