To the Editor:
Fans of Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone” may remember its classic episode “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” in which malevolent creatures from outer space turn the inhabitants of a neighborhood against each other to violent, self-defeating ends.

Neighbor vs. neighbor, friend vs. friend, even family members vs. family members — they attack each other verbally and physically while the aliens enjoy the spectacle of resistance to their invasion plans crumbling: The adage “Divide and conquer” in a contemporary venue.

Last week former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan announced that he is increasingly ashamed to be a white male. A book portraying all white people as essentially guilt-ridden and racist called “White Fragility” became a New York Times best-seller for a while. 

Its author — a woman called Robin D’Angelo — is described on her website as being a professor of “critical discourse and whiteness studies.” (And l will bet most of the country does not know you can get a Ph.D. in that corner of academia!)

To sum up her theses: (a) Black people cannot be racist no matter what they say or do, and (b) the more white people insist that they are not racist, the more their stance proves that they are. (Something similar happened in Salem, Massachusetts way long ago: “You are a witch and your denials do nothing but prove you are. To the gallows with you!”)

And to this end we have seen the censors come with torches and pitch-forks: first for “Huckleberry Finn” and “To Kill a Mockingbird”; currently for Dr. Seuss and Speedy Gonzales. How long before they turn their fury on reruns of  “The Big Bang Theory,” “All in the Family,”  “The Jeffersons,” and “I Love Lucy”?

This is straightforward, one-foot-in-the-asylum lunacy.

To their divisive ends, the “woke” crowd has invented a couple of mortal sins called “cultural appropriation” and “microaggressions.”

An example of “cultural appropriation” would be the following: If a woman visits the Southwest and buys a piece of beautiful Navajo silver jewelry — because she is not Navajo, she had better not wear that in public.

Or if a family visits Mexico and purchases a couple of sombreros that are for sale there just about everywhere for their kids — they are indulging in ethnic stereotypes.

A  couple of years back,  a group of Hispanic students in a California college were outraged because the cafeteria served tacos one evening — and the chefs were not Hispanic!

Clearly — if you do not see this as the equivalent of a Ku Klux Klan cross-burning, you are deeply in need of one of Robin D’Angelo’s consciousness-raising sessions. (She gets $7,000 a pop for these sessions, by the way.)

Then there are the “microaggressions.” This term means that if you are white-— anything you say or do almost certainly is racist. 

Examples:

A white college professor of mathematics congratulates a minority student on getting an “A” in the class. Microaggression! What she really means is, ‘I can’t believe someone of your race could do this well. You must have cheated but I can’t prove it.”

Or — the same professor tells a minority student, “Well, you got a B-minus but with a bit more work it could have been a B-plus or an A.”  Microaggression! What she really means is: “Your performance confirms what I have always believed. You people are essentially lazy.”

Or — the same professor has to gently tell the student of a failure in the class. Microaggression!What the professor really means is: “A person of your ethnicity just won’t play white people’s games, will you?”

We are moving toward a dangerous tipping point in this country.

Imagine an eerie scenario in which a researcher uncovers a series of films made in Germany in the mid-1930s in which various Jewish doctors, scholars, and business people are heard denouncing their fellow Jews as “privileged” and declaring that they all must support this Hitler fellow who intends to make all Germans equal.

One would recoil in horror at their blindness to what eventually came to pass. And yet today we see countless examples of white college professors, Hollywood stars, politicians, CEOs, and college students demanding an end to “white supremacy” and denouncing their own “privilege.”

Funny — but I have yet to read of one of these self-flagellating prima-donnas giving up any of their “privilege” — particularly when it comes to executive salaries, or teaching positions, or scholarships to fancy institutions of higher learning.

I guess George Orwell put it best: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” And those space aliens smile as they watch the inhabitants of Maple Street tear into each other’s throats.

Michael Nardacci

Albany