Racism in modern academia

[tangaroa]

So there's a national debate championship called CEDA where the judges seem to have predetermined to award the top prize to a team of black women so the judges could gloat afterward about how progressive they are. The plan had a bit of a snag when the finalists failed to discuss the debate topic and went into racist tirades against white people using the sort of rhetoric that the Germans used against the Jews and that would earn a team of any other skin color a quick expulsion from their university if they had used these same themes against black people. However, that was easily ignored in the name of progress. A few people noticed that the standards of collegiate debating were not being upheld, so CEDA issued a press release condemning them all as racists.

So according to CEDA, we have these new rules:

• If you think a debater should stay on the topic of the debate, you are a racist.
• If you think debaters should follow the stated rules of the debate, you are a racist.
• If you think a debate should be judged on the quality of the debate, you are a racist.
• If you would hold black people to the same standards as other people, you are a racist for treating blacks and non-blacks equally.

And we have these corollary rules for any students participating in a CEDA debate:

• If you address the topic of the debate, you will lose.
• If you respect the stated rules of the debate, you will lose.
• If you were born to the wrong kind of parents, you will lose.

And anyone who has a problem with any of this is probably afraid to speak out because someone might call them a racist. After all, this is the sort of event that attracts white supremacists to come out of their caves and start saying stupid things about black people, and it is usual in these situations for the official Progressives™ to point at them and point at their critics and say "all of you people are like that".

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Side note: Apparently a few of the participating universities got wind that this was not going to be an academic exercise, so they started to organize their own competing debate event. They gave up and fell back in the fold when people called them white universities and accused them of practicing racial segregation.

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An additional note that is really a core issue: The students are being deprived of a good education by being told that their shit is gold. They are receiving positive reinforcement for anti-intellectual activities and may not be getting that sort of reinforcement for logic, analytical, and reasoning skills, if they are being exposed to critical thinking at all. They're getting a hell of a lesson in politics, though.