A janitor whom a university official had accused of racial harassment for reading a historical book about the Ku Klux Klan on his break has gotten an apology — months later — from the school.
Sampson’s troubles began last year when a co-worker complained after seeing him reading a book titled “Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan.”
The book’s cover features white-robed Klansmen and burning crosses against a backdrop of Notre Dame’s campus. It recounts a 1924 riot between Notre Dame students and the Klan in which the students from the Catholic university prevailed.
And…
“You used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your black co-workers,” Lillian Charleston wrote in a letter to Sampson.
A brief message on this subject to all the moronic officials and complainers involved at IUPUI: Fuck … you.
I really can’t put it any better than that. I don’t even need to rant about it, do I? Surely, any human being with at least two brain cells to rub together to create a thought can see how utterly ridiculous it is to claim that reading a book — a history book in which the KKK gets its ass handed to it, no less — is in any way racial harassment.
Oh sure, now they have finally apologized, but there shouldn’t have even been anything for them to apologize for, seeing as reading a book that resides on the shelf on the very library Sampson works in is nothing to get in an uproar about.
We are fast becoming a nation of morons and idiots, doomed to repeat history endlessly, because we are verboten to read about it, study it, or talk about it, for fear of offending some easily offended ignoramus. There is apparently no way to stop it, because it seems to me the stupid outnumber the intelligent by vast numbers. We are doomed to become the dumbest people on the planet, if we aren’t already there.
So, back in middle school — yes, middle school — when I read Mein Kampf, was I racially harassing myself?! Or was I interested in and learning about history?
The coworker who complained is a moron. The officials who accused Sampson of racism are just as bad. They apologized and then Charleston had to make matters worse by adding, “You used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book…”
The only good thing that I read from the article is “Charleston, who has since retired”. :flip:
“We are fast becoming a nation of morons and idiots…” Actually, we’ve long since arrived.
What fascinates me about new thinking fads in the U.S. is how capital so quickly co-opts, trivializes, packages, and markets it back, at a handsome profit, to the same people who presume to have invented it. The fact that the nonsense reported in the article has penetrated so deeply into every corporate and government human resources office reveals just how powerful a tool political correctness has proved to be. I suspect half our gross domestic product is nothing more than the result of business built on ignorance and fear, and that if people stopped doing stupid stuff with their health and wealth, the present economic model would soon fail. Hence, the constant need for more dumb and scared workers and consumers.
There will likely be a post today about political correctness. I mulled it over. I slept on it. I thought back to the points in my life when I was young before there was anything PC about anything. I had a revelation. It’ll be at least a 1000 word rant. ;)
But you’re right, John. We have to be stupid for the current system to work. Depressing, isn’t it?
There is a wonderful chapter about the KKK in a book named Freakonomics. It draws parallels with estate agents in their method of operation.
The thing which interested me though was that, if you chart racial violence in the US over time then mark on the chart key events in the KKK’s history, there is no correlation. They really did nothing except give a few people the excuse to do what they would do anyway. Oh, and they collected the equivalent of $10 a month nowdays from a million members. Shouldn’t be a suprise.
They really did nothing except give a few people the excuse to do what they would do anyway.
That’s pretty much it, and then once in a group that “condones” their feelings and the group getting a mob mentality, they felt they could do those things they probably thought about doing but wouldn’t have done by themselves.
Actually no. If that were the case then there would have been a reduction in racial violence in the times when the KKK didn’t exist. The truth is they would have done it anyway and they did.
In many cases the violence the KKK claimed to have done was nothing to do with them. However, the real attacker, once they sobered up, was so happy that an unrelated third party was claiming responsibility that they didn’t want to speak out. After all, why would they say that actually it wasn’t the KKK, it was them after too much to drink at their sister’s wedding reception.
Let the KKK have their ‘glory’ and their sister’s wedding not be marred by what they did.