We shouldn’t be remotely surprised that Texas State University’s student newspaper published an op-ed titled “Your DNA is an abomination” that argued “white death will mean liberation for all.”
“Those who are shocked that the author’s odious view made it to print underestimate the pervasiveness of radical social justice ideology in the academy,” according to Andy Ngo, a Portland State University graduate student and College Fix contributor who has been published in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
The “abomination” op-ed led Ngo to reflect on his “jarring” experience upon arriving at PSU two years ago, he writes in Quillette:
I attended an event titled, “Students of Color Speak Out.” The university president encouraged all students, staff and faculty to attend the event, organized in reaction to alleged racial tensions on campus. As a student of color and the gay son of refugee immigrants, the event’s premise interested me.
As I sat in the front, I listened to students detail their daily trauma of existing on a campus that was majority white. Students representing many ethnicities repeatedly shared feeling unsafe. I was confounded because their anecdotes spoke of an experience that sounded similar to those who lived in apartheid-era South Africa or Jim Crow Mississippi — not something I remotely recognized in ultra-progressive Portland.
Students didn’t say they were afraid of threatening behavior, but rather the very presence of whites, as when one said she feared a white gunman would “imminently” attack the anti-racism event, Ngo says.
He had to go to graduate school to learn that the big leagues of anti-racism activism were the opposite of his high school and undergraduate experience, “which sought to unify diverse students through inclusion.”
He had to attend an anti-racism event to see “people overtly dehumanized and treated as racialized objects – amplified through the use of words like ‘bodies’ to refer to people of color”:
In-between and during speeches, students sprinkled in various chants. What I heard was a siren’s song leading us to a culture of racial division and mistrust. …
I left the event wondering if the sum of my worth was on an identity I was born into.
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