Remember Melissa Click, the fiery redhead with an even fierier temper who was captured on video physically assaulting a student reporter during a campus Black Lives Matter rally? If you do, you may also recall that Click was charged with third-degree assault and later dismissed by the university.
Now she is back, not as a teacher but as the subject of an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education. In the piece, she offers her theory of why she was fired. “This is all about racial politics,” she told the article’s author, Robin Wilson. “I’m a white lady. I’m an easy target.”
It’s an interesting take coming from a woman whose entire claim to fame is her well-publicized effort to suppress criticism of a campus protest highlighting the evil of white privilege. Click herself has enlarged upon this problem in her role as an academician. Her doctoral dissertation — “The Commodification of Femininity, Affluence, and Whiteness in the Martha Stewart Phenomenon” — is critical of the preeminent role whiteness continues to play in present-day America:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Though [patriotic holidays] offer the chance to display America’s rich multicultural heritage, Stewart’s patriotic suggestions for celebrating American holidays regularly promise diversity but frequently exclude non-white people and traditions….
[…]
The relative absence of non-white faces in Stewart’s archive of American traditions undoubtedly privileges whiteness by representing white identities through a variety of characteristics and attributes, while narrowly representing non-white identities through stereotyping, if they are represented at all.
How rich that a woman who scorns America’s ongoing pernicious whiteness sees no problem with playing the “white” card (“I’m a white lady. I’m an easy target”) when convenient.
