Prejudice is the child of ignorance
[Quote:]
IN November, I was found guilty of “racial harassment” for reading a public-library book on a university campus.
The book was Todd Tucker’s “Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan”; I was reading it on break from my campus job as a janitor. The same book is in the university library.
Tucker recounts events of 1924, when the loathsome Klan was a dominant force in Indiana - until it went to South Bend to taunt the Irish Catholic students at the University of Notre Dame.
When the KKK tried to rally, the students confronted them. They stole Klan robes and destroyed their crosses, driving the KKK out of town in a downpour.
I read the historic encounter and imagined myself with these brave Irish Catholics, as they street-fought the Klan. (I’m part-Irish, and was raised Catholic.)
But that didn’t stop the Affirmative Action Office of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis from branding me as a detestable Klansman.
[..]
After months of stonewalling, the university withdrew the charge, thanks to pressure from the press, the American Civil Liberties Union and a group called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE.
[..]
Abolitionist Charles Sumner said, “Prejudice is the child of ignorance. It is sure to prevail where people do not know each other.” The people at the Affirmative Action Office were so myopically intent on finding a Klansman, they failed to see a natural ally standing before them.
Erm.. you mean, if I read a book on “How the did defeat the terrorists”, then I am a terrorist?
Wow… And if I read about the Civil War, then I am rooting for the South, right?
The stupidity….