Well, we knew this was probably happening. Lincoln Center is busy trying to Restart Stages and now we find out that they have a new stage: a stage 4 Wokeblastoma at Juilliard.
Heather MacDonald, a Smith Fellow at the think tank Manhattan Institute, is calling out Woetzel, Juilliard, and basically all of performing arts for stoking racial hysteria.
This is an outstanding article that is rich with gems of insight into the clannish climate of Woke-this, Woke-that.
In early August 2020, the school’s black drama students issued their own Letter of Demands. The Drama Division student body is over 50 percent “BIPOC” with nearly all of those BIPOC students being black. That 50 percent black share of the student body is unlikely to have arisen spontaneously. Blacks are 12 percent of the national population, and there is no indication that they disproportionately study drama in high school and college. Yet the black drama students’ letter portrayed the Drama Division as nearly lethally bigoted. Its “racist environment is hazardous to BIPOC students’ bodies,” the letter charged. “Some students are silenced, broken, and limited by racism within the Drama Division . . . [They] have to endure harm and violence [and] sacrifice their physical and mental health every day in this institution.”
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The black drama students’ claim of being daily “broken” by the “harm and violence” they are forced to endure at Juilliard is equally unpersuasive. There are no racists at Juilliard, and the school’s leaders should say so. No one, it should not need stating, is engaged in violence against black students. To the contrary, Juilliard is filled with liberal, well-meaning adults who want all their pupils to succeed. Far from being oppressed, all of Juilliard’s drama students are fantastically privileged compared to actors in bygone centuries who picked up their thespian skills rattling around with a flea-bitten vaudeville or commedia dell’arte troupe.
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Racial identity is also the key to evading colorblind behavioral standards. The drama students demand that every black student on probation for missing or being late to class be taken off probation and his record wiped clean, since Juilliard’s attendance policies have a disparate impact on black students. Any white students on probation for missing class will stay under discipline. Juilliard’s self-described “rigorous” class schedule is “deeply rooted in capitalist and white supremacist hegemony.” It, too, should change to “prioritize the physical and mental health needs of the student body.”
This crap has got to stop. Common people have found that the way to elevate themselves to attention and celebrity is to claim victimization. If they can't claim it for themselves, they'll claim it for someone else and completely take on all of the pain and suffering that they imagine others endured with a triple digit exponent.
Haglund may have to decline to publish comments received on this post which violate good taste or good sense or his own personal security. Be sure to read the comments attached to the bottom of Ms. MacDonald's article; there are some gems, too:
How about banning all white theatergoers and all white donors too? After all, let's be intellectually consistent if we are going to be "principled".
You can hear all the worried white liberals saying: "We were just virtue-signaling. We didn't actually mean it. Now how do we go back in time?" Too late.
