Well, Maybe There Is A Bit Of Hope For Our Young People After All - UPDATED

An ASU student dragooned into a cultural role-playing exercise notes that the Emperor of Diversity Sensitivity is butt-nekked:

Visconti, a 22-year-old political science major from Mesa, called the role-play an “ultra-clear example” of the victim mentality and liberal bias that permeate ASU.

“It crossed the line,” Visconti said. “All it did was reinforce the most disgusting, hateful and ugly stereotypes in our society.”

Visconti said he was required to participate in the role-play for his job as a resident assistant. It was an activity that Visconti, other dorm employees and a Valley religious leader said went too far.

Even an ASU associate professor who specializes in minority relations has raised concerns about the activity.

ASU Residential Life spokeswoman Diana Medina said the role-play was designed to examine the effects of racism, classism and “homophobia” on different cultural and economic groups.

But Visconti said the students who designed the roleplay overlooked their own stereotypes, such as the notion that white men don’t have to work for wealth because society gives them a free ride. Or the idea that Christian churches are filled with bigots, and people who support traditional family values such as heterosexual marriage are hateful and narrow-minded.

“They were basically saying that if you don’t feel the same way, you’re wrong,” Visconti said. “It got to the point that if you weren’t a minority or gay, you were supposed to feel guilty and that everything was given to you in life.”

Good for you, kid.

Ah, me. I remember the days of p.c. reeducation at the Glorious People's Soviet of Middletown. One guy in particular made a specialty of showing up at Wymminz Group meetings and bashing his head against the floor in abject self-abasement over having had the unforgivable gall to have been born male.

Of course, his main objective was to score, but that's a side issue.

UPDATE: I meant to add that IMHO this kind of "sensitivity training" on college campuses, far from encouraging students to behave like civilized adults toward one another, actually promotes campus Balkanization and what Bloom County's Opus once called "offensensitivity."

I'm reminded of a phenomenon I used to witness yearly in a slightly different context. There was a big Psych survey course that a lot of kids took to help satisfy their science credit requirements. One section of this course touched on subliminal advertising. You could always tell when this part of the course was reached because the campus suddenly became full of earnest young things pouring over magazine liquor ads, absolutely convinced that they could make out the writhing forms of nude bodies airbrushed into the shadows of the ice cubes. (Because sex sells, d'ye see?) I always secretly hoped that after the students had completed their reports on the topic the professor would suddenly reveal that the whole thing was really a demonstration of auto-suggestion, that the mind can be trained easily to see exactly what it wants to. IMHO, the whole "sensitivity training" bit can and often does have exactly the same effect.

Of course, whether the people running these programs actually want harmony among the student body, or else would prefer to foment discord, thereby securing their own positions as Sensitivity Police, is another question.