When I was in college, I wrote a lot of bad opinions, including one bemoaning the fact that my college’s new vehicle registration costs would set each student back approximately 47 Taco Bell burritos.
Thankfully, my worst hot takes from college are nowhere near as bad as former congressman Andy Levin’s DEI screeds.
Levin, who may be considering another run for Congress in the near future, likely in the less competitive 11th district instead of the 10th, ardently defended the Democrat Party’s DEI Platform before he was a politician and long before critical race theory went mainstream.
Levin comes from Democratic Congressional stock. Andy took over his father Sander Levin’s spot in Michigan’s 9th Congressional District, and his uncle, Carl Levin, was a U.S. senator while Andy was writing letters to the editor in his college paper.
Those show Levin was a woke hipster at Williams College in the 1980s.
“I am a racist. That is, I was born in America,” Levin confessed in a letter to the student newspaper, the Williams Record. The letter seems to be related to recent demonstrations against apartheid in South Africa.
“When Americans are naked, we hate whole groups of people, largely because we can categorize them,” Levin generalized. “Socialization into a culture is learning to think, act, be in that culture’s categories of understanding.”
To Levin, we’re all the problem, just like those who subscribe to critical race theory argue today.
“We are all socialized into a world which is still structurally racist,” Levin continued. “Underneath our clothes of rhetoric and liberal arts magnanimity our naked bodies hide.”
Levin’s focus on skin color is now entrenched in academia. The dominant position in higher education and even some K-12 ethnic studies courses is that the color of your skin does change your opportunities in life.
It’s not just race, actually, but a combination of factors, such as sex, gender, mental health, income status, religion, ability, and a host of other mutable or immutable characteristics.
“There is no escape from the past which has shaped us, only toil and endless efforts at breaking down ourselves to ourselves and others,” Levin posited. “We must be naked together if we have any hope of being healthy together.”
Apparently, the young Levin really liked nudity metaphors.
The young Levin’s solution to atone for the sins of the past? He demanded Williams College change its hiring practices so “that the administration hire no white teacher so long as there is a qualified black person to be found anywhere.”
I think we should hire the right person for the job no matter their immutable characteristics, but Levin is advocating the opposite. Qualified individuals could be passed over to reach a racial quota.
Levin’s slogans have been updated for Instagram and TikTok—”injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere”—but the ideology that says we can collectively save the world from oppression through making DEI demands remains the same.
It’s sad that Levin and so many others have so internalized a view of themselves and America as racist that they can’t see past the identity politics oppression scale to find the true scope of our grand experiment, where everyone has an opportunity to live however they want.
Levin is clinging to the same trite statement that everything is racist 45 years later. A search of his official congressional X account dredges up the same schlock he offered in the 1980s.
Levin’s self-abasement was political theater then, and it still is today. Hasn’t he gotten a little old for that?
Brendan Clarey is deputy editor of Michigan Enjoyer.
