Student journalist: Shoplifting at Gibson’s Bakery was part of Oberlin College’s “Culture of Theft”
Posted by William A. Jacobson
“[W]e uncovered a sad truth: That the majority of shoplifting in Oberlin is carried out by students…. [because] students just felt like it” — Puts in context testimony that the college wanted a special procedure for student shoplifters and feared backing the bakery would “trigger” a negative student reaction.
We have covered Oberlin College at least since 2013, when we wrote extensively about The Great Oberlin College Racism Hoax of 2013.
Classes were cancelled in favor of campus-wide forums to address white supremacy and systemic racism after racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic flyers were posted around campus. The campus almost melted down when a student spotted someone walking at night in a Ku Klux Klan robe. It turned out not to be the Klan, but likely a student walking at night wrapped in a blanket for warmth.
Even the flyers turned out not to be what they seemed – it turned out they were placed around campus by a white liberal student who sought to start a conversation on campus. The entire 2013 racial meltdown was the result of a hoax, and those details were known by the college administration. But rather than address that reality, the administration used the controversy to agree to student demands for increased social justice indoctrination, including during freshman orientation.
The campus atmosphere turned Oberlin College “social justice” activism into self-parody. The black student union protested that the Africana House dining hall did not regularly serve fried chicken (seriously). Other students protested dining hall “cultural appropriation” of Asian food, noting as to the dining-hall version of General Tso’s Chicken, “[i]nstead of deep-fried chicken with ginger-garlic soy sauce, the chicken was steamed with a substitute sauce.” Once again, the administration sought to placate the activists, with the Director of Dining Services confessing that “we recently fell short in the execution of several dishes in a manner that was culturally insensitive.”
In December 2014, students led by the black student union issued a 14-point set of demands seeking to “deconstruct imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy” and to divest from Israel. The demands including hiring and promotion of faculty based on race. The inclusion of divesting from Israel was no happenstance, Oberlin had a particularly toxic form of “intersectional” activism, in which Israel was so relentlessly demonized as the center of intersecting systems of oppression that a coalition of alumni signed a statement demanding administration action. Though the administration did not heed the demands for (illegal) hiring and promotion based on race, little action was taken to change the campus climate.
So when the Gibson’s Bakery fiasco happened, it was not entirely surprising. What was surprising were some of the details that came out during the case that cast an even darker shadow on activism at Oberlin College.
There was something we covered during the trial, but which just jumped out at me as I was preparing a long Twitter thread excerpting our trial coverage:
Among our coverage was Daniel McGraw’s reporting on the Oberlin Police Department historical records on shoplifting arrests at Gibson’s Bakery. Those statistics shows that there was no disproportionate arrest of blacks: