The Washington Post's most epically unbelievable self-own via a self-owning guest student opinion writer
Is Jeff Bezos aware of this almost mythical level of self-devouring behaviour at his paper?
Note to reader: As a precaution I would discourage you from in any way contacting or confronting any person mentioned in this newsletter article.
When I saw the meme I thought it had to be a parody or a 4Chan hoax, but it wasn’t, and normally I like to draw out the full context of a story. But we don’t need to in this case. The Washington Post published on May 9 a guest op-ed by Caleb François, a senior at George Washington University, asking that the college rename itself. There are so many levels of irony here that I’m sure are obvious to you:
Francois was unoffended enough to apply to and attend GWU for now almost four years.
He published the article through the Washington Post.
Both GWU and the WaPo are in Washington, DC.
The campus politics website College Fix also made light of this uproariously hilarious article that might as well have been written by the Babylon Bee. In reposting the article on his Facebook page Francois seemed to have no appreciation for the irony of the whole situation. He also reposted a thread from the school’s Haitian alliance that bemoaned the fact that African languages like Haitian Kreyol are not taught at the school. Besides the fact that this is a regional patois of French that has no standard form - and therefore is no different from non-African dialects like Quebecois that are also not taught - François didn’t seem to mind that WaPo neglected to spell his name with the proper letter ç as he uses everywhere else.
Any honest observer should conclude that Mr. François is amplifying performative outrage that internally he probably does not feel. What else does he think should be changed?
The name of the Mount Vernon Campus of GWU’s smaller campus that was once a women’s college on the grounds that this was the name of George Washington’s plantation.
GWU’s team nickname and mascot "the Colonials”.
The university’s next president should be a black person.
All of this may have been caused by the GWU administration seeking to appease the student body, as François himself introduces the topic by highlighting the renaming of the Cloyd Heck Marvin Center to the more innocuous “University Student Center”. The WaPo copywriters also let another glaring problem escape: François called Frederick Douglass - one of the potential namesakes that he proposes for the university - a “statesmen” using the plural form.
What the Post may not have been aware of is that François’ lack of appreciation for irony doesn’t just end with asking for his university to rename itself in an op-ed for a newspaper with the same name. Much of François’s Facebook wall is filled with tributes to figures in black history ranging from Douglass, to Martin Luther King, Jr. to Malcolm X to Bob Marley. However, in the midst of objecting to the offensive life of American’s first president, he also reposted a photo of Louis Farrakhan along with a reverential caption that omitted his long history of racist remarks against whites, Asians, and Jews or his homophobic and sexist beliefs that he preaches as the leader of the Nation of Islam. Even Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald, one of the most party-line liberal columnists in the US, has condemned Farrakhan’s toxic influence on politics in the black community.
The original posting that he shared was from Dr. Raymond Winbush aka Tikari Bioko, a professor at Baltimore’s Morgan State University and a prominent activist in the reparations movement for descendants of black African slaves. Dr. Winbush has on his Twitter feed a tribute to another anti-Jewish figure, noted Pulitzer Prize winning author Alice Walker. He also unironically condemns the separatist “ADOS” (American Descendants of Slavery) movement as a “right wing, white supremacist tool in blackface”.
Why do I share this story? The theme during my upbringing was that a university education is one of the keys to giving a “well-rounded” perspective to a student, and therefore everyone should have one. Unfortunately, it seems that now for multiple generations the academia and the news media have instead encouraged doctrinal and narrow-minded viewpoints that they see as progressive but are if anything mirror images of traditional anti-black racism. The establishment is so cowardly (or complicit) in the face of these views that they are now uncritically published by their flagship newspaper.