Racial Outrage at IUPUI

So what exactly is an IUPUI? No, it’s not a nearly extinct marsupial from the Australian outback. IUPUI is the Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis, and now the source of one of the most outrageous attempts at racial intimidation in modern times.  

It was my misfortune to spend some eleven hours in Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport recently after missing a connecting flight from Ft. Myers to Tulsa. During that long and painful layover I found myself reading a day-old edition of the Houston Chronicle, which carried an op-ed piece by Washington Post writer Kathleen Parker, titled “Crime and punishment for reading a book on the Klan.”

According to Ms. Parker, a 50-something IUPUI student, Keith John Sampson, who worked part-time as a school janitor, was reading a book last fall while taking a break from his janitorial duties. The book, Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan by Todd Tucker, tells the story of a 1924 street riot in South Bend, Indiana, in which Notre Dame students battled Klan members who had gathered to terrorize and harass Catholic students. The cover of the book featured a picture of Notre Dame’s golden dome, two burning crosses, and a crowd of robed and hooded Klansmen.  

However, as Sampson was reading, a co-worker seated across from him saw the cover and, with no knowledge of the content of the book, decided that the book was offensive. As Parker tells us, the cover art was apparently traumatizing enough to the co-worker to draw a reprimand from Sampson’s union shop steward who declared that reading a book about the Klan was akin to bringing pornography into the workplace.  

Weeks later, Sampson was informed by the IUPUI Affirmative Action Office that a racial harassment complaint had been filed against him, hinting that disciplinary action was possible. In the letter, IUPUI affirmative action officer Lillian Charleston charged Sampson with having demonstrated “disdain and insensitivity” toward his co-workers. Parker quoted the letter as saying, “You used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your black co-workers.”

The letter went on to say that, under the “reasonable person” standard, most adults are aware of how repugnant the KKK is to African-Americans. Sampson was ordered not to read the book in the presence of African-American co-workers.

However, are the terrible atrocities committed by the KKK any more repugnant to black people than the atrocities of the Nazi Holocaust are to Jews? Of course not. What is clear is that Jews are anxious for people of all religious and ethnic backgrounds to be informed on the facts of the Holocaust. They have even gone so far as to construct museums to perpetuate the memory of that terrible era.

Contrary to what the affirmative action police at IUPUI might think, there is far too little known about the KKK and its 100-year reign of terror, especially among the descendants of those who were the victims of Klan terror. For example, are African-Americans aware that, after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Democrats passed Black Codes and Jim Crow laws in order to reassert control over the lives of the freed slaves and their families?  

Are black people, especially the young, aware that many Republicans, blacks and white, resisted the oppression of the Black Codes and the Jim Crow laws, and that the KKK was created as a paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party to accomplish through murder, arson, and intimidation those things which they could no longer accomplish within the law?  

Are black people, especially the young, aware that between the years 1882 and 1951, some 3,437 blacks and 1,293 whites were lynched by the KKK? Are they aware that a large percentage of the 1,239 white people lynched were Republicans who were murdered because of their support for black civil rights?  

Are black people aware of how few white Democrats have given their lives in that same cause? Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were killed by Klansmen at Philadelphia, Mississippi, in June 1964.  That’s two. How many more? Anyone care to provide proof that the seven men who killed Goodman, Schwerner, and their black friend, James Chaney, were not all Democrats?

Weeks after receiving his first letter from Ms. Charleston in the IUPUI Affirmative Action Office, Keith Sampson received a second letter. The letter advised him that the affirmative action police were unable to make a determination as to whether or not his choice of reading material was “intentionally hostile,” and that no disciplinary action would be taken.    

The most “affirmative” action Ms. Charleston could possibly take would be to insist that the school’s Black Studies curriculum be reconstructed to allow for the teaching of the true history of black people in America, as opposed to the fictitious, left-leaning, politically correct version that is now in the classrooms.

Kathleen Parker closed by turning the tables on Ms. Charleston. She asks, “What could be more hostile in a university environment than investigating a student’s reading choices on the basis of a bystander’s perceptions? That’s not just hostile, but sinister.”