Originally published December 10 2014
America gone crazy: College president forced to apologize for saying "all lives matter"
by J. D. Heyes
(NaturalNews) In the aftermath of grand jury decisions not to indict white police officers in the deaths of black suspects in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City recently, a number of Americans have protested what they view as inherent -- and often racial -- injustice in the justice system.
Many protestors have adopted a slogan, "Black lives matter," in recent days, again to shine a light on the fact that the deceased suspects in both of these cases were African American.
Kathleen McCartney, president of the very prestigious Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, not only agreed with these protestors, but she went on to point out what should be inherently obvious to most -- people of all races matter.
Reflecting that belief, she wrote an email to the student body at the institution recently "attempting to show support for students protesting [the] racially charged grand jury decisions," Fox News reported.
But McCartney -- whose university-educated feminists Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, former First Lady Nancy Reagan and celebrity chef Julia Child -- could not have anticipated the wrath of the political correctness policy when she wrote, "All lives matter," in the subject line of her email.
"All lives" don't matter?
Apparently, that reality is offensive to some people.
Fox News reported:
Protesters have adopted several slogans in connection with the cases of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, including "Black Lives Matter." McCartney's more inclusive version of the refrain was seen as an affront that diminished the focus on black lives and racism, according to emails obtained by FoxNews.com.
"We are united in our insistence that all lives matter," read the email, even as she made very clear she strongly backed the protests and even writing that the grand jury decisions had "led to a shared fury... We gather in vigil, we raise our voices in protest."
Some students at the institution were upset that she did not stick to the PC script that only "black lives matter."
According to the Daily Hampshire Gazette, which first reported the story, the paper quoted one of the university's sophomores, Cecelia Lim, who said, "It felt like she was invalidating the experience of black lives."
As a means, then, of responding to the backlash, McCartney, who is white, composed a second email to the study body -- an apology -- saying that what she said was a mistake "despite my best intentions."
So, now, apparently, she has been shamed into discounting what her instincts know to be true, that "all lives" really do matter, only now that comes with an asterisk: *Unless that offends someone.
"I regret that I was unaware the phrase/hashtag 'all lives matter' has been used by some to draw attention away from the focus on institutional violence against Black people," she wrote.
In her mea culpa, McCartney also included some of the student replies to her original email.
Tough to figure out what you can and can't say on campus
She quoted one student as saying: "It minimizes the anti-blackness of this the current situation; yes, all lives matter, but not all lives are being targeted for police brutality. The black students at this school deserve to have their specific struggles and pain recognized, not dissolved into the larger student body."
As you might imagine, some have also criticized the apology -- not for being insincere, per se, but for being unnecessary, considering the tone of the original email and the actual message it was attempting to convey.
"It's getting increasingly difficult to figure out what you can say on the modern campus, even for university presidents... Too many of today's students want freedom from speech rather than freedom of speech," Greg Lukianoff, President of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and author of Freedom From Speech told Fox News.
Today's campuses remain bastions of expression and societal evolution -- but only if you toe the line of a certain political ideology.
That isn't "free speech," that's tyranny, pure and simple.
Sources:
http://www.foxnews.com
http://www.gazettenet.com
http://www.amazon.com
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