Victims of ‘Cissexist Heteropatriarchy’

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Let me state clearly what should be obvious to longtime readers: I don’t like it when kids at elite colleges claim to be victims of oppression.

Self-pity as a basis for political activism is a very bad idea and should be discouraged. Generally speaking, young people are ignorant and foolish. Being highly intelligent is not a substitute for experience, and youthful enthusiasm should never be confused with actual knowledge. Do not tell me you are a victim of oppression if your Daddy is rich enough to send you to a school where tuition is $50,586 a year:

There are too many white musicians in the Oberlin College jazz band. This was among the numerous complaints — “concrete and unmalleable demands” — in a 14-page manifesto issued last week by the Black Students Union (BSU) at the elite private liberal arts college in Ohio. The second item on their list of demands was “a concerted effort to increase the percentage of Black students and specifically Black female identifying instrumentalists in the Jazz department. We would like to reiterate the demand for a 4% annual increase in the enrollment of Black students in the Jazz Department starting in 2016 to accumulate to 40% increase by the year 2022.”
Underrepresentation of “Black female identifying instrumentalists in the Jazz department” might seem a rather odd choice of student grievances to those of us old enough to remember when campus radicals focused their attention on serious issues like the Vietnam War. The seemingly trivial nature of the Oberlin BSU complaints contrasts starkly with the group’s dramatic denunciation of the college as an institution that “functions on the premises of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy.” . . . .

Read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.

 

75 comments

  2. Therein lays the problem: how many high school Musicians of Colour have a chance to become “top-ranked high school jazz musicians,” when their music teachers are Oppressors of Whiteness who choose to teach the works of long-dead Composers of Whiteness rather than jazz or other Music of Colour?

  4. Jazz is like music only for musicians (or very sophisticated listeners). Either way, jazz has a limited audience.
    On a recent episode of Bar Rescue, the bar being rescued was a struggling jazz club owned by a black woman. Part of making over the club was including other musical genres to ensure greater audiences.
    (I kinda like jazz myself and the missus really doesnt like it much)

  5. So, while whites are actively, consciously, seeking to ensure inclusiveness they are at the very least being accused of subconscious racism? Things that make ya go hmmm

  6. Everyone knows that you don’t eat the yellow snow. Apparently, not everyone got the memo about drinking the yellow water.

  10. I’m not a fan of higher education for artists. I think college is a crock of crap for most artists. It’s a scam.

    However, it is important for the producers and arrangers to be educated. Every musician who’s following his/her heart needs an educated person behind the scenes to make sense of it all: an Alan Parsons, a Trevor Horn or a Quincy Jones. (Or a Pete Rugolo, if you really want to get esoteric.)

    So when we talk about music study in college, we’re not necessarily talking about the performers themselves, but the people who will go into the arranging field.

  11. …might seem a rather odd choice of student grievances to those of us old enough to remember when campus radicals focused their attention on serious issues like the Vietnam War.

    And that’s the very thing I harp on constantly. Our culture keeps pounding the idea that every young person needs to be screaming “Shut it down!” about something – anything! Otherwise, their generation doesn’t exist.

    But if no “earthshaking cause” is handy, they have to pull one out of a hat. Thus, the utterly stupid causes we’ve seen of late, and the wild sputtering and shouting over them.

  12. I represent that remark! You take that back!

    I’ll put an embargo on yer ass!…of something.

    Damn, I feel so microagressed.

    That all was sarcasm by the way.

    By the way, our generation has raised up the biggest bunch of spoiled friggin’ brats this world has ever seen.

  14. That and the limiting of the size of the House of Representatives making congressional districts about 15x the size the Founders intended are the two main reasons that Congress is the cesspool it is today.

  17. Exactly, Oberlin College is the paradigmatic example of a tolerant and open higher education institution, the first to offer full access to degrees to women and African-Americans in the 1830’s. The first black man to play in the major leagues (no, not Jackie Robinson) was an alumnus!

    Consequently, they have to create this fantasia of “oppression” over a form of music that the vast majority of Black America abandoned as a popular form of entertainment a half-century ago.

  18. …and if fried chicken popped up in ANY form, screams of racism (from BLM), murder (from vegans), and health alarmism (from the usual fanatics) would deafen the student body.

    In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the steamed chicken horror was because of crazed dietitians hijacking the menu.

  20. We have a jazz and blues station here in Oregon which I listen to sometimes for the blues, so I developed some appreciation for jazz as a result. But sometimes I just can’t stand the screeching horns or dissonant arpeggios, and have to turn it off. And I like Russian classical such as Rachmaninov, so I can appreciate dissonance. Some just take it too far.

  23. Oh, I know that they were complaining about the -lack- of fried chicken in General Tso’s, but, if it had been provided -without- their input, they would have protested it as double-plus un-good bad-think.

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