“We commented last month on Dartmouth College's decision to bring in Harry Belafonte as the keynote speaker for Martin Luther King's birthday celebration. Here's a report from the daily student newspaper on what the old calypso singer had to say at Dartmouth. Here's an editorial from the same paper criticizing the selection of Belanfonte.
The editorial homes in on the primary objection to Belafonte. It's not that he's a left-wing extremist, and it's not that he's a has-been entertainer with no basis for claiming experise on the subjects he opines about. It's that he doesn't make arguments, but relies instead on invective and racist attacks on people he disagrees with (see below). This approach dishonors Dr. King who kept hate-filled utterances out of his rhetoric at a time when they arguably would have been justified. Moreover, as Joe Malchow has noted, Belafonte's approach is inconsistent with the (apparently one-directional) plea by Dartmouth's president for civil discourse.”
Read the rest.
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2 comments:
The speech was certainly no disgrace. I'm not a big fan of some of Belafonte's controversies - the Colin Powell quote, of course, or his admitted anti-white past (which he says was wrong of him) - but the Dartmouth speech was amazing. Like I say, I'm no personal fan of Belafonte's, but it was the greatest speech I ever heard. I wrote about it on my own blog at http://waywardepiscopalian.blogspot.com/2007/01/harry-belafonte.html.
Nathan,
Thanks for your comment. Keep 'em coming!
Best wishes for the success of your blog.
Don
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