That Columbia Student Who Simply Loves White People Is Bad … Just as Bad as the Smug, Hyphenated-American Racial Student Groups that Condemned Him
by Alexander Zubatov
In the past few days, this story of an unhinged-sounding Columbia University student raving about his love for white people and proclaiming to a small group of more “typical” Columbia students that white people invented the modern world has been making the rounds among people who get very, very worked up about such things, including the ever-increasing segments of the media that makes a living off of selling people “racism” stories :
Apparently, immature idiocy is now important enough to be covered by the likes of The New York Times, NBC News, CNN and even the conservative segments of the media (here’s coverage by Fox News and The New York Post, for instance) that ought to know better.
The university’s technocrats quickly went into “very-concerned-and-serious” mode, launching an investigation into this incident and forming a “working group” to look into bias on campus. And, of course, needless to say, the university’s various students who think it appropriate to form groups based solely on their racial identities of the I’m-proud-of-myself-for-how-much-color-I’ve-got variety issued their usual hyperbolic pronouncements condemning this white student who is proud of himself for how much white he’s got. The “Columbia’s Student Organization of Latinxs,” to take one example, called on Columbia to hold the student accountable and, predictably, claimed the incident was part of a larger “institutional problem that is perpetuated by its administrative, academic, and business practices.” If we actually asked them what “administrative, academic, and business practices” they’re talking about, we would undoubtedly get, amidst shocked-that-you’re-even-asking expressions, vague pronouncements about institutional racism with, still, no underlying idea of what it is they’re really talking about. Is the “institutional problem” at the administrative level perpetuated by those same administrators who, nationwide — and, surely, still more at Columbia — number 12 liberals for every one conservative, in contrast to a six-to-one ratio among professors and a 1.6-to-one ratio among students?
Lost in all the hysteria is a point the white student made after he’d become national news and sobered up: his rant, he said, was just an “overzealous” reaction to “the divisive rhetoric that blames all the ills of society on white men.” Those of us who are eighty, sixty or even forty might not get it: a white college student today didn’t live through the period of slavery, Jim Crow, the repressive 1950s, the Civil Rights Era, the seething 70s or the Reagan 80s. Realize this: these white students pretty much came of age during an era when, from a very early age, everyone was telling them they and their entire racial grouping are deplorable scum responsible for most every ill in human history. If we are reflecting even one bit on what it is we are doing when we demonize and antagonize an increasingly struggling white majority, we should not be surprised, in the least, if at some point, some of these students might break free of the educational orthodoxy that works overtime to run down European civilization and the West and learn a few things about just how much Europe contributed to the making of the modern world, including — through thinkers like John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Voltaire and Montesquieu, not to mention Karl Marx and his many influential latter-day acolytes among the cultural Marxists — devising notions like free speech, tolerance, pluralism, diversity, despotism, critique, oppression and hegemony, the very ideas, in other words, that allow all these anti-white, anti-West bigots to spew their venom freely in our midst and spread their hatred of this nation and everything for which it stands, even as they shift the locus of their pride away from the broad-shouldered, collective national identity of old and towards a smaller, pettier racial or sexual identity constructed out of a distorted, beatified version of the history of such racial or sexual subgroups and their contributions to humanity’s fortunes (sorry, guys: despite the fact that it’s now apparently a high crime to imagine King Tut or Cleopatra as anything other than a dark-skinned African, the ancient Egyptians weren’t actually black).
The white Columbia student telling the world how much he loves his whiteness and extolling the virtues of white civilization (whatever that might be) is, in other words, merely the mirror image of the approach he has seen taken by others from other groups everywhere in his midst and, mysteriously, forbidden to him and his kind.
We are reaping what we’ve sown. We cannot have different standards for different races. We can talk all we want about the burden of history that makes white pride and minority pride different in kind. We are, when it all comes down to it, not groups living in history but individuals living in the present moment. Expecting a white college kid who has spent his life being attacked for who he is to rise above the hatred and realize it has a historical origin is expecting too much. Expecting the same of a poor, white, non-college-educated kid is expecting even more.
The more we remain blind to the obvious irony and hypocrisy of a lone white student expressing white pride and being roundly and widely condemned for it by a bevy of recognized, organized, administration-supported university student groups committed to expressing minority pride, the further down this racial abyss we will need to travel in order to find our way back out.
The proper message that should be directed to this wayward Columbia student is the same message that should be directed to all his smug mirror-image adversaries: identifying yourself on the basis of your race makes you a superficial idiot. Feeling proud of yourself because other people who look a bit like you did some great things — and, for that matter, feeling ashamed because other people who look a bit like you did some shameful things — makes you a superficial idiot. Judging other people who look different than you do on the basis of their race makes you a superficial idiot. And it makes you a bigot, a racist, no matter what you look like, no matter who you are.
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Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama, essays and polemics. In the words of one of his intellectual heroes, José Ortega y Gasset, biography is “a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”
Some of his articles have appeared in The Federalist, Tablet, Times Higher Education, Quillette, The Imaginative Conservative, Chronicles, The Independent Journal Review, Acculturated, PopMatters, The Hedgehog Review, Mercatornet, The Montreal Review, The Fortnightly Review, New English Review, Culture Wars and nthposition.
He makes occasional, unscheduled appearances on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Zoobahtov).
