Hurt speech

[OldDog]

Originally Posted by GenuineRisk

Here is what "free speech" has been on these college campuses:

A swastika painted out of feces on a dorm wall (Mizou)
Swastikas drawn in chalk on campus (Yale)
Nooses left hanging on trees (Duke and U. of Mississippi)
Greek houses hosting "blackface parties" (UCLA)
Student body president called "An Indian piece of sh*t" (U. of SoCal)

When and by whom were the Mizzou poo swastika, the Yale swastikas, the Duke noose and others defended as constitutionally protected free speech?

Originally Posted by GenuineRisk

Going back to what she had to say, again, her rage is not specifically about the conversation with the campus official; it's a cumulation and he was what triggered it into shouting. Look at it as a rage fest 20 years in the making (guessing at her age).

There's free speech, and there's safety. And calling out and swiftly working to condemn racially and sexually aggressive speech, especially on a PRIVATE college campus, is responsible behavior by an administration. It's protecting your students. The kids (or more likely, their parents) pay a lot of money to go these places; they have a need to feel safe on them.

Much as I may try to empathize with her, she is from a well to do family and community in CT and she is attending YALE. I am wondering what rage issues/triggers she has endured in her 20 something years. Her outburst much more resembles my neighbor’s horribly spoiled 13YO daughter than a promising 20 something attending one of the most prestigious institutions of learning in the world. I can’t help wondering if shielding college students from anything “offensive” does them any favors in preparation for the real world. The ladies at my local Shell station have a more well-adjusted outlook than does this young woman (and they use more refined language.)

Now we’re to the point that disagreeing is offensive, "an example of gender based micro aggression," and met with demands for firings/resignations. I watched how Mizzou students, and some faculty, treated those with whom they disagreed. I read how protesters at a Yale free speech forum, as well as the Yale student above, treated those with whom they disagree. There was nothing “micro” about their aggression. It was more like proto-fascism.

[GenuineRisk]

Originally Posted by OldDog

When and by whom were the Mizzou poo swastika, the Yale swastikas, the Duke noose and others defended as constitutionally protected free speech?

Much as I may try to empathize with her, she is from a well to do family and community in CT and she is attending YALE. I am wondering what rage issues/triggers she has endured in her 20 something years. Her outburst much more resembles my neighbor’s horribly spoiled 13YO daughter than a promising 20 something attending one of the most prestigious institutions of learning in the world. I can’t help wondering if shielding college students from anything “offensive” does them any favors in preparation for the real world. The ladies at my local Shell station have a more well-adjusted outlook than does this young woman (and they use more refined language.)

Now we’re to the point that disagreeing is offensive, "an example of gender based micro aggression," and met with demands for firings/resignations. I watched how Mizzou students, and some faculty, treated those with whom they disagreed. I read how protesters at a Yale free speech forum, as well as the Yale student above, treated those with whom they disagree. There was nothing “micro” about their aggression. It was more like proto-fascism.

Hey, OldDog! Apologies for not replying sooner!

The things I cited can all be defended as constitutionally protected free speech.

I was giving you examples of how what the students are mad about is NOT an email about Halloween costumes; it goes much, much deeper than that. Their peers, their fellow students, are painting swastikas in feces, and hanging nooses, and donning blackface at parties. And it's not like this behavior is new to them once they get to college. The NYDaily News ran an article this week about a 14-year-old honor student and athlete at school in Virginia writing a letter about the racism and harassment he faces from his peers:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nati...icle-1.2432355

Honor student and football player. Fourteen years old. This is his letter:
"To Whom It May Concern:

Yesterday on the football bus coming from our football game a kid ... started saying racist things to me. He then started saying he does not like blacks and he told me 200 years ago my ancestors hung from a tree and after he said that I should I hang from a tree. That made me super mad, so in the locker room I told him not to call me n----r or that I should be hung on a tree. The coaches took me away from the kid because I was really mad and they think I was going to fight him but I want someone to do something about it because I’m tired of boys messing with me because of my skin. I’m at my boiling point with this. Please do something about this because when I bring it to the office/principle you do nothing about it and I’m tired of the racism."

