Oberlin College Tag

As longtime readers know, we're not big fans of the White Privilege verbiage, or the White Privilege consultant and pontificating class:

• Diagnosis: White Privilege Syndrome by Proxy
• White Privilege Conference
• White Writer’s Privilege
• Zimmerman verdict energizes Salon.com’s White Privilege branding

In an otherwise good article about the Oberlin racism hoax, Conor Friedersdorf uses the term "white privilege" to describe the actions of the perpetrators:

White kids spreading the n-word and Nazi flags around campus for kicks, without giving a damn how many minorities they scare or upset, does seem like a great example of white privilege!

The editors or Friedersdorf chose to highlight and repeat that sentence as an insert mid-article:

The problem is that the analysis and the entire post left something out, these were white liberal kids trying to make a liberal talking point come to life in a performance-art style endeavor: https://twitter.com/LegInsurrection/status/370929969913806849 Those white liberal college students had a privilege above and beyond mere ordinary whites. That extra-special privilege was to have the mainstream media largely ignore that the performance-art inspired racial narrative which covered the news cycle in March 2013 was a hoax.  Only the conservative media seems to care. I have written to just about everyone I could find at an MSM or left-wing website who ran with the Oberlin racism narrative back in March, and almost no one has updated their stories. I emailed reporters and/or editors at The NY Times, The Boston Globe, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Slate.com, Huffington Post, and CNN, among others. Here's a typical email, which I sent to Slate.com:

You covered the racial incidents at Oberlin last March. It turned out to be a hoax, The Great Oberlin College Racism Hoax of 2013. Will you update?

Here's another one, sent to the "scoop" line at HuffPo:

Huffington Post ran numerous stories in various sections about racial incidents on Oberlin College's campus in March 2013. It turns out those were hoaxes perpetrated by progressive pro-Obama activists in order to get a reaction, http://t.co/BAACsOTX0g. Will you report the hoax and correct prior stories?

And The NY Times:

You covered this story last March, Photos of Oberlin College Students Rallying Against Hate Incidents. Turns out it was a hoax. Thought you'd want to know, since NYT may want to follow up now that the story has changed.

I also sent tweets to reporters who covered the story but for whom I didn't have email addresses: https://twitter.com/LegInsurrection/status/370638270067003393 https://twitter.com/LegInsurrection/status/370639994714476544