Kansas community college president compares Black athlete to Hitler
When is a Black student-athlete like Hitler? The answer is never. Unless you are Deborah Fox, the President of the Highland Community College in Highland, Kansas. She made the comparison after a Black basketball player was vocal in his criticism of the school‘s sports programs. He believed they were racist. And he is likely correct, as it isn’t the first time the school has had complaints about its treatment of minority athletes.
In 2020, B.J. Smith, the women’s basketball head coach at the college, filed a complaint with the NAACP alleging racial discrimination when Athletic Director, Bryan Dorrel, told him to recruit players the rural community in northeastern Kansas “could relate to.” Highland is in Doniphan County - which is 95% white and 2% Black. The women’s basketball team is majority African-American. So it is patently clear what Dorrel meant.
A former football player also filed a complaint, accusing school officials of banning him from campus and rescinding a scholarship because he wore dreadlocks. And now the Kansas ACLU and the NAACP are investigating. But even though the school has been flagged for racism, its President thought nothing of throwing fuel on the fire.
In an October meeting in which a former assistant football coach and players had gathered to discuss what they saw as the harassment of Black student-athletes, Fox singled out one of the more vocal players as being too negative. And who, in her mind, wielding too much influence with other Black players on the team. She was recorded saying,
“You know leadership. There’s certain people that emerge as leaders, good or bad. Even though we don’t like it, Hitler was a great leader. He, somehow, even for evil, moved and were able to do these things. It’s terrifying. But that’s what can happen when leadership isn’t acknowledged and goes untapped or undirected.”
Leaving aside the imbecility of her lunatic allusion, it takes a thoughtless racist to believe Hitler was a great leader. Great leaders achieve greatness for themselves and the people they lead. Hitler was a charismatic psychopath who played pied-piper to a German population primed by economic deprivation, and a disastrous conclusion to World War I, to follow someone who promised to make Germany great again.
But look at the results. Germany, after 13 years of Hitlerian leadership, was a smoking pile of rubble, carved up and divided, home to a starving population, and responsible for the deaths of millions. Leaving aside his monstrous immorality, Hitler will go down as one of the worst leaders in human history.
If you want to identify an evil but successful leader, it would be better to point to Stalin. He was also a psychopath responsible for the death of millions. And it is valid to say that no one who ruled a terrorized population could ever be considered a successful leader. But he did win a world war and built a backward, agrarian nation into a nuclear-armed, industrial superpower. Although not one which offered a wide range of quality consumer goods.
Comparing Americans who are trying to prevent unnecessary deaths - or who are just speaking up for themselves — to messianic sociopaths is just dumb. But that doesn’t stop conservatives and other pestilent Americans from doing it . Godwin’s law states, “As an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or Nazis approaches one.” Fox commentators have compared Dr. Fauci to Joseph Mengele. Republican politicians have compared vaccine mandates to Nazi anti-Semitic pogroms. And science-deniers makingAnne Frank allusions have been condemned by Yad Vashem, the ADL, and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Deborah Fox has achieved something she had no intention of doing. She made Highland Community College an allegory of red state America. A racist institution, led by a hyperbolic and bigoted moron, which abuses its underpaid (unpaid) labor force.