Students: Fight Racsim! Decline Your Rhodes Scholarships!

[Hoppy]

Winners of the Rhodes Scholarships should immediately decline. The scholarships were earned off the backs of black laborers. The racist apartheid South African government was founded with the support of the racist, Cecil Rhodes.

[Xipe Totec]

1. If Cecil Rhodes was the last racist left standing, this would be a sound policy.

But when an entire nation of 330 million people was raised on the backs of slave labor, how can one follow a life path purely devoid of the fruits of slave labor?

[KamaAina]

2. Zimbabwe's colonial name, Rhodesia, hearkens back to Rhodes as well.

And I see what you did there.

[KamaAina]

3. Racsim sucks!

I heard them open for Motley Crue once.

[hifiguy]

4. Anyone who would decline a Rhodes

should have their head examined.

[lpbk2713]

5. Is this supposed to be a veiled jab at Bill Clinton, Susan Rice and Rachel Maddow et al?

Knock yourself out.

[ryan_cats]

14. Kris Kritstofferson, too.

[sharp_stick]

6. Yeah and stop eating

dutch food, that'll show em'. Nobody in their right mind would ever turn down a Rhodes Scholarship.

[mwrguy]

7. Changing the name would be a good idea

[1939]

9. Except that they were funded by him NT

[mwrguy]

10. So?

He's long dead and rotting in hell.

[1939]

18. So

The name is tied to the money. If you want Patrice Lumumba scholarships, you have to come up with Patrice Lumumba money. That is Rhodes money paying for those scholarships.

[NightWatcher]

8. Anyone dumb enough to refuse one, is too dumb to qualify for one anywhoo.

[FLPanhandle]

25. +1 True. nt

[DavidDvorkin]

11. Apartheid came into being many decades after Rhodes died

He was a racist in the same way that most Europeans of his time were. He was above all a supporter of the British Empire, however, and tried to destroy the Boer republics of which the Apartheid government was the direct descendant.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

13. The speed with which apartheid imploded tends to be overlooked too

I'm not sure why that is. As monumental state-level failures go, it was a pretty big one. Depending on your preferred bookends it only lasted 40-50 years and was in a state of collapse from the mid-70's onward.

[DavidDvorkin]

16. My belief/strong hunch

is that the collapse was precipitated, or at least greatly hastened, by the introduction of television. The Cosby show was the most popular show on South African TV, meaning that a lot of whites saw an upper-middle-class black professional family dealing with situations common to upper-middle-class professional families. TV undermined the stereotypes necessary to maintaining the system.

[Heeeeers Johnny]

12. Doesn't take a Rhodes scholar...

to see what you did there.

[cwydro]

15. I wondered when someone would go there.

Anyone who gets a Rhodes scholarship is a lucky (and bright) person.

I believe Bill Clinton was a Rhodes scholar, am I right?

[cherokeeprogressive]

17. Won the scholarship, studied at Oxford, failed to earn a degree. n/t

[cwydro]

20. I didn't know he never earned a degree!

[cherokeeprogressive]

21. Not from Oxford anyway.

I guess simply earning the scholarship qualifies a person to be addressed as a Rhodes Scholar.

[cwydro]

22. Guess so.

I think I'd brag about it lol!

[Adrahil]

19. That's like refusing to use all the libraries Carnegie built.

I say, Bah! Use them! And then work. Against what that old racist fuck believed.

[Cyrano]

23. Bobby Jindal is a Rhodes Scholar, which

Last edited Tue Nov 24, 2015, 01:16 PM - Edit history (1)

may prove that lack of a conscience isn't a disqualifying trait.

[Seeking Serenity]

24. Don't forget to reject a Fulbright scholarship, too.

Such scholarships being named for the late Sen. J. William Fulbright, a signer of the Southern Manifesto.

[RandySF]

26. Yeah, that's not going to happen.

I don't think anyone is going to ruin their futures over a name.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

27. I got a Byrd Scholarship.

I believe he was in the KKK at one point.

