Scroll down to read this post.

 

Readers!

 

The time has come for my annual short Thanksgiving/Christmas fund drive for Behind The Black. I must do this every year in order to make sure I have earned enough money to pay my bills.

 

For this two-week campaign, I am offering a special deal to encourage donations. Donations of $200 will get a free autographed copy of the new paperback edition of Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, while donations of $250 will get a free autographed copy of the new hardback edition. If you desire a copy, make sure you provide me your address with your donation.

 

As I noted in July, the support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.

 

In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.

 

Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.

 

Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:

 

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

 

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
 

3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:

 

4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
 
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652

 

You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.


Today’s blacklisted American: Whites at Cornell University

The Civil Rights Act of 1964: repealed by Cornell
The Civil Rights Act of 1964: repealed by Cornell

Continuing my weeklong series documenting the modern bigotry of our culture, today’s bigot is Cornell University, who recently offered a segregated rock-climbing course that whites were forbidden to attend. From the course’s original description:

This class is for people who identify as Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, or other people of color.

Moreover, that original course description made it very clear that the course was limited to such students only.

The original description gave no indication that BIPOC [Black, Indigenous People, Others of Color] students were the “special focus” of the course, instead of the only eligible category for enrollment. While [that original version] said students “will also talk about BIPOC individuals and groups in rock climbing,” that sentence was immediately followed by the restriction to “people who identify as” BIPOC.

Such a class would be illegal under both federal and New York state law.

New York has a “Human Rights Law” that bans “non-sectarian educational institutions” (which includes Cornell) from denying services to students on the basis of race and color, among other categories. The New York Attorney General’s Office flatly says such bans are “illegal.”

This state law supplements the federal Title VI law, which bans the exclusion of any person from federally funded programs “on the ground of” race or color.

The segregated course was first revealed and discussed on Reddit four months ago, and remained unchanged for three weeks, until Campus Reform contacted the university as part of a planned report. Cornell officials then immediately revised the course description to imply that whites could attend also, though the focus of the course remains racist in favoring the teaching of minorities over whites.

You might argue that this is an isolated case and it is unfair to accuse Cornell University of bigotry based on this one example. The problem with that argument is that the university’s intolerance of anyone opposing modern leftist dogma and its identity politics is not limited to this one example, and instead is quite extensive. First, as noted in the Reddit discussion, the university still offers courses restricted only to women.

Second, shortly after the election of Trump the president of Cornell’s Republican club was physically attacked, an attack that was the culmination of a campaign of harassment and threats.

Then there was the creation by students of “safety teams” to discourage others from attending a scheduled speech by a Cornell law professor advocating free speech on college campuses.

Later, when that professor criticized the Marxist and racist agenda of the Black Lives Matter movement, several student organizations at the university moved to get him fired.

At this same time a petition supporting the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement, with many bigoted demands, was being circulated and endorsed widely on campus by students, teachers, and faculty. That petition included the demand that the university “support and encourage departments to make cluster hires of Black and other faculty of color,” that it “encourage and support the recruiting of graduate students of color in clusters and cohorts in departments,” and that it “abolish colorblind recruitment policies and practices in partner/spousal hiring” in favor of hiring minorities first and foremost.

Then there was the 2019 offering by the university of six week seminar course that questioned the very use of “reason” or “rationality” in intellectual thought.

The goal of the entire seminar is to demonstrate that knowledge, and truth, is always tied to power, which means that all knowledge, and truth, is entirely subjective, and if discovered by some ethnic groups in power (whites or Christians or Jews), other ethnic groups out of power have the right, the obligation, to reject that knowledge, and truth, in order to establish their own power base.

Not surprisingly, the teacher of this course is an expert and supporter of Critical Race Theory, and has said publicly that the “spike in gun sales after Barack Obama’s re-election (the “end of ‘Anglo Saxon’ domination over the United States”) was a signal that white people were arming themselves for a race war against Hispanics.”

The sad part of this story is that Cornell is not an outlier, but very typical of most major universities today. If you are conservative you face outright oppression. If you are white you are considered the lowest of the low, and must bow to the new bigoted model that places minorities at the top of the racial pyramid, pure and above any criticism at all, merely because of their skin color.

So, what college is your kid going to? And that future recent graduate you are thinking of hiring: What school did he or she attend? What did they learn?

These are questions we who believe in a colorblind society that does not judge people by their race must be asking. And we need ask them often and bluntly, and not be afraid to respond appropriately to the answers we get.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

15 comments

  • Cotour

    The problem with such foolish “Politically Correct” “Social Justice” “Virtue Signaling” is this

    “This class is for people who identify as Black,”

    If this is the test, then who among them can turn anyone away that wants to participate and they state that they identify as black.

