To Glenn

Glenn’s article can be read here.

Imagine having the entire world shaped to your singular and specific benefit so comprehensively that there was never a time or place in the last millennium in which you would have been ostracized or denied privileges because you yourself are the picture of privilege. Now imagine the world beginning to recognize that, perhaps, one class of person should not be able to hoard all of the benefits of randomly generated biological brilliance. That perhaps, no one’s biology is more brilliant than that of another. Then imagine being incensed by this. Such is the case of one Glenn Harlan Reynolds.

Early last year, the man in question penned an editorial in which he contended that college campuses that provided safe spaces for discussion and solidarity among people of color were as divisive and harmful as the practices and institutions that created the need for such spaces. On multiple occasions, he compares such activity to racial segregation. In Reynolds’ mind, “All of this labeling, separating and dividing by race and other characteristics is one of the things contributing to a divided and divisive America.” Interesting. I was of the opinion that moronic and insecure white men like him were among the greatest contributors to our divisions, not the actions that attempt to reverse the damage they’ve done.

How anyone as clueless as Mr. Reynolds, creator of politics blog Instapundit and a law professor at the University of Texas has been able to maintain any semblance of readership is miles beyond me. You must see things from a certain shelf of privilege or be bitterly racist to take issue with initiatives and events created for the specific benefit of the American minority population, and I sincerely hope that he is only guilty of the former.

Mr. Reynolds’ place of privilege is apparent in how clearly appalled he is by the idea of he and his tribe being excluded from anything. Likening the institutional racism of the American segregation era to the efforts of colleges across the nation aimed at palliating or rectifying the centuries of racial trauma and discursive censorship of certain minority groups. Primarily African and Latin Americans require a laughably ignorant misunderstanding of American race relations.

To forge a connection between the forceful separation of races in promotion of white supremacy, to the current attempts to give back the sociopolitical and economic ground targeted and unwelcome minorities have historically had stolen, is to completely ignore the rationale minorities and those trying to help them have in distancing the former from white people in certain contexts.

Veritable mountains of evidence exist of white Americans’ strategic censorship of discourse by minorities in academia and the strategic suppression of minorities’ efforts to ascend the socioeconomic ladder. But now that some American colleges are attempting to reverse this damage, Mr. Reynolds and those like him lambaste their exclusion as ‘segregation.’ As if white Americans need ‘safe spaces’ when the nation itself is their domain.

Mr. Reynolds, like many a conservative or neoliberal, evidently believes that equal opportunity needn’t be worked toward because it has already arrived. Of course, he fails to see the need for stepladders—we are all on the same level. If he were to read this and disagree with me, I would ask why, then, he is so ardently against the idea of supporting environments and initiatives for the ascendance of minority groups at the expense of excluding white people. White people who, generally, don’t require as much assistance. I would also ask why the simplest of minds can tell racial segregation apart from severely needed reparational activity and a law professor cannot.

The scenario produced by this article is comical and all too common: A white man with no conception of American race relations takes issue with minority-targeted opportunities and the spaces in which he is not welcome. Because he and his tribe cannot fathom the denial of their elite, universal access to everything, segregation must have once again reared its hideous head. Never mind the reasons one may have for wishing to be distanced from or given the opportunity to attain socioeconomic status comparable to that of white America, a class that has historically antagonized and ostracized the country’s minority population. Mr. Reynolds and like-minded cynics don’t want to hear it—anything structurally sans-white is as contemptible as the epoch of lynching and Jim Crow.