Three weeks ago, on Nov. 1, the notorious (and often hilarious) website 4chan pulled another glorious prank when members of the Politically Incorrect board anonymously posted signs with the simple sentence “It’s Okay to Be White” on various university campuses around the country. These universities include Harvard, Tulane, Princeton, UC Berkeley and even the nearby Concordia College. And just like so many other infamous 4chan trollings, it was unbelievably priceless.
Overly sensitive university administrators and students on these campuses flew into an uproarious rage, labeling the posters “racist” and “hateful.” The police were even called at Harvard when a dozen of the harmless pieces of paper were spotted by some hapless students who have skin thinner than the paper the signs were made of. As if the simple statement “it’s fine to be a Caucasian” is somehow disparaging racial minorities. The signs made no statement on whether it’s okay to be black, Latino or any other ethnicity. All these signs stated was if a person is white, then that’s a perfectly fine thing to be.
But the funniest part of this beautiful trolling was the response so many out-of-touch media outlets published. Huffington Post reported that the original 4chan post on /pol contained the phrase “normies,” which is, and I quote, “what white supremacists refer to white Americans as.” Apparently, the word normies is racist. Un-freakin’-believable.
Academic administrators at several of these universities have made completely asinine responses to the innocent prank. Marcia L. Sells, the dean of students at Harvard Law School, stated that the signs were “provocations intended to divide us from one another.” University of Alberta President David Turpin labeled the signs “incidents of racism.” The president of Concordia College William Craft even said that he wanted to hold a public forum to “engage” students about the signs.
The fact that so many of these influential people in the media and academia are falling for such an obvious prank made at their expense is both funny and sad. It’s funny that, even though 4chan has gained so much notoriety, these clueless college snowflakes and media reporters still fall for a trap this obvious and demonstrate how hypocritical they can be. These far-left social justice advocates rail on and on about racial and gender equality, yet fall into pitiful hysterics at the mere sight of a piece of paper.
It is sad, however, that the perfectly reasonable idea “it’s okay to be white” is considered a controversial phrase to the point where the authorities have to be called. What’s the correct position then, that it isn’t okay to be white? That being white is somehow an inherently unacceptable thing? Correct me if I’m wrong, but that sounds rather racist. The whole point of this genius trolling, as the 4chan post stated, was to expose the racial hypocrisy of these far-left nutjobs.
This reaction is evidence of when ignorance runs rampant. This is evidence of how out of touch and intellectually lazy the media establishment can be. This is evidence of how dangerous it is for people to base too much of their mindset and ideology around an arbitrary physical characteristic such as race or gender. When one sentence can offend you so deeply that it requires a public hearing be held about it, you might want to reconsider your thought process.
Like the great Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Unfortunately for the deceased Rev. King, it looks as though there are too many people in America that are so entrenched in their ideology of social justice that they cannot acknowledge the basic, moral principle that it is okay to be white.