It's Not Just Bookstores

Andrew Klavan enters the “Bookstore Ghetto”:

My copy of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is old and so, increasingly, are my eyes. It was a strain for me to make out the small print on the yellowing pages so off I toddled to my nearest bookstore to find a fresh copy. I looked in the literature section thinking the book would be there because it’s literature. Silly me. When I asked a salesgirl for help, she took me—but of course!—to the “African-American Section,” because Ellison and the protagonist of his novel are black.

What a great idea! Putting all the novels about black people in a single section! Why didn’t I think of that? But wait—wait—how many of the characters have to be black before the novel does go into that section? Does just one black character make the whole novel black or is there a special section for mulatto novels with characters of both colors? And if all the novels about black people are in the black section, does that make the Literature section the white section? Why don’t we call it that then? I’m confused.

And hey, what about The Adventures of Augie March—do I find that in the Jewish section? No, don’t be an idiot. Important novels about Jews trying to find their place in America go in the Literature section, of course. What are you, an anti-semite? Only important novels about blacks trying to find their place in America go in a special section of their own. Anything else would be hateful.  Got it now?

You know, every now and again, I meet a conservative individual who is an avowed racist, and that’s too bad. But leftism is racism. Leftism, which sees people as victim groups rather than individuals, which sets us one against another according to the color of our skins rather than distinguishing us by the contents of our characters, which is so eager to manipulate our guilts and grievances in order to form bases of support for an ever-expanding state, has derailed the natural American movement—the natural human movement—toward assimilation and unity and replaced it with ghettoizing multi-culturalism and infantilizing “diversity.”

It would be one thing if it were only in the bookstores. But the racist clowns do it everywhere. Shame on them.

Sadly, it’s an increasingly popular option amongst academics, particularly at graduation time.