Liberals hate Michigan’s Hillsdale College, which not only celebrates a decidedly conservative point of view, but also galls them by refusing to take government funding – which means they have no way of threatening Hillsdale and trying to force it to fall in line. It’s no surprise, then, that liberals and their media allies are trying to manufacture a scandal over Hillsdale President Larry Arnn’s use of the phrase “dark ones” during testimony before the Michigan Legislature.
They are trying to say Arnn is racist because he “described minorities as ‘dark ones.’” What he actually did, however, was describe the arguably racist actions of state bureaucrats who invaded his campus to play diversity police.
Arnn told a legislative committee at the state capital that bureaucrats from the Michigan Department of Education showed up at Hillsdale’s campus in 2000, wandering around with clipboards looking at the faces of students and writing down what they saw.
“What were they looking for besides dark ones?” he said.
Scandal!
Members of the committee gasped, scolded Arnn and suggested that he had better apologize. The news media went to work immediately, churning out stories announcing that Arnn “described minorities as ‘dark ones’” while burying the context of his statement, if they explained it at all. The usual race-mongers declared that context didn’t matter because the simple, literal, descriptive two-word phrase was so offensive.
The Rev. Charles Williams II, president of the Michigan chapter of the National Action Network – whatever that is – demanded that Hillsdale funders denounce Arnn, and warned darkly (uh oh, can I say that?) that if they do not, “we will be very strategic in how we deal with any of their industries and venues.”
I am so tired of this nonsense. In case you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of black people, and some have darker complexions than others. I am one of the dark ones! Now, having said that, I could spend the rest of the day figuring out how to boycott myself for offending myself, but I think I will skip that absurd exercise because all I did was tell you what I look like.
You want to know a secret? Normal, everyday black Americans do not sit around getting offended because some college president, or politician, or celebrity, or media person, or talk show host, or whoever . . . used some phrase. It is not important and we do not care. But there is a whole industry that consists of people who do nothing but sit around and wait for someone to utter a phrase to which they can take offense. And when it happens, they pounce, and the media does their bidding.
Oh, and when the person who utters the phrase is an identifiable conservative – bar the door. It’s outrage time. Crank out the press releases. Organize the boycotts. Demand retribution. It’s your moment in the sun when you are a professional offense-monger.
And in the midst of all this, the media completely missed the real story. Arnn was describing an action of state bureaucrats that was totally inappropriate – showing up on his campus with clipboards and counting how many black faces they saw. In the aftermath of Arnn’s testimony, the Michigan Department of Education denied this had ever taken place – until admitting yesterday that it did.
Oh, by the way, conservative Hillsdale was the first private college in the nation to bar discrimination on the basis of race, sex or religion in its charter. That fact has shown up in a few of the media stories, but it’s buried underneath all the faux outrage over Arnn’s dastardly utterance.
Stand strong, Dr. Arnn! The left is attacking you not because you said anything wrong – you didn’t – but because you lead a conservative institution that doesn’t take their money and can’t be controlled by them. To them, that makes you a target. To this “dark one,” it makes you a hero.
