Joy Reid said the quiet part out loud — and it’s ugly

Joy Reid has done the parents of America an unexpected kindness.

If you’ve ever wondered what really lies behind the diversity, equity, and inclusion philosophy and the “decolonizing” curriculum so prominent in our universities, Reid has made it plain by saying the quiet part out loud.

Appearing with Wajahat Ali on “The Left Hook,” she claimed that “mediocre white men” are simply coasting along on stolen achievements from others. As amusing as it can be to watch Reid melt down and flail in any medium, there is, alas, a serious side to her remarks.

In the space of a few breaths, Reid not only insulted the intelligence of all white people, but also cast herself, unwittingly, as the schoolyard bully.

As one of the few — and I mean very few — conservative professors at Arizona State University, I can testify firsthand that faculty meetings and mandatory “trainings” often turn into open-mic nights for contemptuous remarks about white men. And if you raise the issue, cue the gaslighting chorus: “We can’t be racist. Only white men can be racist.”

So yes, laugh at the absurdity if you like. But parents should know that Joy Reid’s public bile is not an isolated eccentricity. It’s the distilled essence of a worldview taught in classrooms across the country.

Riding on privilege

Consider her credentials: a degree in film studies from Harvard and a lucrative perch in television. Yes, you read that right — film studies. Yet her rant against “whiteness” was no theatrical performance. It was a window into the sort of ignorance and hatred our universities have been happily exporting into the culture for decades.

Her interlocutor, Ali, was even more candid.

These people [white men] cannot create culture on their own. Without black people, brown people, the DEIs, there’s no culture in America. We make the food better. We make the economy better. We make the music better. Right? MAGA can’t create culture. They got Cracker Barrel and Kid Rock.

If you are still operating under the “classical liberalism and respectful pluralism” lens, you need to wake up. The left abandoned that approach decades ago. That might not be what leftists say at “meet the professor night” to get your money, but it’s what you find in their curriculum — and then said out loud by people like Joy Reid.

For those who are still under the illusion that we are committed to pluralism, you might have expected Reid to have exhibited a modicum of moderation: “Hold on, we can’t make sweeping denunciations of an entire people group. Everyone has contributed.” But no. For the academic left, classical liberalism and its old-fashioned respect for difference and fair treatment went out of fashion around the same time as dial-up internet.

Instead, Reid didn’t hide her disdain for those with lighter skin tones. “They don’t have the intellectual rigor to actually argue or debate with us,” she told Ali. “What they do is tattle and tell. They run and tell teacher that ‘the black lady or the brown man was mean to me.’”

Hiding in plain sight

The spectacle is almost too delicious. In the space of a few breaths, she not only insulted the intelligence of all white people, but also cast herself, unwittingly, as the schoolyard bully whose chief grievance is that the other children tell the teacher when she breaks the rules.

The irony, as Kid Rock might have noted with a raised brow, is as dense as a Cracker Barrel biscuit.

When Reid and Ali deign to speak of “culture,” they only mean food and pop music. They spent time sneering at Elvis, as if dismissing him were the final act of liberation. Meanwhile, Reid — a multimillionaire alumna of one of the finest (supposedly) universities in the world — complains of American awfulness and insists that our entire history must be reduced to the story of slavery, with no mention of those white men who fought and died to abolish it.

RELATED: Students are trapped in mandatory DEI disguised as coursework

Photo by Deagreez via iStock/Getty Images

As a professor, I can assure you that this is standard-issue humanities pedagogy in many American universities. Students are not trained to grapple with Mozart, Shakespeare, Adam Smith, or William Lloyd Garrison. They are taught a cartoon version of history in which every problem is “the fault of whiteness” and every solution is a demand for reparations. If those great names of history do appear, they are merely depicted as foils in a morality play about systemic oppression.

Remain vigilant

Parents, take note: Feel free to chuckle at Reid’s self-own, but then remember that people with her views stand in the front of your child’s classroom, smiling benignly during the parent campus tour while privately stewing in the same resentment. Moreover, they expect you to pay them tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of being indoctrinated into their hatred.

It’s time to call this nonsense what it is — racism dressed up in academic jargon — and consign it to the ash heap of falsehood. They are free to hold their opinions, and we are free to ignore them and move on.