RACIAL SENSITIVITY AS CONDESCENSION: At Commentary, Michael Rubin reprints a letter in Yale Alumni magazine by Robert Hinton, Yale Ph.D., and father of a class of 2011 alumnus:

As soon as my daughter was accepted into the Class of 2011, she began receiving communications from various offices at Yale that sent her three unintended messages: as an African American, (1) you don’t really belong at Yale; (2) you will never be comfortable at Yale; and (3) to survive the Yale experience, you will have to separate yourself culturally and psychologically. Of course, being my daughter, she ignored this stuff and spent four years having more fun than I usually allow.

If you tell people, before they arrive, that they are moving into a racist experience, you shouldn’t be surprised if they begin looking for racism the moment they land on campus and find it, even where it may not exist. The kinds of black students who come to Yale have already developed strategies to survive “white” situations.

A heavy-handed, paternalistic effort to make them “comfortable” at Yale may create more problems than it solves. When these students move on beyond Yale, they won’t find a “black house” where they can hide.

Now that there is “minority” bureaucracy in place, it will fight for its continued existence even after it has achieved obsolescence. Someone needs to ask if what was necessary and appropriate in 1969 is still necessary and appropriate.

Read the whole thing.