BUZZ
ANALYSIS: ‘Clear parallels between [the student’s] suggestion and how white Southerners handled ‘the negro problem”
Four years ago a Purdue University women’s, gender and sexuality studies professor hilariously tried to compare the University of Pennsylvania’s “Lia” Thomas, a male participating on the women’s swim team … to Jackie Robinson.
Robinson, whose story was most recently popularized in the film “42,” broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball in 1947.
Now, a professor of communication studies at the small, private North Carolina liberal arts school Davidson College, notes he challenged a student who favored separate transgender sports leagues by likening such to “separate but equal” Jim Crow policies of the pre-civil rights-era South.
Issac Bailey writes in The Charlotte Observer that the student had “eagerly raised his hand” in class to make his point — to which Bailey immediately retorted “so separate but equal?”
Bailey says the student “hadn’t recognized the clear parallels between his suggestion and how white Southerners handled ‘the negro problem’ in a region dominated by Jim Crow policy.”
According to Bailey, this moment “occurred during a portion of the class designated to challenging every idea anyone put forth,” and he says he “didn’t care” about the student’s opinion on the matter, or that he left class still believing such.
“I only cared that he approached the issue through a 360-degree lens,” the expert in “race and journalism” says. “It meant grappling with the reality – scientific and social – that a strict sex binary can be applied legitimately to only maybe 95 percent to 97 percent of us.
“Trans, nonbinary and intersex people don’t fall neatly into our common definitions that draw absolute bright lines between ‘men’ and ‘women.'”
MORE: Study: Opposition to trans athletes rooted in ‘homophobia,’ disdain for female athletes
Although Bailey makes it appear he’s merely asking questions and challenging for challenging’s sake, in the same piece he glosses over a controversy involving a transgender elementary school teacher, pooh-poohs the entirety of the trans issue by claiming there are “like […] maybe 10 trans people in college sports out of more than half a million athletes,” criticizes the U.S. secretary of defense’s view of transgenderism by claiming he’s “unqualified,” and rips Royce White and Enes Kanter Freedom for highlighting the issue of men playing in women’s sports.
Note that Bailey is the same academic who claimed — even though he didn’t know him nor attend the same school — that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh “was probably lying about his drinking” during his SCOTUS confirmation hearing.
His expertise, such that it is, was possessing “a nearperfect view of such behavior in college because [he] never got drunk and could watch it all while sober.”
Oddly enough, Bailey had “zero questions” about the credibility of Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford.
In 2021 Bailey claimed Kyle Rittenhouse was merely a “victim of the ‘the Foxification or Fox News effect of American discourse’ regarding topics such as Black Lives Matter.”
Rittenhouse “was trying to do good, to protect this dying nation […] the same nonsense claim people have been using throughout the U.S. Predominantly white voters were trying to defend their freedom, so they flocked to an open bigot like Donald Trump and stormed the U.S. Capitol.”
MORE: Harvard prof: Rise of Donald Trump similar to Jim Crow, KKK era