    Or Hispanic, or as a woman?

    They have set themselves up for a law suit and it will be well deserved. Just like the religious cake maker had to suffer his “discrimination”, so should they.

    Stupid is stupid, no matter how or who promotes it.

  • Doubting Thomas

    Cotour – I think it is clear that a person who registered and walked into the class and did not “look the part” would begin to take enormous heat from the students, instructor(s) and University administration. Especially if said individual did anything but carefully, loudly and continually toe the racist woke line. Finally, there is a danger of “committee’s of justice” which, after hours, would take “peoples justice” out on the wrongly colored transgressor.

    We live in a world rapidly heading towards anarchy.

  • Cotour

    What exactly does, “Identifies as black” mean? (This is red meat to a lawyer worth his or her salt)

    If I say I am identifying as black person, who is to argue with me? Same if I say that I am identifying as a woman. These morons have crafted their own the weapons of their own demise. As morons usually do.

    Crank it up: https://youtu.be/lP5Xv7QqXiM

    Send the lawyers and the money, the more the better, no guns needed.

  • eddie willers

    Cornell officials then immediately revised the course description to imply that whites could attend also, though the focus of the course remains racist in favoring the teaching of minorities over whites.

    “So why ya gotta sit at the lunch counter? We got a perfectly fine take out window out around back”.

    I grew up under ‘Separate, but equal’. It was the law.

  • Mitch S.

    “all knowledge, and truth, is entirely subjective, and if discovered by some ethnic groups in power (whites or Christians or Jews), other ethnic groups out of power have the right, the obligation, to reject that knowledge, and truth, in order to establish their own power base”

    Hmm, I’d like to see the advocates of “Critical Race Theory” follow that obligation.
    Let’s see how they live without the fruits of “white, Christian or Jewish” knowledge and truths.
    No driving cars, no computers, internet, phones… no electricity at all.
    They could do basic farming (no tractors or chemicals), raise animals, make bronze and iron. And I suppose they could have steam engines (the ancient Egyptians did some basic research in the field).
    And of course no Covid vaccine or most other modern medicine.
    They could still use gold, silver and coins so reparations could be paid to them and they’ll be able to buy gunpowder and make explosives to try to establish the power base…

  • wayne

    Cotour-

    Warren Zevon
    “My [expletive] [expletive] Up”
    Live in Holland 2000
    https://youtu.be/LbhYqV17CoQ
    3:11

  • Ian C.

    “we who believe in a colorblind society”

    Colorblindness can work in societies that are ethnically and culturally dominantly white. That is changing in America and Western Europe. The less white, the more does colorblindness become a luxury and a liability. Generally speaking.

  • wayne

    Star Trek Original Series
    “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” clip
    https://youtu.be/n8ysHnbDQ50
    4:17

  • commodude

    This is the backbone institution of Ithaca and Tompkins County, NY, which had a convicted cop killer as a “community elder” on their police reform board.

    https://www.fingerlakesdailynews.com/2021/04/01/sen-omara-blasts-ithaca-for-inclusion-of-cop-killer-on-police-reform-board/

    We describe Ithaca locally as 10 square miles surrounded by reality.

  • Jeff Wright

    Freedom of access vs freedom of association-you cannot have selective enforcement either way. Allow this and Title 9 dies

  • alperetti

    “all knowledge, and truth, is entirely subjective, and if discovered by some ethnic groups in power (whites or Christians or Jews), other ethnic groups out of power have the right, the obligation, to reject that knowledge, and truth, in order to establish their own power base”

    This is pernicious nonsense that should be laughed at in anything claiming to be a serious school.

    Stepping back from the interracial animosity of the present, I can sort of see and respect various groups’ desire for some kind of “personal space”. Jews have their Hillel organizations: We understand that it’s their space and don’t crash their party just for the hell of it. Other student ethnic/religious groups have their various clubs. If you were to be *consistent* about this principle, then there should be nothing stopping us from forming a “white cultural center” (meh), or a “men’s only club”, or a “women’s only club”.

    On the other hand, I’m a cultural pirate (heave to and prepare to be appropriated!), and this is a university. If there are all these interesting ethnic societies, then I’d want to see what makes *everyone else* tick. What sort of things do you do? How do you see the world? What achievements are you proud of? How were they accomplished? What’s on your bookshelf? Right now I indulge my “cultural tradition of cultural piracy” through reading autobiographies and books, but it’d be a nicer saner world if things were amicable enough that students could, you know, learn from each other and drop in on each others’ groups.

    A University is supposed to be universal in some sense, right?

