Glenn Singleton on Mark Twain: "He's a Racist."
Readers of Liberty and Power will recall the disturbing antics of Glenn Singleton, a self-described diversity expert. Singleton typically gets six figures for his services from school districts, such as Cherry Creek, Colorado and Chapel Hill, North Carolina and (courtesy of a blowback from a conservative campaign led by Michelle Malkin) from Bellevue Community College.
Singleton describes his thought reform sessions as “Courageous Conversations About Race.” The reality of what goes on has little, if anything, to do with either courage or genuine conversation. The main talent of Singleton and his associates is to find creative ways to humiliate and degrade others. As during the Cultural Revolution in China, standard operating procedure is to have hapless educators and staff line up with individual signs, each showing numerical scores of their alleged unconscious racism.
I shudder to think that they might also have to listen to Singleton's theories on American literature. Haven't they suffered enough?
He has the following to say, for example, about Mark Twain, Huck Finn, and Jim: "I remember sitting back in middle school and saying to myself, 'I don't think Twain is a satirist, I think he's a racist. I don't think Huck and Jim are having this great relationship. I can't really understand why Jim keeps talking to Huck. I would think if I just got out of this period of slavery-with no freedom-I wouldn't want to spend all my time on a raft with a white boy answering questions.'"
I’ll lay odds that most of us, given a choice, would prefer Huck to Singleton as our raft mate. Luckily for Jim, he could choose his company. Unfortunately, this is not always the case for participants in Singleton’s “Courageous Conversations.”