A professor is under fire by Duke University officials after he responded to a newspaper editorial about racism dooming Baltimore with an opinion piece of his own, placing the blame more at the feet of blacks and saying many didn't want to assimilate – and as proof, just look at their "strange" names.
Professor Jerry Hough rebutted the New York Times' editorial, "How Racism Doomed Baltimore," with a rebuke that opened: "This editorial is what is wrong."
From there, he spoke of the Democratic-fueled "alliance of Westchester and Harlem, of Montgomery County and intercity Baltimore," and an "asset stimulus policy" that grows market revenues but leaves blacks with a real "decline in wages," once inflation is factored.
He then referred to Baltimore's Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake as "utterly incompetent" and faulted her for botching the city response to the violent protests that plagued the streets in the wake of Freddie Gray's death.
"Her resignation would be demanded if she were white," Hough wrote. And in return for the city's response to the protests and police response? He said: "The blacks get awful editorials like that that tell them to feel sorry for themselves."
Hough then pointed to Asian-Americans in 1965 and the discrimination they faced.
"So where are the editorials that say racism doomed the Asian-Americans? They didn't feel sorry for themselves, but worked doubly hard," he wrote. "I am a professor at Duke University. Every Asian student has a very simple old American first name that symbolizes their desire for integration. Virtually every black has a strange new name that symbolizes their lack of desire for integration."
He went on: "The amount of Asian-white dating is enormous and so surely will be the intermarriage. Black-white dating is almost non-existent because of the ostracism by blacks of anyone who dates a white."
Duke vice president for Public Affairs and Government Affairs Michael Schoenfeld said in a statement: "The comments were noxious, offensive, and have no place in civil discourse. Duke University has a deeply held commitment to inclusiveness grounded in respect for all and we encourage our community to speak out when they feel that those ideals are challenged or undermined, as they were in this case."
Hough responded to the criticism by decrying the atmosphere of political correctness in higher education.
"I am strongly against this obsession with 'sensitivity,'" he said, ABC News reported. "The more we have emphasized sensitivity in recent years, the worse race relations have become."
Hough, who's taught for four decades, told the North Carolina newspaper, the News & Observer, he had already been placed on leave at the time he penned his op-ed and that he wasn't planning on teaching past 2016.