[Todays_Illusion]

28. That is as stupid as the Woodrow Wilson protests, ps Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar

[mahatmakanejeeves]

29. Is this sarcasm?

Last edited Tue Nov 24, 2015, 04:08 PM - Edit history (4)

Old title of post: Fight. Urge. To. Post. To. Stupid. Threads.

Trollish. Dimwittedness. Too. Powerful. To. Resist. Must. Respond.

[font color="red"]ETA, at 3:00 p.m.: Now there's a sig line, "If you're pissed off at this. Stop and think. It may be scarcasm. If you're not sure, ask me."

This is sarcasm, right?[/font]

It's getting harder at DU to tell. Anyway, here's one of this year's Rhodes Scholars:

Ericka M. Wheeler Named First Black Female Rhodes Scholar from Mississippi



Millsaps College senior Ericka M. Wheeler

(Photo/Courtesy Millsaps College via AP article)

by: Jeff Amy Associated Press
Nov 22, 2015

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Millsaps College senior Ericka M. Wheeler is a double major in English and history who has plans to become a physician after watching her grandfather suffer from Alzheimer’s disease. Her journeys so far have taken her from Mississippi to Cambodia and Cuba and her next stop will be England, as a Rhodes Scholar. Millsaps announced Saturday that Wheeler, who is the first African-American woman from Mississippi to claim the prestigious honor, has been chosen as one of 32 U.S. men and women who will enter Oxford University next fall for postgraduate study.
....

Wheeler, who wrote a thesis tracing how police brutality and race have been treated in fiction since the 1930s, attended Greenwood High School for two years, followed by her junior and senior year at the Mississippi School of Math and Science in Columbus.

From American Rhodes Scholarships Winners 2016:

Profiles of Winners

DISTRICT 7

Mississippi

Ericka M. Wheeler, Carrollton, is a senior at Millsaps College, where she is a pre-med student with majors in History and English. Her honors thesis “Crime, Race and Police Brutality through Historical Fiction” navigates complicated historical and autobiographical issues. Ericka is President of Millsaps College Intercultural Student Organization and Co-President of Millsaps College Gospel Choir. She is an Alzheimer’s disease social activist who has sought to assist Alzheimer’s patients capture their memories in short-story booklets. Raised in the heart of the rural Mississippi Delta, Ericka has a passion for social justice borne in a desire to return from her studies to pursue issues of race and health in Mississippi. At Oxford, she will pursue an M.Phil. in Medical Anthropology.

P.S. Your title, "Students: Fight Racsim! Decline Your Rhodes Scholarships!"?

The word you're looking for is "racism," not "racsim." {Autocorrect is going berserk.}

Possible example of Poe's Law?

[Hoppy]

31. Bingo ! Yes, sarcasm.

Last edited Wed Nov 25, 2015, 09:07 AM - Edit history (1)

Point being, college students are demonstrating to remove names from buildings of people deemed to be racist. That doesn't cost anything but time. Also, it gives them something to do.

While most are not going to even bother to apply for a Rhodes since they wouldn't qualify, would those that do qualify and feel the same about racist benefactors, be willing to support their beliefs by giving up a reward of substantial monetary benefit?

[mahatmakanejeeves]

33. Thanks. It has reached the point that I can't tell real demands and sarcasm apart.

I would not be the least bit surprised to read that students somewhere really had made that demand.

[Hoppy]

34. Putting the sarcasm emit in, takes the fun from it.

[JonathanRackham]

30. Take the scholarship & graduate with honors.

Then do something good for the world.

[Yorktown]

32. Let's also reject Euclidian Maths and the Pythagoras theorem

Both Euclides and Pythagoras lived in Ancient Greece which had multiracial slave labor.

In defense of the caucasian, Mediterranean and African slaves of Ancient Greece,
let's rename the Pythagoras theorem and Euclidian Mathematics.

Next: Plato and Voltaire were homophobes.