Powerline points to yet another instance of a campus roiled by a spurious accusation of racism. Gabriel Keith, a student at Minneapolis Community and Technical College and a Marine with three terms of service in Iraq, was caught up in hysteria after an innocent gesture with his sweatshirt drawstring was taken as a threat to lynch blacks with a hangman’s noose.

The Star Tribune columnist Katherine Kersten, who has brought the incident to public attention, wonders why “college culture has become the laughingstock of the larger community?” How did hypersensitivity to slights, real and (as in this case) imagined, become a behavioral norm? Kersten’s answer: “Victimhood is a tremendous source of moral power,” and those seeking such moral power­—in this case a student group called the Association of Black Collegiates—are all too ready to deploy the race card in order to accumulate it.

That explanation is surely on the mark, but one is still left trying to grasp where such behavior comes from. A partial answer can be found in another story making headlines: hypersensitivity, it appears, is being taught at an early age. In Eagle Point, Oregon, a six year old was suspended from school last week for drawing a picture in which one stick figure was depicted shooting another stick figure in the head. The boy’s father told the local newspaper that the drawing was inspired by an episode from the Simpsons. But never mind: in the eyes of school administrators the drawing was an implicit threat to other students.

One is still left wondering where such hypersensitivity comes from. But one thing is clear from these two episodes: American colleges are becoming mirror images of American kindergartens.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 11:32 AM and is filed under Connecting the Dots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.