    On one end of this scale you have a bunch of disconnected guilds that don’t communicate anything with each other. Hardly a school! On the far other end of the scale, you have a bunch of compulsory common classes – everything is public all the time, everyone must be homogeneous and fit into the over-culture. No one will be themselves, on campus. The closed societies just move off campus.

    Arguments to address to a university in an over-culture that isn’t busy going insane.

  • MadRocketSci

    Seems to me that the internet has the potential to become the new “university” of a sort, and perhaps undo or blunt the damage that our maleducation has done. There are all sort sorts of holes in my knowledge I’m attempting to fill – it’ll probably be a lifelong task! The only reason I stand a chance is that I can grab just about any book (with various annoying restrictions due to our tragic copyright regime) from archive.org or elsewhere. I can go read the founding papers in my field. I can watch lectures by people who aren’t lunatics on youtube (unfortunately, all still concentrated on a platform controlled by “the enemy”).

    If the left wants to complete their dark age, they can do serious damage by destroying the educational content on the platforms they control, banning books on the last remaining universal bookseller, and burning down archive.org and gutenberg.org, and similar sites with copyright lawfare. They’ve already started on some of these tasks: I wish more of the network-effect-concentrated infrastructure of the internet hadn’t fallen into their hands.

  • Cotour

    #4           POLITICAL POWER AND LEADERSHIP CAN NOT TOLERATE A RELIGION, A BELIEF SYSTEM OR A GOD                             THAT DOES NOT  SUPPORT AND FURTHER THEIR ACQUISITION OF AND RETENTION OF POWER

    “Technology however has short circuited in real time and in real terms media and politics, and at the same time has accelerated leaderships ability and need to influence, manipulate and manage the population in the context of our modern world and politics. 

    Empowered leadership and their particular flavor of politics, how ever YOU choose to identify, characterize or label it.

    And political agenda is being allied with and buttressed by traditional media and high tech / Social Media business entities who essentially are now in control of the flow of news, information and “The Message”. And those business entities have chosen to actively and subjectively, based on their political agendas and desires, censor that information and manage who in the public realm is allowed to participate in distributing information or disagreeing with information and the “Message”. ”

  • Cotour

    WHATS UP WITH UNTER? WHERES HUNTER?

    You may have seen the recent Hunter Biden interview, who is the son of the president of the United States. Where he admitted to desperately combing through the carpet for any sign of any residual crack cocaine for him to smoke. And you might have asked? What was the point of this embarrassing interview?

    Joe Biden “Compromised” by China?: https://youtu.be/g4gXUp-kH4M

    What was the point of the interview? HUMANIZATION.

    Hunters and the presidents handlers need for the public to see Hunter in compassionate and human terms. If you saw any of the pictures of Hunter that were taken from his abandoned computer you saw the sad and depraved, perverted life of what crack addiction looks like. And it ain’t pretty.

    This is all accompanied by and in promotion of Hunters new book, “Beautiful Things”.

    The average every day human being would tend to want to hide from such things as perversion and things like crack cocaine addition. But what we are dealing with here are very sophisticated operators and PR masters “repairing” Hunter perception by the public. So what you are witness to is the rehabilitation of a fellow human being who you have compassion for because you see that he is in the process of redeeming himself.

    And this is all a setup to no charges being brought by the FBI / DOJ against the current presidents son, plain and simple. And through the evidence that has been revealed by the Hunter Biden abandoned computer, it is his computer, have no doubt. The current president is compromised through the business deals that were laid out on the computer and through other evidence, where the current president was apparently a part and a facilitator of.

    And it all revolves around the Communist Chinese and their reach / investment into our government. The Communist Chinese have all their bets covered.

    Does that make you feel secure and safe?

    Remember, Hunter Biden is being rehabbed in real time for all to see in the eyes of the American public in order that his being given a pass by the powers that be is accepted by the general public in the furtherance of his fathers legacy and political agenda. And that agenda is clearly without doubt a Leftist agenda that empowers the Communist Chinese. Be not naive.

  • Andi

    “We describe Ithaca locally as 10 square miles surrounded by reality.” – good one!

    Reminds me of the line “The best thing about Austin is that it’s not too far from Texas”

Readers: the rules for commenting!

 

No registration is required. I welcome all opinions, even those that strongly criticize my commentary.

 

However, name-calling and obscenities will not be tolerated. First time offenders who are new to the site will be warned. Second time offenders or first time offenders who have been here awhile will be suspended for a week. After that, I will ban you. Period.

 

Note also that first time commenters as well as any comment with more than one link will be placed in moderation for my approval. Be patient, I will get to it.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *