Ohio’s Oberlin College just paid out more than $36 million for race-baiting defamation of a local bakery.

By Nate Jackson

As with any profession, the world of academia has many wonderful people who consider it their life’s mission to properly education the next generation, teaching them how to think, not what to think. Arguably more than most other professions, however, academia is also full of arrogant leftist elites who think they know better than the rest of us and who are poisoning young people with woke socialist indoctrination. It’s hard not to be pleased when these supposed intellectuals get their just deserts.

The smug race-baiters who run Oberlin College, a particularly far-left institution in Ohio, just paid out more than $36 million to a family-owned bakery opened in 1885 after grossly and utterly unjustly smearing its owners as racist.

It all began in November 2016 when a black male student attempted to use a fake ID to buy wine before just grabbing two bottles and fleeing the store. Two female black students were with him, and when Allyn Gibson, the son of the bakery owner, chased them out of the store, tackling the male, the three attacked Allyn. Or, as the Associated Press puts it, “tried to intervene.”

The three students were arrested and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges. That should have been the end of the story, but Oberlin College administrators made sure it wasn’t.

When students protested outside the bakery, the school’s vice president and dean of students, Meredith Raimondo, distributed flyers claiming the bakery was a “RACIST establishment with a LONG ACCOUNT of RACIAL PROFILING and DISCRIMINATION.” A similar resolution was adopted by the Student Senate and emailed to students as well as posted publicly on campus for a year. The school ended its purchases from the bakery and encouraged student boycotts. The bakery was vandalized.

In the intervening years of legal wrangling, the bakery’s original plaintiff owners have died. David Gibson died in 2019 at age 65, and his father Allyn (the younger Allyn’s grandfather) died at 93 earlier this year. Neither saw the final resolution of false allegations that nearly destroyed their family business.

“It is definitely bittersweet,” said Gibson’s Bakery owner Lorna Gibson. “It took a tremendous toll [on my family]. A lot of stress, a lot of financial toll. It definitely hit us hard.” She pledges to use the money to rebuild the business and hire back employees.

Family attorney Brandon McHugh said: “It’s definitely about right and wrong. And to be quite frank, the three students that shoplifted, they admitted their crimes. It was Oberlin College that could never admit that what they did was wrong.”

Indeed, Oberlin might have paid up, but administrators and students don’t seem properly chastised. After having lost in court earlier this year, the school would only say it was “evaluating” options and that the “issues raised by this case have been challenging.” Then, the AP reports, “In a statement earlier this fall, Oberlin College said it hoped the end of the litigation would begin the healing for the community.”

Healing can only truly begin when race-obsessed leftist elites stop race-baiting and hating and targeting anyone who dares to disagree. It would also help if they would admit how wrong and destructive their behavior is.