Keith John Sampson, who works as a university janitor to pay his way through school, tells the tale of his Racial Harassment Nightmare:
In November, I was found guilty of “racial harassment” for reading a public-library book on a university campus.The book was Todd Tucker’s Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan; I was reading it on break from my campus job as a janitor. The same book is in the university library.
Tucker recounts events of 1924, when the loathsome Klan was a dominant force in Indiana — until it went to South Bend to taunt the Irish Catholic students at the University of Notre Dame.
When the KKK tried to rally, the students confronted them. They stole Klan robes and destroyed their crosses, driving the KKK out of town in a downpour.
I read the historic encounter and imagined myself with these brave Irish Catholics, as they street-fought the Klan. (I’m part-Irish, and was raised Catholic.)
But that didn’t stop the Affirmative Action Office of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis from branding me as a detestable Klansman.
They didn’t want to hear the truth. The office ruled that my “repeatedly reading the book . . . constitutes racial harassment in that you demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your co-workers.”
A friend reacted to the finding with, “That’s impossible!” He’s right. You can’t commit racial harassment by reading an anti-Klan history.
It’s hard to imagine this Stalinist level of Thought Policing as anything other than parody.