And as the article makes clear, it's far from this one encounter.

The student in the video may well be from a financially secure family and, as you pointed out, she's going to Yale. That said, as many of the students protesting on campus have pointed out, it's Yale. It's supposed to be a safe space; they're paying for this. And if this stuff happens on the privileged grounds of Yale, what does that mean about what's happening in the rest of the nation?

Dr. Sue mentioned that, as an Asian American, he has, hundreds of times, been asked, "Where are you from? No, but where are you from? But where?" (Because, apparently, "Portland, Oregon," which is where he was born, is not an acceptable answer). "Oh, Dr. Sue, you speak English so well!" (Well, duh, it's his first language. May be his only language, for all I know). This is a guy with a Ph.D, who I'm sure is quite financially comfortable, getting this stuff from well-meaning individuals who probably really don't think they're being offensive, but what comments like this say is, "You're an other; you're different."

If you haven't clicked the link about visual micro aggressions I posted in my first reply to this thread, I really really recommend it. It's a quick scroll through of young men and women of color holding up cards with the kinds of things they experience every day. Heck, I'll repost it here because I think it's really important.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/hnigatu/raci...sis#.ne5YdwNEa

[Danzig]

i blame vitamin d for all the troubles of this world.
well, almost all. i blame religion for the rest.

those are crazy, gr. astonishing what stupid people will say.

[Rudeboyelvis]

[Danzig]

people who criticize racism are crybabies?
amazing.

[Rudeboyelvis]

Originally Posted by Danzig

people who criticize racism are crybabies?
amazing.

Yeah, that's it.....wow

Crybullies upset that Paris is getting more attention than them:

http://dailycaller.com/2015/11/13/li...-not-missouri/

[Danzig]

i think lebanon had a legit gripe, virtually no coverage of their attacks from isis.
we all know some stuff gets more attention than others...but i'll be damned if i would ever call someone speaking up for basic civil rights and basic human dignity crybabies.
some of us take for granted what others still have to fight for.

[OldDog]

Originally Posted by Danzig

i blame vitamin d for all the troubles of this world.
well, almost all. i blame religion for the rest.

those are crazy, gr. astonishing what stupid people will say.

Wow. How is condemning all religious for the troubles of the world less offensive than blaming all blacks, or all homosexuals, or all (insert subdivision of humanity here)?

Are you unaware of all the good things done in the world in the name of religions?

[OldDog]

Originally Posted by GenuineRisk

Hey, OldDog! Apologies for not replying sooner!

The things I cited can all be defended as constitutionally protected free speech.

I was giving you examples of how what the students are mad about is NOT an email about Halloween costumes; it goes much, much deeper than that. Their peers, their fellow students, are painting swastikas in feces, and hanging nooses, and donning blackface at parties. And it's not like this behavior is new to them once they get to college. The NYDaily News ran an article this week about a 14-year-old honor student and athlete at school in Virginia writing a letter about the racism and harassment he faces from his peers:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nati...icle-1.2432355

You never need apologize for not answering me sooner. I am at best a part-timer here and often don't visit for days at a time.

Those things might be defended by someone somewhere as free speech, but I've not seen that defense applied legally. And when prosecuted as trespass or vandalism I don't recall free speech being evoked as a defense.

Putting Shaun King aside, that's very ugly. Don't all states have rules against bullying and harassment? The school officials should be called out if it's true and they aren't doing anything about it.

Originally Posted by GenuineRisk

The student in the video may well be from a financially secure family and, as you pointed out, she's going to Yale. That said, as many of the students protesting on campus have pointed out, it's Yale. It's supposed to be a safe space; they're paying for this.

Do the students in this "movement" really want to have a dialogue? It seems like they only want to be heard and not to hear. That's not a conversation.

Black only healing space for the students to share, decompress, be vulnerable & real. #ConcernedStudent1950

All this talk about "spaces." I guess libraries aren't considered to be "safe spaces."
http://www.mediaite.com/online/dartm...hy-white-fcks/
Dartmouth parents should be asking for a refund.

