I was born in Houston, Texas and grew up witnessing the effects of the Jim Crow laws in the South. My high school did not have 1 black student until 1967, 13 years AFTER Brown v. Board of Education ordered desegregation of the public schools “with all deliberate speed.” My parents and grandparents were not particularly political, but they were Democrats, as practically everyone was in those days in the states of the former Confederacy. I remember my maternal grandfather, who had been born and raised in Georgia, occasionally mentioning a particular “secret society” to which he belonged. It wasn’t until I became an adult that I realized he was speaking of the KKK. I didn't hate blacks. I just didn't think much about them one way or another. THAT was the environment in which I was raised, having little contact with blacks, but having internalized the idea that they were inferior.
The military changed all that, and it happened very quickly. Upon arriving at Marine Boot Camp, I found that my bunkmate was a young black kid from inner city Detroit. He had grown up watching the Civil Rights movement in the mid-1960s morph into the Black Power movement in the late 1960s. We were thrown together and quickly realized (within 48 hours of arrival) that everything we thought we knew about other races was false. We were just two individuals who needed each other. We needed to pull together to get through a very difficult and stressful training program.
In the 1970s and 80s, it was universally recognized by all social science researchers that the institution which had made the greatest positive strides in race relations was the American military. That is still the case. Of course, we no longer have a draft and compulsory military service. Hopefully, young people reading this can learn a bit from someone who has lived a lot of years and witnessed the deliberate effort on the part of the Left to convince you that America is the focus of evil in the world.
During my 30 year military career, I went to night school to get a Bachelors degree and went on to obtain a Masters degree. Prior to my full retirement, I taught freshman college students both American History and Government. I witnessed, from the inside, the transformation of higher education.
What we’re witnessing today is the result of a 50 year
campaign to undermine the American ideal of individual freedom and replace it
with Marxist collectivism. It’s no
wonder that so many Millenials favor Socialism.
They’ve been indoctrinated to that view by professors who, in most
cases, have never even visited a Socialist country.
But, don’t take my word for it. As Jay Parini, former professor of English at Middlebury College in Vermont, put it in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1988, “After the Vietnam War, a lot of us didn’t just crawl back into our literary cubicles; we stepped into academic positions. With the war over, our visibility was lost, and it seemed for a while—to the unobservant—that we had disappeared. Now we have tenure, and the work of reshaping the universities has begun in earnest. “
Or, Andrew Ross, professor of English at Princeton, "I teach in the Ivy League in order to have direct access to the minds of the children of the ruling class." Or, Annette Kolodny, former Berkeley radical who became Dean of the Humanities Faculty at the University of Arizona, "I see my scholarship as an extension of my political activism."
These people, and many others like them, who were undergraduates in the 60s, stayed in college, went on to graduate school, obtained their PhDs, and set about using their particular academic discipline to indoctrinate what is now 3 generations in the Marxism they internalized in their youth.
They fully understood that K-12 education programs children to defer to their teacher. Whatever they’re taught MUST be true. Think of your time in public school. If you questioned what you were being told, it would most often be seen as a discipline problem. In college, there are many professors who use their grade book as a weapon, ensuring that students learn what is presented or risk a bad grade.
In the early 1980s, the New Left realized that the revolution of the proletariat, predicted by Marx for all capitalist countries, just wasn't going to happen in America. Unlike conditions in the 1800s when Marx wrote, the working class was NOT particularly dissatisfied with their lot in life. While they weren't rich, they recognized that they certainly weren't as poor as in other countries under Socialism.
So, the New Left needed another strategy. They settled on Identity Politics as the way to pit Americans against each other. In a 2000 article in New Literary History, Grant Farred actually laid out that strategy. "The various struggles of the 1960s provided the new social movements—groupings organized around single issues, such as race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, issues all too frequently ignored in mainstream politics—with their fundamental building blocks. The diversity of political activity in the 1960s demonstrated to its 1970s and 1980s successors how to mobilize marginalized constituencies, how to ‘politicize’ culture, and how to deploy ‘difference’ as an ideological tool.”[1]
Once you understand that what you've been force fed in school has been based on a deliberate, decades long campaign to destroy America from within, perhaps you'll reconsider whatever previous so-called truths you've believed and you will #WalkAway. I will certainly walk WITH you. I really believe that progress is being made. Who would have thought just 2 1/2 years ago that black residents of Baltimore would run Al Sharpton out of their city:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY39Qy_BXIQ
[1] Farred, Grant, “Is There Life after Identity Politics?”, New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 4, (Autumn, 2000), p. 629
But, don’t take my word for it. As Jay Parini, former professor of English at Middlebury College in Vermont, put it in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1988, “After the Vietnam War, a lot of us didn’t just crawl back into our literary cubicles; we stepped into academic positions. With the war over, our visibility was lost, and it seemed for a while—to the unobservant—that we had disappeared. Now we have tenure, and the work of reshaping the universities has begun in earnest. “
Or, Andrew Ross, professor of English at Princeton, "I teach in the Ivy League in order to have direct access to the minds of the children of the ruling class." Or, Annette Kolodny, former Berkeley radical who became Dean of the Humanities Faculty at the University of Arizona, "I see my scholarship as an extension of my political activism."
These people, and many others like them, who were undergraduates in the 60s, stayed in college, went on to graduate school, obtained their PhDs, and set about using their particular academic discipline to indoctrinate what is now 3 generations in the Marxism they internalized in their youth.
They fully understood that K-12 education programs children to defer to their teacher. Whatever they’re taught MUST be true. Think of your time in public school. If you questioned what you were being told, it would most often be seen as a discipline problem. In college, there are many professors who use their grade book as a weapon, ensuring that students learn what is presented or risk a bad grade.
In the early 1980s, the New Left realized that the revolution of the proletariat, predicted by Marx for all capitalist countries, just wasn't going to happen in America. Unlike conditions in the 1800s when Marx wrote, the working class was NOT particularly dissatisfied with their lot in life. While they weren't rich, they recognized that they certainly weren't as poor as in other countries under Socialism.
So, the New Left needed another strategy. They settled on Identity Politics as the way to pit Americans against each other. In a 2000 article in New Literary History, Grant Farred actually laid out that strategy. "The various struggles of the 1960s provided the new social movements—groupings organized around single issues, such as race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, issues all too frequently ignored in mainstream politics—with their fundamental building blocks. The diversity of political activity in the 1960s demonstrated to its 1970s and 1980s successors how to mobilize marginalized constituencies, how to ‘politicize’ culture, and how to deploy ‘difference’ as an ideological tool.”[1]
Once you understand that what you've been force fed in school has been based on a deliberate, decades long campaign to destroy America from within, perhaps you'll reconsider whatever previous so-called truths you've believed and you will #WalkAway. I will certainly walk WITH you. I really believe that progress is being made. Who would have thought just 2 1/2 years ago that black residents of Baltimore would run Al Sharpton out of their city:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY39Qy_BXIQ
[1] Farred, Grant, “Is There Life after Identity Politics?”, New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 4, (Autumn, 2000), p. 629
