Lastly, and perhaps paramount to all other cultural issues, is the pervasive sense of crippling victimhood within the black community. Leaders of the black community, whether nationally like Al Sharpton or locally like the People of Color Caucus, ply the poisonous snake oil of victimhood to blacks, blaming problems on past injustice and racism. While racism certainly exists and past injustices like slavery were undoubtedly evil and a blight on American history, using those two excuses as a crutch keeps the black community stuck in the past and prevents it from moving forward in a constructive manner. As John H. McWhorter, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute who also happens to be black, argues, “the ideology of victimhood… rather than what remains of racism itself, is the biggest obstacle to further black progress in today’s America.”

“[W]e do not believe students have a protected right to use a student publication meant to serve and represent the Duke community as a platform to proliferate racist stereotypes and misinformation about an entire group of people – a group of people to which the writer does not even belong,” stated the petition, written by a group calling themselves “Concerned and Conscious Duke Students.”

“We are concerned that if Zhao continues as an editor of the opinion column, he will also continue to abuse his position of power to create an unsafe educational environment for marginalized students,” it states. “This is not a question of being ‘politically correct,’ nor is it a matter of censorship. Rather, this is a call to hold The Chronicle’s staff and the content they produce to a higher standard of journalistic ethics.”