Asian/Pacific Islander Awareness Month is here! Now, I grew up in a Red State, so in my quaint, colloquial and Euro-normative approach to chronology, I am wont to think of the month following Febru… I mean, Black History Month as “March,” but according to the castration-blue banners strung from the lampposts all around campus, that parochial, oppressive and insensitive nomenclature has been replaced, and all of us are exhorted to celebrate diversity and be aware of Asian and Pacific Islanders! I wanted to know what aspect of Asian and Pacific Islander culture I was to be more aware of; whether to focus on Kuru Disease, laughing sickness – caused by the ingestion of human cerebral tissue – among the cannibals of Papua New Guinea, the willing crucifixion devotionals performed in the Philippines by Catholics, or perhaps of the rigorous and hierarchical social structure of feudal Japan. In my curiosity, and earnest interest in having my level of awareness raised, I thumbed through as much of the Intercultural Center’s website as I could muster – before the stench of pickled brain cells became too much to bear – and I couldn’t find any direction or justification for why I should be celebrating Asian/Pacific Islander Awareness, as opposed to say, the annual celebration of Atlantic Islander Un-Awareness I enjoy every 17th of March. This paucity of rationale suggests to me that the Intercultural Center, for all their self-congratulatory and unctuous language, can’t really tell me why I should abandon St. Patrick’s Day in favor of Sweet Potato Day or Brain Eating Day.

If the ICC isn’t going to give us any good reasons to turn our backs on March, aside from their typical lip-service chants of “diversity,” I am willing to try and divine some. The American left, for all its anti-Western, anti-social and anti-intellectual sound and fury, is not the first cadre of self-important charlatans who have sought to rid society of its traditions and foundations, or even the first to politicize time-keeping. The Jacobins, the radical left of the French Revolution, mandated similar changes to the calendar under the pretense that the old calendar was a symbol of aristocratic oppression. The months of the year were given naturalistic titles: Thermidor, Fructidor, Germinal… and those unlucky souls caught using the aristocratic nomenclature were revealed as reactionaries and imprisoned, even executed. While our left has traded the ear for the aesthetic for surreptitious conniving, the goal is the same: replace the old bourgeois institution, in this case the calendar, with something that reflects the preferences and fetishes of the liberal establishment, regardless of whether or not the process of timekeeping is improved or diminished. Napoleon eventually reinstated the Gregorian calendar, but those ground under the wheels of Jacobin frivolity were not so easily restored.

It occurs to me that there will never be a European/Atlantic Islander Awareness Month. That doesn’t fit into the vision down at the ICC, or anywhere within the leftist mindset. To the left, we’re all card-carrying members of the International Conspiracy of Capitalist Cracker Patriarchy until they free our minds of prejudice and stereotype. Singling out groups for social and psychological largess is another part of this process, but I’ve yet to discern how employing base racism serves to end racism. Nonetheless, this is why a Black Student Union, Hispanic-only fraternities and sororities, and a Women’s Resource Center are accepted and encouraged, while the mere idea of a White Student Union is sinister and racist, Russian or Irish-only fraternities are discriminatory (and imaginary), and a Men’s Resource Center is absurd. In the divide-and-conquer mien of identity politics, only ethnic Westerners can be oppressors. Encouraging the alienation, insulation and racism of minority groups in Western societies is acceptable because that society is racist, anyways. Here’s something new, SSU. Forget about celebrating the accidental geographic ancestry of whatever group needs special attention this month, and go celebrate Tuesday and drink with your friends. I guarantee there’s more actual diversity among your peers than in the entire Intercultural Center.