HATE CRIMES have been all the rage on college campuses lately. At the University of New Brunswick earlier this month, a Pakistani student reported being attacked on two separate occasions because of his race. The first time, he described being beaten by four white men who called him an "[expletive] Middle-Eastern brown person" as they punched him repeatedly in the face. The second time, he recalled being forced to the ground and then savagely kicked in the stomach and head. In a second incident, during an anti-rape rally at the University of Massachusetts, a woman stumbled into the crowd of protestors, bleeding from a knife wound and screaming that she had been raped. And finally, at Claremont College in California, community members recently came to the defense of a female professor after her car had its tires slashed, its windows broken and its body spray-painted with vicious racial and sexual epithets.
In the end, police discovered that the "victims" of all these hate crimes had faked it. Every single one was a hoax. The Claremont professor vandalized her own car. The purported rape victim cut herself with a knife and then ditched the evidence under a car. And the New Brunswick student just plain lied -- twice. These cases paint a sad picture of desperation among a group of fervent campus ideologues who would stop at nothing to validate their radical beliefs about the oppressive nature of mainstream college culture.
Aside from their slimy tendency for deception, the people who faked these crimes all shared another important feature in common: When they were finally caught, they all publicly claimed that they had acted out of a genuine desire to raise awareness about the scourge of racial, sexual and ethnic hatred within their communities. Their sense of social justice made them do it. By their own proclamations, they were driven to fraud by the frantic view that the insidious plague of bigotry is much more widespread among the population than the unenlightened masses of college students are able to realize. They all felt that their actions were necessary to focus the community's attention on a situation of grave injustice that would otherwise be completely ignored. The consensus seems to be that our nation's campuses are overwhelmingly mired in racism and sexism, and that this problem just doesn't get enough notice.
This is a strange notion to entertain, even for a bunch of nutcases who are depraved enough to lie about hate crimes in order to further their own petty political agendas. First of all, one would be hard pressed to think of any topic on any college campus that gets nearly as much attention as the tired old dogmas of racial, sexual and cultural oppression that angst-filled students and professors are always reciting ad nauseum. On many college campuses, the mania of political correctness has made Shakespeare elective and diversity training mandatory. Further, it's just plain silly to believe that there is some rampant epidemic of racism or sexism that holds the majority of our nation's students in its thrall. Even on the exceedingly rare occasions that hate crimes really do occur, they're invariably committed by lonely whack-jobs who dwell far outside the mainstream of campus culture. Virtually every person at every college in the country is more than aware of the repugnance of bigotry, and you could scarcely find a college student anywhere who would even dream of supporting racially motivated violence.
Just think about the situation here at the University, which alarmist critics routinely condemn as a "plantation" or a "bastion of white supremacy." When the tragic alleged assault against our own courageous Student Council President Daisy Lundy was reported, it wasn't as if students secretly delighted at the thought of a racially motivated attack occurring against one of their peers. Quite to the contrary: They organized candlelight vigils and demonstrated heartfelt outpourings of support. The community rightfully recoiled at the thought of such a horrible crime being committed on grounds. And our administrators, being the walking embodiments of white liberal guilt that they are, formed an array of nice-sounding committees that promised to address concrete and specific topics suchas "diversity and equity."
Clearly, pernicious racism of the type that motivates hate crimes still exists throughout our country and even on our nation's college campuses. But thankfully, it is not nearly as common or as accepted as many people seem to believe. In fact, the stigma of being labeled a racist today is as feared among college students as any campus stigma ever has been. Perhaps this is why more students don't stand up and speak out when they hear their present-day universities compared to openly racist institutions that practiced slavery and eugenics. Or maybe they've decided that anyone who would make such comparisons is simply beyond the reach of reason altogether.
Anthony Dick's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily.He can be reached at adick@cavalierdaily.com
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