Two Activist Groups Stuck in the Past

[Draggingtree]

American Thinker:

January 2, 2016

Two Activist Groups Stuck in the Past

By Robert Oscar Lopez

1. There were more than the usual number of "year in review" recaps for 2015, and I am bracing for a wave of "what's in store" predictions for 2016, especially because a big election is coming up. So let's look generally at decades-long trends here. Two "progressive" movements need to stop living in the past. This is a friendly intervention.

    

   1. The New Anti-Anti-Black Movement

The New York Times ruined countless readers' Christmas Eve by publishing a smarmy letter entitled "Dear White America." It was by Emory professor George Yancy (not George Yancey, who is a wonderful guy living in Texas!). The zealously and pretentiously titled epistle tries clumsily to adapt James Baldwin's famous 1962 letter to his nephew, best known as "My Dungeon Shook" in the collection Fire Next Time.

 

A rash of Baldwin imitators seemed to follow, with Jasmine Belkhyr, the editor in chief of a Columbia journal called Winter Tangerine, writing two even more pompous pieces on December 27 ("An Open Letter to Columbia Journal and Columbia University") and December 29 ("An Open Letter to the Whole Wide World").