HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Freshman Orientation At UNC: Conform Or Be Cast Out.

The skits set forth various scenarios. The first showed an Indian woman talking to a white friend, who unintentionally acted racist. In another, a man aggressively flirted with a woman who was clearly uncomfortable. The next skit showed two friends asking another friend of lesser means to go out to lunch and immediately assuming he had the means to do so. The final skit showed a gay man react with offense at the use of the word “gay” as a derogatory term.

Instead of showing that all people are equally deserving of human dignity, the theater group created its own caricatures: the “villains” in each of the skits were either white, male, heterosexual, middle class, or some combination of the four. Perhaps, if the objective had been solely to learn how to navigate a community whose citizens hail from increasingly diverse backgrounds on ethnic, religious, and cultural lines, this exercise would have been helpful, if ham-handed.

However, learning to get along wasn’t the real purpose. The actual intent was revealed in the discussions that took place afterwards. We were given an opportunity to ask the characters from each scenario and the event leaders questions. Most of them weren’t memorable (“how did that make you feel?” and “why did you think that was okay?”) but a few of them brought the real direction (not to mention, hypocrisy) of the program to light.

Read the whole thing. Taxpayer dollars at work, advancing a narrow agenda of hate and exclusion.