College Official Ignorantly Claims Pacific Northwest Is Racist

Is it worth it to spend $49,385 a year to send your kid to Connecticut College?   The answer is no, judging from a wacky, hate-filled, and ignorant editorial by an official at Connecticut College.  In it, the College’s radical History Department chair, Catherine McNicol Stock, vilifies residents of the Pacific Northwest.

Enraged at rural people who identify with Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, Professor Stock claims that the Pacific Northwest, which regularly elects female and minority lawmakers, is “populated” by “angry white men,” racists and sexists, and “white-supremacist groups.”

The exact opposite is true.  The Pacific Northwest is very open to advances by minorities and women.  Washington State has elected an Asian-American governor (Gary Locke), and two female governors (including the trailblazer Dixy Lee Ray in 1976), and both of its current Senators are women.  Idaho has elected a Native-American attorney general, Larry Echohawk.  Alaska has elected a female Senator and a female governor (whose husband is part Eskimo).  These states also have elected minority judges, like Washington state appellate judge Jerome Farris, a moderate who was later appointed to the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.  Women comprise 4 of the 9 justices on the Washington Supreme Court, and once comprised a majority.

Cathy Stock is either exceedingly ignorant of history (an irony given her status as a history professor and department chair), a liar, or both.

For Professor Stock, ignorance may be bliss.  If she knew more about the history of the Pacific Northwest, it might pain her even more, since she plainly hates conservative women, a category that includes many of the women who first served as governor or state supreme court justice in the northwest, like Washington Governor Dixy Lee Ray (a supporter of nuclear power and critic of “comparable worth” regulations), and Washington Supreme Court Justices Carolyn Dimmick and Barbara Durham.

Stock’s hatred of conservative women is shared by other feminist academics, like University of Chicago Professor Wendy Doniger, who claims that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is not really a woman.