Yale School of Medicine
Academia gone mad.
No, seriously, this is
It's bonkers, and highly disturbing … yet hardly shocking coming from an institution of higher learning.
The prestigious Yale School of Medicine is in critical condition today following pushback over the comments of visiting speaker Dr. Aruna Khilanani, a New York psychiatrist, who said during an April 6 online lecture she has fantasies about killing white people with a handgun.
A New York Times piece, published June 6, reported Dr. Aruna Khilanani told listeners she has a fantasy in which she kills white people in a way that calls to mind a mass shooting.
“I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a f***ing favor,” Khilanani said.
The Times’ story, which seemed to tiptoe around the bizarre and highly graphic comments, reported that Yale, after taking a month to review the comments, limited access to Khilanani’s speech. Additionally, the institution continued its backpedal by issuing a statement decrying the comments as “antithetical to the values of the school.”
The story reported Khilanani’s talk, titled “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” featured her PTSD-fueled violent fantasy which she later said was used as a tool provoke real engagement.
Khilanani said her anger at being a victim of racism － and frustration with white people who deny their racist attacks － ignited her violent fantasies.
“Too much of the discourse on race is a dry, bland regurgitation of new vocabulary words with no work in the unconscious,” she said. “And, if you want to hit the unconscious, you will have to feel real negative feelings.”
Then this …
“My speaking metaphorically about my own anger was a method for people to reflect on negative feelings,” she told the Times. “To normalize negative feelings. Because if you don’t, it will turn into a violent action.”
Look, nobody here expected the Times would pick a fight with far-Left wokeism and Khilanani’s extremist, violent language; for that matter, it would’ve been somewhat shocking if it’d played the story down the middle.
But the Times piece didn’t even use the “money quote” in its story until paragraph No. 8. In terms of honest, pragmatic and forthright journalism, that’s bonkers.
Think about it. A guest lecturer at an Ivy League university speaks graphically about “unloading a revolver” into the heads of white people, and the Times’ story doesn’t even mention it until the eighth 'graph?
That’s specious, irresponsible journalism, but it’s not like anyone at the Times is second guessing it. Although introspection itself is a virtuous trait, it’s far easier for today’s media elite to signal virtue than actually earn it.
The following is a excerpt from the Times piece, which appears ahead of the quote about firing a handgun into the heads of white people:
“This is the cost of talking to white people at all — the cost of your own life, as they suck you dry,” Dr. Khilanani said in the lecture, which drew widespread attention after Bari Weiss, a former writer and editor for the opinion department of The New York Times, posted an audio recording of it on Substack on Friday. “There are no good apples out there. White people make my blood boil.”
Somewhere Jim Crow-era segregationists are laughing to themselves and saying, “Damn, son! That’s some good ol’ hate right there!”
The rejoinder is predictable: A white person’s views on race are meaningless, and therefor inconsequential, so shut-up and accept your fate. This doesn’t concern you.
That rejoinder also smacks of Nazism … the real kind, not the airy nothingness confused white elites say when someone disagrees with them and they don’t know what to say next.
First, even if we accept the notion that white people are innately privileged and that "the system" is racist (not an invalid notion, by the way), Khilanani remains intellectually vapid, and Yale is, at best, guilty of tacitly endorsing violence against people based on the color of their skin.
Khilanani fails to add anything socially significant to the issue of race, and in doing so she reveals herself to be little more than a hot-take guru who spouts puerile vomit — again, like those Jim Crow segregationists — as though it actually means something.
Secondly, assuming the point of gaining a higher education is to enlighten the mind and foster a person's ability to think for his or herself, this sort of fear-based aggressive language in no way promotes open-mindedness and critical thinking. Instead, it promotes division, separation and mistrust ahead of inclusion, unity and human connection.
In truth, it promotes close-mindedness, exactly like those damn Jim Crow segregationists we love to hate.
One would think an Ivy League institution like Yale would vet its invited speakers and know ahead of time that even a marginally talented doctor of psychiatry would understand the critical, life-affirming importance of connection in human development. Now there’s a lesson worthy of higher education, and vastly more real-world usable than “I want to
Finally, it boggles the mind to think such a prestigious institution would endorse a speaker who glorifies gun violence at a time when that very thing is considered by most academics (not to mention regular old "uneducated" folks) to be a massive threat to the country.
But then again, that’s academia gone mad; and because it’s as gutless as it is clueless, the New York Times can’t get it right.
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