This piece was a major flashback for me. I had not wanted to read it at first because, to be frank, I'm tired of this stuff. But Harper is a very good writer and it is a worthy read. I saw all of this firsthand when my father, Shelby Steele, went through it as a professor in the late 1980s. Now @Tyler_A_Harper goes through a similar racial landscape as a professor in the 2020s. Nearly forty years apart, and the script has not changed. Actually, it got worse, more absurd. The racial absurdities imposed on both of them by those who use race as their power are straight out of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, where a man is seen as everything except the individual he actually is. Harper walked away from a tenure track most academics would kill for. He said Bates was "not a good place to work, nor a moral one." Not a moral one -- how can race be moral? On the other hand, a classical liberal arts education is moral. Both he and my father were on the Left, but they saw how they were being used, and they refused to keep pretending otherwise.

The more I think about the Jason Arday debacle the more it pisses me off. I was only a teen when I witnessed how my father, Shelby Steele, was forced out of his university for the crime of believing that blacks could achieve the American Dream without preferential treatment. My father was often voted as the best professor in his department and his specialty was the Russian novel. When I would go with him around town, former students would come up and thank him for pushing them to their limits. But when he began to publish his thoughts on race in Harper's and Commentary magazine, the white guilt-black power elites at the university decided that he had to go. Today that university is now a major bastion of social justice warriors, and to what good? Since my father is a man of merit, he has survived and thrived despite repeated attempts to cancel him. Arday will survive by debasing himself into further victimization. The price of that bargain, paid by our society and, most of all, by our students, has been enormous. Can you imagine how low my father would have had to sink to reach Arday's level? How much he would have had to betray his merit and talent? Do you not see how evil race is? To rely on even an inch of it robs one of the will they need to push their talents to the highest of heights. Even the devil at the crossroads didn't ask for that much. Below is a still from the upcoming White Guilt documentary.

"There is a phrase in the Catholic Church for a certain kind of believer: the cradle Catholic. It means the one who was born into the faith, baptized before he could speak, raised inside the rituals so completely that he never had to choose them. He did not convert. He did not study his way in or have a come-to-Jesus moment that brought him to the church door as a grown man. The cradle Catholic was simply always there. And the church has a quiet worry about him, an insecurity, because the thing you are handed in the cradle is the thing you are most likely to take for granted. The convert had to earn the faith and so he knows exactly what it is. The cradle Catholic risks practicing out of habit a thing he has never once had to defend. "I have come to think there is such a thing as a cradle American, and that many of us now are one. We were born into freedom the way the cradle Catholic was born into the faith. We did not convert to freedom. Most of us under seventy did not serve in the armed forces or march for it or risk our families. We were born into this land where the rights were already written down and the laws made. And like the cradle Catholic, we are in danger of losing the greatest thing we have ever been given, because a freedom you have never had to defend is a freedom you do not know how to defend." Link below.