Banana Peel Discovered at Ole Miss

Michael Lumish

The United States, if not the West more generally, has lost its fucking mind.

In an article for a newspaper associated with Ole Miss by Slade Rand and Rachel Ishee we read:

This weekend, leaders from Ole Miss Greek life convened upon Camp Hopewell in Lafayette County for a three-day retreat designed to build leaders and bring campus closer together. The retreat was cut short Saturday night, however, after three black students found a banana peel in a tree in front of one of the camp’s cabins.

The students shared what they found with National Pan-Hellenic Council leaders, sparking a day’s worth of camp-wide conversation surrounding symbolism, intended or not. In the midst of the open and sometimes heated discussion, senior accounting major Ryan Swanson said he put the banana peel in the tree when he could not find a trashcan nearby.

This is what we have come to.

Some student puts a banana peel on a tree somewhere on campus and all hell breaks loose.

It is perfectly fine to put up a tremendous mural of a genocidal Jew murderer - who somehow became an American feminist leader - at a cafe next to a major Oakland transportation hub, but a banana peel in a tree at the University of Mississippi is just too much.

The stupidity seems to go on and on and on with no end in sight.

Alexa Lee Arndt, interim director of Fraternity and Sorority Life, referring to a community discussion of the meaning of the banana peel wrote:

To be clear, many members of our community were hurt, frightened, and upset by what occurred at IMPACT … Because of the underlying reality many students of color endure on a daily basis, the conversation manifested into a larger conversation about race relations today at the University of Mississippi. 

Well, good god, we would not want to slip on that one, now would we?

People are acting as if this is either 1963 and we need marches with Martin Luther King, Jr. or it is 1968 and we need Stokely and Eldridge and the fellahs to put on the black berets and show the cops what's what.

Makala McNeil, president of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, one of the nine historically African-American sororities and fraternities, said she saw the banana peel after leaving a group discussion that addressed race relations.

So, let me get this straight. Ms. McNeil, after leaving a discussion on "race relations" saw a banana peel hanging from a tree?

And this made the local news?

I understand, obviously, about the cultural significance of bananas and monkeys to racist conceptions of black people. What I fail to understand, however, is why something like this should even be an issue in 2017 given how much progress the United States has made in ethnic relations since the bad old days.

In truth, the fact that anyone, anywhere actually gives a shit about the racial significance of a banana peel dangling from a tree at the University of Mississippi should put to bed any notions that Americans are careless on racial inequalities. Actually, Americans are among the most racially neurotic people on the planet.

We are obsessed with "race."

A major part of the reason for the current "race scare" is because following the New Left of the 1960s questions of race, gender, and class were (rightly) interwoven into political analyses throughout the academe. This should be obvious. Indeed, one cannot so easily separate political theories of race, gender, and economic class because each strand pulls on every other.

But, now, largely due to the influence of cultural Marxism and identity politics, the progressive-left seems to actually want the existence of American racism so that they can use it as a political club or as a badge of social purity.

What is worse, however, is that they are racializing young people. That is, they are encouraging college students, if not high school students - if not babies - to see the world through racialized lenses and through the progressive-left hierarchy of victimhood.

I see this as the turning back of fifty years of progress in favor of blood and war.

Given what is going on at this political moment - what with rioting Idiots in Black and the destruction of historical Civil War statuary and the constant cries of racism, Racism, RACISM! - it seems to me that what Dave Rubin calls the "regressive left" actually wants the presence of Nazis and Klansmen and White Supremacists so that they can have something to fight against.

The American left has had a supply-and-demand problem with racists since the 1970s.

There was plenty of demand for open racists to target but they were in short supply.

Thus they have simply expanded the meaning of "racist" to include pretty much all white people and examples of racism to include a banana peel sitting in a tree.

Well, if the left wants a fight over racism I am certain that they will find enough hell-bent-for-fury right-wing dingbats to give them one.