John Derbyshire – The Unz Review March 5, 2021

[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com]

The news recently has featured a spate of people behaving badly. It reveals an increasingly prominent class issue: the widening rift between working-class and lower-middle-class people (manual workers, clerks, small business owners, low-level government staff) and their social superiors in the Ruling Class (billionaires, celebrities, politicians, college professors, corporate media Talking Heads, Human Resources directors, federal power-holders etc.)

This recent lack of respect has all been, as the French say, de haut en bas, “from the high to the low.”

-> First case study: The flap at Smith College about a black student’s complaint that she was harassed for “eating while black.”

This is actually an old story from July of 2018. It’s come into the news again because a low-level white employee at Smith College resigned on February 19th complaining of an anti-white work environment. [ Resignation letter from Smith College employee describes hostile workplace, president responds , by Kate Wilkinson, WWLP, Feb 26, 2021]

Smith College is a tony liberal-arts college for women in Northampton, Massachusetts. A year at Smith will cost your parents a tad over $78,000. The only other thing I’ve heard about Smith is that is the world, if not Solar system, if not galactic, headquarters of lesbianism … but that’s just hearsay.

The story in short: A cafeteria and attached lounge was closed to students for the summer, so high-schoolers on a summer camp program could use it. A black student, Oumou Kanoute (right) raised in the U.S.A. by immigrant parents from Mali, ignored this and took her lunch there anyway, disregarding a reminder from one of the cafeteria workers, a white female.

While she was eating her lunch, a 60-year-old white male janitor—let’s call him Janitor One—saw her there and told campus security. A different janitor, 58 years old, call him Janitor Two, accompanied a campus cop back to the lounge to tell the student she wasn’t supposed to be there.

This janitor was also white, as was the cop. There are a lot of those durn white people in Western Massachusetts. When are we going to fix that?

The black student made a fuss on social media, the college authorities groveled and flagellated themselves, Janitor One was put on paid leave, and a law firm was hired to investigate the incident.

They found nothing, of course; but the college went on groveling regardless.

They offered no apologies for their behavior: no apology to the cafeteria lady, the janitors, or the cop, all of whom had been denounced all over social media—and even in some legacy media—for their cruel, arrogant white supremacy.

So the correlation of forces here is: In the Blue corner, a young black woman from a wealthy family attending a tony college with a huge endowment and $78,000 fees. In the Red corner, four white working-class Americans making minimum wage, or not much above it.

Last I heard, the cafeteria lady got furloughed last fall on account of the pandemic. She’s having trouble getting a new job because when prospective employers look her up, she’s flagged as RACIST.

Janitor One is back from paid leave but declines to be interviewed. Janitor Two left the college soon after the incident, fed up with all the compulsory training sessions in race and intersectionality.

Quote from him, which I think captures the deep truth of the incident: “I don’t know if I believe in white privilege. I believe in money privilege.” [Inside a Battle Over Race, Class and Power at Smith College, by Michael Powell, NYT, February 24, 2021]

I have no news of the cop.

-> Second case study: the renegade Royals, Harry Windsor and his wife Meghan Markle.

Continues …