I stopped grading papers long enough to check my emails. A friend sent me something that I couldn’t believe at first. I did some research, and it is truly all over the Web. Wow. I just had to post something on this, with the links for you to go to if you wanted to research it yourself. Evidently the University of Delaware stirred up a hornet’s nest with their recent residence life education program. I found the definition of the actual program here. You can download it yourself as a pdf file. http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/8546.html

One problem with the program was their definition of who is a racist. Here is the definition of racist that was distributed.

“A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality”; “REVERSE RACISM: A term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege”; and “A NON-RACIST: A non term. The term was created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism.”

The hornet’s nest of blog and news attacks that resulted thankfully caused the university to terminate the program.  This is just too much.  As a writer and student of the War Between the States, I’ve learned how far away from historical accuracy people will go in order to be “politically correct.”  From this incident, I’ve learned how far from logic and common sense they will go. Here are some links you can go to for further research.

http://www.thefire.org/index.php/case/752.html 

And here is the link to the university’s Website where a letter is posted that terminates the program.  However, I wish they had stated the reason for the termination as due to its error and stupidity rather than withdrawing it only after attacks. I wonder who the crackpot is who created this definition of a racist?  http://www.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2008/nov/letter110107.html