The Fruits of Wokeness

The single most deplorable and craven thing I ever witnessed from a University administration occurred at Middle Georgia State University, which is a regional university that serves the Macon area. I worked there as a lecturer and a professor, so I got all the internal emails and memos, including the boilerplate emails that came out of the president’s office, which I always read with a great deal of interest. Christopher Blake is his name, and the only thing I really remember about President Blake is that he was really sorry that he was born white. He made that clear in a campus-wide email he sent out just after George Floyd died. Blake was broken up about George Floyd, about Breonna Taylor, and others I’m sure, and he made it clear that he recognized and understood that he had benefited from the advantages bestowed upon him just by being born white and male.

Such prostrations were de rigueur during the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, and I was reading them, watching all these white people doing self-flagellation, and thinking, this is new. Then, leftists, backed by democrats, started the chants of “defund the police”, and again, I was watching all this unfold, just observing, and I was thinking, this is new.

I reached out to President Blake after another email came out to the campus system from the student government that asked for students to inform on their professors. It asked, have you experienced racism at MGA? Write to us here and let us know. I’d seen this before because I had watched with keen interest the cancelations of Brett Weinstein and Heather Heyer at Evergreen State College in Washington. Evergreen was the first example of a college completely melting down due to wokeness, and I feared that Blake with his admission of benefitting from racism would stoke something similar to happen at MGA, so I sent him an email to warn him. At the time, I assumed that Blake was a decent guy just doing his job, which including mouthing things one may not actually believe to keep the woke mobs at bay. I asked Blake if he was familiar with the events that happened at Evergreen State. To my surprise, he wrote me back and said he was, in fact, familiar with those events, and he thanked me for the email. So, I can say about Blake that he responded to his emails, which is a lot better than any other college president I’ve known.

No meltdowns occurred at MGA of which I am aware, but all of the above information is given so I can help the reader understand that when Dylan Harrison, a 26-year-old sherriff’s deputy in Alamo, Georgia, was ambushed and executed in the street during his very first shift as a cop, shot in the head like a dog, President Blake said nothing, and his silence, paired with his inability to shut up about the death of George Floyd up in Minnesota, is the single most craven thing I have ever seen from a college president.

Alamo is a Mayberry, a tiny little town out in the boondocks of Middle Georgia, and Harrison’s murder there is as shocking as if Barney Fife had been gunned down in the streets of Mayberry. I’m not trying to be funny. I’m trying to show that this shooting was shocking, that it was the ugly national politics of defund the police brought right to Mayberry’s doorstep.

Harrison’s brother was taking my composition 2 course at the time, and he wrote to me a next day and told me that Dylan was his brother (I don’t know if he was a half-brother, or if brother was figurative in this case as the two men shared different last names) and that he was in the squad car with Dylan and witnessed his brother’s brutal execution, and in light of that, he just wasn’t going to be able to continue in the course. I told him, you take all the time you need, and I told him that I was going to pray for him and his family. As it turns out, I was probably the only representative of Middle Georgia State who said anything like that to this young man.

In saner times, before wokism had become entrenched at the university, these institutions saw themselves as in the service of the local community. The University president was a statesman of sorts, a liason between the larger world the University brought to the local community. When I was in college twenty years ago at Ole Miss, there’s no way, and I mean simply no way in Hell that Robert Khayat, who was chancellor of Ole Miss at the time, didn’t send out his condolences to the family of Dylan Harrison and furthermore issue a call to a return to law and order. There is just no way Khayat would have failed to do that. I can think of no excuse for Blake’s silence on the matter, especialy since just months ago he had prostrated himself on the alter of Saint George and implicitly endorsed defund the police, and here, right on our doorstep, was the result, the poison fruit of that call to demonize the police, a slain officer with a wife and a six-month-old daughter at home, right in Blake’s backyard, right in the area served by the University, and Dylan’s own brother a student at the University. I still want to know how such an oversight happens.

The day they buried Harrison every cop in the state of Georgia who could attend his funeral did attend his funeral, which resulted in a funeral procession the likes of which I doubt I will ever see again. Essentially, the entire city of Dublin closed down to let these mourners through. Middle Georgia State has a campus in Dublin. President Blake issued no campus-wide condolences. Not a single word.

Wokeness is the most pernicious corrupting force I have ever seen, and it is breaking our institutions, and I fear that they are all going to break before any sort of return to sanity is going to be possible. Wokeness deconstructs, perverts and corrupts, and makes institutions unable to carry out their missions. Proponents have to signal their virtues to the cause, and they have to ignore anything off narrative. It is a totalizing ideology, and those who don’t toe the line get put through struggle sessions and canceled. For what it is worth, I doubt Blake actually has remorse for how he was born, and he probably wasn’t even aware of Dylan Harrison. When I raised the issue with my department head, he hadn’t even heard about it, and that is a problem in an of itself. No New York Times coverage. No CNN coverage. The coverage was only local. Can you imagine, dear reader, if the races of these people were reversed, if a white hillbilly had executed a black cop? Can you imagine the national media being silent on the matter?

So, I want to say what President Blake could not: To the Harrison family, I am sorry for your loss, and I hope that our country can return to a state of law and order soon, and I am thankful for the police insofar as I am glad they are a phone call away should I ever need them. When I worked for MGA, I saw myself as a part of the local community, and I was always accessible to my students, something I am proud to be able to state here. Months later, when some faceless administrator’s secretary wrote to me to ask about my former student’s request for hardship, I told her clearly: Give this young man anything he asks for. He witnessed his brother get murdered, and he has been through Hell. In response, that secretary simply replied, thank you. No, we will take care of him. Nothing like that. Such is the sorry state of things, and I swear to you, not a single day passes that I don’t thank God for getting me out of it, but that’s an article for another time.

Shame on President Blake, and shame on Middle Georgia State University.