The leaders of the Civil Rights Movement must be rolling in their graves. In the name of cultural diversity, Western Washington University recently created a separate Black Affinity Housing program that occupies an entire floor of a residential hall on campus. Once done, the new cultural space will add to the school’s existing network of the Multicultural Center, the LGBTQ Student Center, and gender-inclusive housing. Student activists from my alma mater-the University of Miami- created a petition to request a Black Cultural Center to further racial justice. The Multicultural Solidarity Coalition at Arizona State University, for example, recently demanded that two white, male students leave its space because “there is no such thing as ‘white culture.’” Student leaders of the Multicultural Student Center and the Latinx Student Center at the University of Virginia are lobbying the university’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Manager to keep the University Police Department out of their safe spaces. Some college campuses are now re-segregating into multicultural spaces that exclude “offensive” bad elements.
#Mao struggle session free#
Real-life implementation of this divisive doctrine often departs from its unobjectionable and virtuous claims for an improved society free of any injustice, bias, or oppression. Now we are not re-experiencing the Cultural Revolution, nor are we in danger of another bloody “ Red August” massacre, but Americans should be alarmed by the threat of a similar radical doctrine and its increasing demands for our students to become “change agents” in the names of social justice, diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racism, and other lofty goals unrelated to education. Chinese Red Guards, mostly high school and middle school students, helped effectively shut down their schools by subjugating school principals and teachers in endless struggle sessions and substituting field trips with free train rides to Beijing to meet with Chairman Mao.
To start, this radical orthodoxy preys on impressionable and unsuspicious young minds, filling them with romanticized “revolutionary” ideas, such that many are willing to forego formal education for political ambitions. Few draw parallels between what happened in China half a century ago and what could happen in an open society engulfed by an orthodoxy of group think, racial identity politics, and dichotomous social relations.
#Mao struggle session series#
Many, including the generation born after the Cultural Revolution, view the chaos and destruction caused by Mao’s Red Guards as a mere historical hiccup, rather than a formative series of events that would set a pattern for the future. This event was part of a student-led paramilitary movement that debuted the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
He chanted: “The revolution is just and the rebellion is justified!” The Red Guard leader read out each person’s crime against the revolutionary regime, demanded confessions, and encouraged the crowd to join the struggle. The teenager, who came from an affluent landlord family, herded over a dozen “Five Blacks,” who were ordered to stand in a row on a makeshift stage in the town center and wear signs showing their names and alleged crimes. On a warm day in the early fall of 1966, a 17-year-old former high school student led a group of local Red Guards in a struggle session to publicly shame members of the “Five Black Categories (landlords, rich farmers, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, and right-wingers)” in a small town near Shanghai.
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