So VMI Isn't Structurally Racist After All

The Washington Post’s Ian Shapira and his social justice allies in Richmond and Lexington, Virginia, must be worried, big-time. For nearly two years running, their Axis-Against-VMI has enjoyed remarkable success: forcing an honorable VMI superintendent to resign; removing Lt. Gen. “Stonewall” Jackson’s statue, and his name from Jackson Arch; renaming buildings and recontextualizing the past; inserting divisive ideology into courses; and establishing a diversity office at the school. To explain all of this, and the sheeplike climate that has permeated a once-willing-to-stand-apart-from-cultural-faddishness military school of high reputation, one must return to the previous, disgraced governor of Virginia. Ralph Northam came within the proverbial gnat’s eyelash of being forced from office in 2018 when his own racial insensitivities as a younger man came to light. But the VMI 1981 alumnus and former President of the VMI Honor Court – he included this on his official stationery – apparently experienced a change of heart. He embraced the demands of neo-Marxist-based, Critical Race Theory (CRT) devotees within the ranks of Richmond’s political powerbrokers, and he kept his job. In September 2019, he hired Virginia’s “first cabinet-level Chief Diversity Officer. . . . also the first [position] of its kind in the nation.”[1] In the aftermath of Northam’s insensitive behavior years earlier, one year after it had come to light he established a powerful new office – one previously unknown to the cabinet-level apparatus of any state in the country. This was astounding.

More @ The Abbeville Institute