Sometime Sunday morning, a man by the name of Karl Reid stepped aboard an early flight, settled into his Delta comfort plus seat, snapped a selfie, posted it, and single-handedly managed to show the world exactly what happens to the hearts and minds of those who bathe regularly in the vomitous vat of polarizing prejudice intellectuals euphemistically call "diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)."
The implication is clear, even if not enunciated.
It's hard to come up with the most apt adjective to use in describing Mr. Reid's perspective on life in general, and on his fellow human travelers specifically.
It appears that Reid's seat mate attempted to make small talk, to be genial, kind, to take an interest in the stranger that God had ordained to sit beside them that day. But rather than take that simple, friendly gesture as a sign of human decency, genuineness, authenticity, and goodwill, Reid saw it as an opportunity to grandstand.
Having either been taught (or more likely having taught himself) to view all life's interactions through the Marxist prism of race, power dynamics, and resentment, Reid's first inclination was to seize the moment, and pridefully present himself aggrieved:
"Look world, some ignorant schmuck assumed a black man wearing an athletic windbreaker coached basketball. The days of Bull Conner's firehoses persist."
With all due respect to Mr. Reid, it encourages me to see an increasing number of people willing to tell such diversity divas to kindly blow it out their ears.
As thankful as I am to see Mr. Reid get ratioed into oblivion, as nice as it was to see his attempted victimization routine backfire with people expressing sympathy for the nice individual who merely tried to strike up friendly conversation only to get roasted as a latent racist, this scene still represents something much darker and more depressing to me about the state of our culture. Karl Reid is MIT's VP of diversity.
This nonsense is what he gets paid a healthy salary to do every day.
MIT's board of trustees sees it as a worthy use of alumni gifts, tuition payments, and donor dollars to compensate this man to do to young, worldview-developing college kids what he did to a stranger in this post.
There are now hundreds of thousands of Karl Reids scattered throughout academia and the corporate world imposing this toxic trend on our dying culture.
Cite all the statistics you want. Lob all your academic rhetoric about my "cis white mobility privilege," and every other made-up word in your arsenal. My question is a simple one:
Are we a better society with people feeling comfortable looking for common ground and shared interests by striking up a polite conversation with a stranger on an airplane, or one where we train our children how to find reason to take offense even without cause?
Mr. Reid had a choice on the plane, and he chose to make our world a little more cynical, a little more judgmental, and a lot less pleasant.
