The high cost of falsely accusing someone of racism

 Stanley Ridgley:

“Where’s the racism?”

This is the question that college presidents nationwide—and most everyone in their administrations—refuse to answer.

If you want to see a college president tap-dance to avoid accountability, go ahead and ask: “Who are the racist people, and what are the racist policies, programs, and procedures on your campus you claim is ‘rampant’ with ‘racism?’”

Enjoy the public relations messaging, but don’t expect a real answer. They can’t answer, because finding actual racism on a college campus is as likely as sighting Bigfoot. And just about as credible.

Now, college leaders are even more likely to circle the wagons against accountability, largely due to fears of litigation. Thanks to the resolution of a legal case in Ohio last week, this has become a $36 million question. Oberlin College paid up on a $36.6 million judgment to a local family bakery for libeling their business as “racist.”

The sad and completely unnecessary case of Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College is likely to reshape the conversation about so-called antiracism efforts on university campuses in coming months and years, even as colleges fund expensive bureaucracies, commission task forces, and hire well-heeled bureaucrats to solve a problem that is almost nonexistent at their institutions.

The incident that led to the judgment occurred in November 2016, when a black Oberlin student shoplifted a bottle of wine from the bakery, was chased and caught by one of the owners, all of which resulted in a scuffle. The thief and his two accomplices, who intervened for their friend to pummel the clerk protecting his business, were all arrested.

Within 24 hours, Oberlin moved swiftly into action. Not to upbraid the students, nor to apologize to the bakery and to the owner’s son, Allyn D. Gibson, whom the trio attacked.

Rather than assist in the prosecution of the student, Oberlin shifted into high umbrage mode and supported a coalition of students, faculty, and administrators to attack the bakery publicly for “racism.” The college stopped doing business with the bakery.

Then Oberlin broke out the tired script we’ve seen so often in the past several years and fueled a very public hate hoax. Oberlin’s Dean of Students and Vice President Meredith Raimondo was on the protest front lines armed with a bullhorn and leaflets, which constituted much of Oberlin’s culpability in the defamation of the Gibson family business.
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Allegedly that it is racist to stop a black criminal bad enough.  Attacking a business as racist for trying to stop a thief is absurd.