The University of Montana asked students, staff and community members to participate in an essay contest on the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. When the school released the results last month, Montana students and race activists across the country stood up and gave the 4 winning female essayist a hardy round of applause.
What’s wrong with the above paragraph? What’s wrong with it is Fella falsified the last 14 words. Here is the full paragraph without the last 14 falsified words…
The University of Montana asked students, staff and community members to participate in an essay contest on the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. When the school released the results last month, Montana students and race activists across the country accused university officials of racism and disrespect. That’s because all four winners were white. Turns out some would rather the school had honored King by judging entrants on the color of their skin rather than the content of their submissions.
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Here in Bullet Point Format are the Key Points of the Rest of the Story (yes, the late Paul Harvey is helping me assemble this bit of Foolishness)…
- The four contest winners started receiving threats.
- The African-American studies program, which had sponsored the contest, removed their photos and essays from its website.
- A central fact—no black students had even submitted an essay—failed to defuse the racism charge.
- Critics blasted “shameful” university officials for holding a contest at all.
- A lecturer on the college race circuit admonished the University for thinking that “there is a universality around writing an essay,” when in reality blacks express themselves “completely different.”
- One black student sniffed that participating would have been a “sellout/compromise.” “Having grown up in all white spaces,” he posted on Facebook, “I often avoided events such as this because I knew the purpose was a performative gesture from the administration.” (How the student determines when events are not “performative gestures” was left unspecified.)
Fella’s Educational Insertion
Performativity is a complex concept that can be thought of as a language which functions as a form of social action and has the effect of change. The concept has multiple applications in diverse fields such as anthropology, social and cultural geography, economics, gender studies, law, linguistics, performance studies, and history, philosophy. (Source: Wikipedia)
Now don’t you feel smarter? I know I don’t.
- The African-American studies program was denounced for not canceling the competition when the organizers realized the skin color of the six entrants.
- “I cannot understand how anyone would think remembering the legacy of MLK Jr. is achieved by giving four white girls a shout out,” wrote a critic.
- Outraged observers accused the contest committee of not specifically soliciting submissions from black students.
- In fact, the committee, whose majority consisted of “persons of color,” including the presidents of the Black Student Union and the Latino Student Union, had asked members of the Black Student Union to participate.
- The students’ failure to do so, despite a $250 first prize, was nonetheless deemed the university’s fault and another instance of the university silencing minority voices.
- Woke white students declared that they would never presume to write about MLK and racism, since doing so would be an example of “speaking OVER black voices.”
- If no white students had submitted an essay that too would have demonstrated campus bigotry.
(Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.)
- The demographics of the University of Montana student body and faculty were cited as evidence for the white supremacy charge. The undergraduate population is 79% white and 1% black; the faculty is nearly 90% white. (Never mentioned was the state’s demographics: 89% white and 0.6% black.)
- The university has been predictably repentant, calling the criticism “fair.” Yet its Facebook page also notes, with a hint of exasperation, that a student’s skin color does not preclude him from submitting an essay or working toward equality.
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All of this would make Martin Luther King sad because his colorblind ideal has been thoroughly repudiated: whites who write about implementing Dr. King’s legacy today are threatened, rather than welcomed to the cause.
Rodney Glen King would be sad also. During the riots, on May 1, 1992, Rodney made a television appearance in which he said...
I just want to say – you know – can we all get along? Can we, can we get along? Can we stop making it horrible for the older people and the kids? And ... I mean we've got enough smog in Los Angeles let alone to deal with setting these fires and things ... It's just not right. It's not right and it's not going to change anything. We'll get our justice. They've won the battle, but they haven't won the war. We'll get our day in court and that's all we want. And, just, uh, I love – I'm neutral. I love every – I love people of color. I'm not like they're making me out to be. We've got to quit. We've got to quit; I mean after all, I could understand the first – upset for the first two hours after the verdict, but to go on, to keep going on like this and to see the security guard shot on the ground – it's just not right. It's just not right, because those people will never go home to their families again. And uh, I mean please, we can, we can get along here. We all can get along. We just gotta. We gotta. I mean, we're all stuck here for a while. Let's, you know, let's try to work it out. Let's try to beat it, you know. Let's try to work it out.
Fella to Rodney…The final chapter is yet to be written so there is still hope but, at this point in time, it appears we can’t all get along.
(I did not write the bulk of the above. This material came from an article in the Wall Street Journal by Heather Mac Donald and it was published on Feb. 6, 2020.)
Would I kid u?
Smartfella
Lagniappe: There is a lot of sad above but probably the saddest sad is this bullet… “The four contest winners started receiving threats.”
Lagniappe More: The University sort of defended itself in a Facebook Post but it did more groveling than defending.
This part of their “defense” was especially interesting:
The committee members who judged the essays were both white and people of color, and the process of judging included removing the authors’ names and identifying information from the essays, also called “blind judging.”
Read it, if you want… https://www.facebook.com/umontana/posts/10159172552917646?__tn__=K-R&mod=article_inline
