In his response to letters in the current Commentary on his extraordinary article, “The New Dark Ages on Campus,” which appeared in the April Commentary, KC Johnson makes an acerbic observation. First he points out:
A Duke task force produced a 69-page report claiming to examine the diversity-obsessed university’s “role as a contributor” to “hate and bias”; the group’s recommendations included addressing the “imagery of Black and Latinx staff ‘serving’ students in roles such as dining halls, housekeeping, grounds, bus drivers.”
Leave aside the faulty syntax. Johnson’s observation: “Only in the academy could a university employing significant numbers of black and Hispanic workers be seen as an affront to ‘diversity.’”
True, but is this not in keeping with a great many progressive indictments of aspects of our traditional culture, to make benign and even benevolent positions seem outrages to justice? How about keeping women out of combat being seen as a form of discrimination? For that matter, how did supporting women to raise their own children in their own homes become an example of life-denying deprivation and oppression? Such is the twisted logic of progressive thinking, and it is one of the ways progressives alienate us from our own culture and from ourselves in order to make us more pliable to their strictures and their demands.