At Dartmouth, the Word "Fiesta" is "Racist" (But Then Again, What Isn't?)

The racial dementia now infecting academia reached new levels of absurdity this week at Dartmouth College.  A fraternity and a sorority had planned a fund-raiser for cardiac treatments.  The party was named "Phiesta" and was to have a Cinco de Mayo theme.

However, a single Hispanic female objected, saying she was offended by the use of "fiesta" and so the entire event was canceled.  "Fiesta," in Spanish, means "party," and "racism," that over-abused, overly emotive trigger word, is generally defined as the belief that one race is superior, or is understood as mindless hatred of another race based on physical differences such as skin color.  The use of the word "fiesta" and the use of Cinco de Mayo for a party theme, clearly do not in any way convey "racism" as it is generally defined.

Nevertheless, the leader of the fraternity, President Taylor Catchcart of Phi Delt, explained why his organization has a bad case of terminal wimpiness:

“We felt that the possibility of offending even one member of the Dartmouth community was not worth the potential benefits of having the fundraiser,” he said.

Yes, of course -- let those heart patients die, we just can't allow a phony, posing, posturing professional victim to be "offended." I mean, where's our priorities?

Every college student knows he or she can create a ruckus by pretending to be "offended" over anything related to a minority ethnicity, and they will get special attention, deference, apologies and wailing and lamentations from their fellow brainwashed automatons.  The racial hysteria that pervades the college campus has turned the university into a very hostile workplace.

The Daily Caller summarized the situation in a single sentence:

This incident is one more in a long list of episodes that pretty clearly prove that Dartmouth is slowly going insane as an institution.

Carlos Perera, Hispanic-American, Tells Why He Doesn't Like Cinco de Mayo

Carlos presented these thoughts in a comment, but they are so good I decided to make them a full-fledged article in Saber Point. His quote in the blue field below is worth quoting again and again.

*********

Though Hispanic myself--even if not a Mexican-American, rather a Cuban-America, which tends to come with a completely different worldview--I must say the whole Cinco de Mayo thing peeves me somewhat. Some of that irritation has to do with the somewhat ersatz nature of the holiday, which, I am sure you know, is not a big one in Mexico proper, at least outside the town of Puebla, which, my Mexican-from-Mexico acquaintances tell me, does go whole-hog in celebrating it. 

All right, I admit my cavils at the lack of historical perspective are sheer petulance on my part. What does bother me much more is that Cinco de Mayo has increasingly become a celebration of Mexican-racialist irredentism--the whole La Raza-Aztlan thing--instead of the feel-good, healthy-ethnic-pride holiday that I remember Mexican-Americans celebrating in my youth. The change in perspective has not been good for the health of the American body politic; ethnics should, when in the public forum, not displace American traditions and symbols with those of their ancestral homelands. That is not just bad manners, if unchecked it can lead to the eventual balkanization of the society.

Face it: what is most valuable about American culture has been inherited from Anglo-Saxon civilization, going back at least as far as the common law and equity courts of Henry II. The real genius of the American melting pot was to turn all immigrants and their descendants, whatever their ethnic provenance, into civic Anglo-Saxons, with all that implies in terms of respect for the rule of law, the probity of elections, respect for individual rights, etc. Thus, men with last names as diverse and un-Anglo-Saxon as LaGuardia, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Cardozo, Nixon, Dukakis, and, yes, even Schwarzenegger (I know--I was disappointed in him too!) could become important American political and juridical figures, in the Anglo-Saxon civilizational mold.