Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2001/03/12/letters_to_the_editor.php
Monday, March 12, 2001
Stop Whining
If the 'Wah-Hoo-Wah' cheer is racist, offensive, and inappropriate, why not establish a new one? I suggest 'Waah-Waah-Waah' myself. What other cheer could more accurately reflect the continuous pissing and moaning pouring out of that college for the past five years.
Dartmouth College has been nothing but a constant embarrassment since I graduated. The only news the college makes are the occasional mentions of protests, demonstrations, derecognitions, boycotts and half-baked reform initiatives cooked up by people so bored with their own life, they now try to run the lives of others.
Well now I want to complain. Every Saturday this fall I was left hoping that the Dartmouth football scores would not run across the bottom of the TV, prompting all the fellas in the pub to laugh at me and the state of my sorry school. WAAH-WAAH-WAAH! Give the baby his pint.
Ryan T. Mulrooney '96
Treat People Like People
Your article truthfully points out that the Ivy League's call for diversity has degenerated into self-segregated groups of people using the racist presumption of color-oriented conformity to stereotype themselves and each other with bogus racial identities ('Dartmouth's Racial Separatism,' 2/12/01).
'Races' do not exist, and 'cultures' are human relationships, not predetermined mindsets. The only human entity to ever walk and talk upon the earth is a 'human individual,' each freely choosing whether to think for himself, or to accept the prevailing cultural indoctrination and stereotypes routinely passed out as an education in the social sciences. It is our diverse value choices, not our superficial skin colors, that create and recreate our human characters.
Encouraging young people to derive an artificially positive self-image from a bogus racial identity actually prevents the joyful discovery of personal preferences and the corollary pursuit of personal accomplishment that is fundamental to real self-esteem. The sooner America's so-called educators are able to figure out the difference between a stereotype and a human being, the sooner the social animosity and personal dysfunction created by the current cultural indoctrination will be replaced with satisfying and harmonious human relationships.
Judy Helton