A decade ago or so, the sporting press was obsessed over black head coaches in football. In response, the NFL instituted the Rooney Rule, forcing owners and general managers to interview black coaching candidates. We saw a rash of black guys getting jobs and the panic subsided. No one know how many black head coaches there are now, but no one talks about it so the answer is “enough.”
The weird thing is this panic never extended to college ball, where you rarely see black head coaches. Every once in a while it gets mentioned, but you don’t see the panic. The SEC had some black coaches and that screws up the normal narrative where southern white males are blamed for everything race related. The real reason the Left never focused on college is even they have to accept that college is run by the Left. If they are going to get on colleges for not hiring black guys, they will be shouting at a mirror.
The other day NRO had a somewhat comical opinion up regarding the alleged rape culture of the University of Virginia. Rich Lowry is a UVA grad so he has an interest in the story. Rolling Stone has a long piece supposedly about a woman raped at Virginia by, wait for it, a bunch of white guys at a fraternity. The Rolling Stone reads like what liberals imagine happens in the rape culture of fraternities. It is mostly likely another hoax that is fan fiction for the the grievance set.
The reason to be skeptical is these tales contradict daily life. We’re supposed to believe that the coeds at the modern college think like coeds from Hollywood movies about coeds in the 1950’s. Five minutes around young people says that’s laughable. We’re also supposed to believe that the people running the school are callous to the victims, despite the daily parade of victims they trot around campus as a part of their haranguing of the student body.
That’s the part that makes the Rolling Stone story tough to accept. The modern college campus is a celebration of victimology. The people in charge are so far out on the Left they would make Pol Pot uncomfortable. Yet, we’re supposed to believe that they are turning a blind eye to gangs of feral white boys raping the hell out of the pretty little white girls. You’ll note the narrative never has any black people in it. The so called “rape culture” on campus looks a lot like a horror film written by the local lesbian club.
That brings us back to the black football coach issue. The piety pyramid says black guys trump white girls, gay or straight. Yet, we have the Left ignoring the black coaching story and seizing on the plight of the sorority sister. The former requires saying bad things about their coreligionists who run the schools. The latter lets them rant about faceless, nameless bogeymen and make believe victims that evoke the right kinds of emotions.
The frustrating part of this is how the modern Right rolls over for this nonsense. The professor who wrote the opinion piece for NRO should have to give back his diplomas. First, he swallows the Rolling Stone story, despite the obvious problems. Second, he cannot bring himself to look out his own window at the place he works and compare that to the imaginary world conjured in these stories.
The real madness in this new front in the war is the unstated claim at the core of the rape culture nonsense. For it to be true, rape amongst middle-class college white guys is spiking at a time when overall rape is in a steep decline. In fact, rape has dropped 58% between 1995 and 2010. Those numbers include colleges so the rape culture crowd has a math problem. But, like everything else that belches froth from the Cult, logic and reason are the first casualty.
