Advanced Political Correctness

A reader writes:

In this disturbing article, Robert Weissberg says he and other professors stop teaching the truth because black students are offended. Not just negative things about blacks, like crime rates, but anything that mitigates the view of the U.S. as pure evil, such as the truth about the 3/5 compromise (it was the South that wanted blacks fully counted) or the fact that the Constitution ended the slave trade. So they have to be fed a line of pure victimization and pure villainy.

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N. writes:

The article by Robert Weissberg is very important, and I urge all who read it to skip nothing, especially the last few paragraphs which tell of a “good liberal” who found out that he was not immune to the forces of PC. It is a very sad tale.

Mike B. writes:

I must confess to feeling conflicted over the horrible fate of poor Professor Stuart Nagel. My “civilized” side is saddened by the injustice done a decent man. My “angry white male” side whispers that if sacrifices are made on the alters of multiculturalism and political correctness, as inevitably they must, is it not fitting they come from the ranks of those who engineered it?

LA writes:

A reader (whose e-mail I’ve misplaced) drew my attention to this comment which follows Weissberg’s article. I’m quoting it in its entirety:

I knew Stuart Nagel when I was a student at Illinois and later when I was his colleague. In the fifties and sixties, Champaign-Urbana was as segregated and racist as any part of Mississippi. In that environment, Stuart Nagel worked zealously on behalf of the local African-American community and also for changes in the way in which the university recruited African-American students and hired and promoted African-American employees. Stuart Nagel was promoting affirmative action before even the word itself had entered the lexicon of political discourse. As a licensed attorney, he provided legal representation to local African-Americans,either pro-bono or for trivial compensation. His zealotry on behalf of civil rights often earned him the contempt of the higher university administration and the ridicule of some of his colleagues. Beyond that, his civil rights work, in those days, was not beyond pale of physical harm. After all, much of downstate Illinois, like downstate Indiana, had been settled by Southerners dispossed by the Civil War and these were people who faithfully transmitted across generations the prejudices to which they had been born. Against all this, Nagel persisted. After the tragic death of Martin Luther King, Jr., Nagel and his colleague Phil Meranto were instrumental in getting the university to commit to an outreach program to African-American students, which helped pave the way for fundamental changes in the demography of the university’s student body. It is the height of unreality that someone with Suart Nagel’s pedigree could have been brought down by what must have been a mindless, banal, and naive accusation of “racism.”

Abraham H. Miller, emeritus professor, University of Cincinnati

Here we truly have the voice of unreconstructed liberalism. Miller is still singing all the liberal notes from the Fifties and Sixties. He seems to have no notion that the blacks liberated and empowered and filled with desire for vengeance against whites by that same civil rights movement, along with their white liberal facilitators, are the ones that destroyed Nagel. Has Miller never read Darkness at Noon, for ______’s sake? (About the Communists consuming their own.) So what is Miller’s reaction to the destruction of Nagel? Disbelief. Shock. The eternal emotions of the liberal who can’t grasp the evils that liberalism has unleashed and is still talking about white racism in 2007 when whites have come under an anti-white regime

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 17, 2007 11:39 AM | Send