One of the Most Awful Articles I’ve Ever Read

We should be embarrassed that we even share a breathing space with Ivy-League-educated but nevertheless massively bigoted Ekow N. Yankah after he published this essay in, and therefore soiled, The NY Times Opinion section. In an intentionally provocative but nevertheless depraved article called “Can My Children Be Friends With White People?”, Yankah attempts to argue that the Trump-y climate of today’s politics has so threatened the safety of his children that he can no long trust, or assume the worthiness of, today’s white people. He says:

“As against our gauzy national hopes, I will teach my boys to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible. When they ask, I will teach my sons that their beautiful hue is a fault line. Spare me platitudes of how we are all the same on the inside. I first have to keep my boys safe, and so I will teach them before the world shows them this particular brand of rending, violent, often fatal betrayal.”

Well, Prof. Yankah, if you teach your kids that friendship with white people is impossible, then you’ll surely be right.*

And:

“We can still all pretend we can be friends. If meaningful civic friendship is impossible, we can make do with mere civility – sharing drinks and watching the game.”

Sir, one question: what is the name of all that is holy is “civic friendship”? As if the core part of friendship with other people to you lie solely in the politics that you presumably share?

This is a misguided man who has let social justice completely inform and envelop who he is. Remove the Xanax-reinforcing world of national politics out of his brain, and he has reduced himself to a laughable caricature that Ivy League educations are supposed to drag you out of. Instead, it has reified the swamp in which he is wading – no, drinking.

This is a sad article that only reinforces the unfortunately well-evidenced stereotype that many Americans have against elite college educations and the warped values they project, which increasingly frighten the public (and me) with dense, erudite distortions of who we are as the American people. No doubt, this man has not only internalized the blithering nonsense of the race-baiting Left, but has made his career out of it. At every turn, he was egged on by his well-heeled, Princeton-grad anti-West colleagues to make a statement like this in the name of being a true social justice warrior. Instead, he has made himself and his cause an embarrassment and an eyesore to society.

This is what happens when you believe the United States still retains the same hegemonic character that it had during the days of slavery (as various members of my college do, in a Dean-of-students-supported email that said that “this country is land stolen from indigenous people.”) This is what happens when you chew up every Washington Post op-ed that tells you that Trump is an existential threat to society. This is what happens when you let politics consume and destroy your life. You become an animal, driven only by amygdalic instincts that tell you to hate those who don’t look like you, in a world where everything is seemingly against you and your race. I thought we had emerged from this kind of tribal past better than this. But tribalism is making a comeback. It’s growing bigger and more legitimate, culminating in a spread on the pages of The New York Times itself.

Shame. Shame, shame, shame.

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