Oscar Madness and Academic Madness

Hat tip The College Fix and Forbes

“Some argue that this is not about Will Smith and Chris Rock being Black or Will Smith “setting Black people back.” This is about a much larger systemic issue rooted in white supremacist culture designed to police the behavior of Blacks amongst the who’s who in Hollywood and beyond. Respectability politics suggest that equity and fair treatment require that Black people — both inside and outside of Hollywood — conduct ourselves in a manner deemed acceptable to whites. Furthermore, expressing any emotion other than complacence, apathy, or agreeance directly violates those norms, disqualifying Black people from receiving the same equitable treatment that whites enjoy as a birthright. And sadly, there is a large group of Blacks who have internalized this toxic messaging.”

-Maia Hoskin

Loyola Marymount University

I have very little to say about the Will Smith-Chrtis Rock incident at the Oscars Sunday night. I don’t watch the Oscars. It is a freak show and has been for several decades. Every year, at least one person makes an idiot of  him or herself. 

Everybody is commenting on the incident, so I’m sure nobody cares what I think about it. To me, it’s not a big deal. I do care, however, when somebody who has a voice tries to turn it into a racial matter (both Rock and Smith are black). Now we have a professor at Loyola Marymount University (of Los Angeles) named Maia Hoskin, who writes in Forbes that the incident was just another example of white supremacy in action. The College Fix has a link to her Forbes article.

 https://www.thecollegefix.com/loyola-marymount-professor-white-supremacy-to-blame-for-will-smiths-slap/

Lunacy at the Oscar’s is no big deal. Lunacy in academia is a big deal because it affects our children who are university students. It is this type of thinking, that sees a dustup between two black guys as having anything to do with the concept of white supremacy. What happened Sunday night was unfortunate and unacceptable-not just according to white standards of behavior as Haskins seems to think, but for everybody. I would remind Professor Haskin that Smith has apologized for his action. 

I would also point out that any punishment to Smith has yet to be decided or handed out. (There has yet to be any policing of Smith in Hoskin’s words) I have watched the re-runs of the incident, and I didn’t see any white people in the audience berating Smith after his act. Did anybody, white or otherwise, take the microfone and condemn Smith’s action? (Maybe, I wasn’t watching the show.) Yes, plenty of people in Hollywood, black and white, have commented afterward, but it seems that, at the time, the show simply went on.

What Haskins is doing is what so many activists in academia do, both white and black, when it comes to race. They are dividing people by race. They don’t want to see Americans come together. They want to see us in separate and competing tribes. To do that, they stretch the truth and turn it on its head. Rather than discuss actual incidents of racism, they turn everything into questions of racism and white supremacy. Thus, an incident that involved no white person becomes an example of white supremacy. We have heard some people make the claim that attacks upon Asians or Jews, when committed by blacks or other minorities, are also examples of white supremacy. This is not coming from drunks in bars. It is coming chiefly out of our universities. It represents the dominant thinking in our universities these days, the ultimate example of “wokeness”.

To sum it up, let Smith and Rock iron out their differences. I don’t care how Hollywood handles it. Next year, somebody else will “steal the show” at the Oscars. I do care how issues like this are being handled on our university campuses, however. Haskin’s article is just another example of the twisted thinking that our children are being subjected to in academia.