[GenuineRisk]

Originally Posted by OldDog

You never need apologize for not answering me sooner. I am at best a part-timer here and often don't visit for days at a time.

Those things might be defended by someone somewhere as free speech, but I've not seen that defense applied legally. And when prosecuted as trespass or vandalism I don't recall free speech being evoked as a defense.

Putting Shaun King aside, that's very ugly. Don't all states have rules against bullying and harassment? The school officials should be called out if it's true and they aren't doing anything about it.



Do the students in this "movement" really want to have a dialogue? It seems like they only want to be heard and not to hear. That's not a conversation.


All this talk about "spaces." I guess libraries aren't considered to be "safe spaces."
http://www.mediaite.com/online/dartm...hy-white-fcks/
Dartmouth parents should be asking for a refund.

They are protected as free speech. There have been some attempts by state governments (not federal) to ban nooses, but it's met with sporadic success and a fair amount of pushback, mostly revolving around what constitutes an actual threat and what is free speech. And a peace symbol written in feces is just as much vandalism as a swastika, but one has a much different effect than the other. They're not equal.

What the students are doing, with the sit-ins and the screaming and the protests, is calling out schools that, as they see it, are not doing anything about bullying and harassment. In the case of the 14-year-old honor student, he's being more polite about it, but you know, Dr. King and Malcolm X had very different approaches to civil rights and yet somehow both of them ended up shot dead by men who disagreed with them. The nation has a long history of responding to pleas for equality and change with violence, and eventually something is the feather that breaks the camel's back, and then people push back with anger and shouting and shoving.

I saw a bit of it in my son's Pre-K class last year. It was a rambunctious class of kids, but there was one, in particular, I picked out as the problem kid in class (I volunteered a lot so I was there a lot). However, that kid was not the one the teacher or the school decided was a disruptive influence. The kid they did single out, to the point of telling the parents the child should only come to Pre-K three days a week (this is a PUBLIC school, I should note, that was receiving state and city money for its Pre-K program), was not, in my opinion, anymore disruptive than the other one, but one was white and the other was not and guess which one was the one whose parents were getting called almost every day?

Again, I know the kids look like shouting a**holes in videos out of context (and from what I read in the article, there were a few who probably are just a**holes, who were called out by the other protesters for acting like jerks). But the shouting comes after a lifetime of little digs, comments, and a lot of blatant racist crap, like what that 14-year-old in the Daily News article deals with. And I hope, after the shouting, the dialogue will really start. The last thing Dr. Wing Sue said in that lecture I attended, was that it's pretty much too late for all of us who were listening to him- by the time you're an adult, your biases are pretty much set and it's very hard to change them (although you can always work to intellectually recognize them, even if you can't change your emotional response). The hope lies with the younger generation, and the best thing they can experience is repeated exposure to and contact with people from different backgrounds than their own. So yeah, why we as a culture object so much to busing and school desegregations continues to make me sad.

I love talking cultural and political issues with you, OldDog. Always a pleasure and I always learn something.

[OldDog]

Dartmouth update: College sees no official reports of violence at protest, despite rumors
http://thedartmouth.com/2015/11/17/c...espite-rumors/

NAACP vice president Tsion Abera ’17 said that there is no truth to the allegations of violence.

“These allegations of physical assault are lies to make white students look like the victims and students of color to look like the perpetrators,” Abera said. “The protest was meant to shut down the library. Whatever discomfort that many white students felt in that library is a fraction of the discomfort that many Natives, blacks, Latina and LGBTQ people feel frequently.”

Abera denied that there were any physical assaults perpetrated by the demonstrators, but some protesters did use profanity in their chants, she said.

NAACP president Jonathan Diakanwa ’16 said there were incidents of close verbal confrontations between individuals, and that although these students could have been uncomfortable or scared, there was no physical violence of any kind.
Comments such as “F*** your white privilege” were not personal or racist attacks on individual white persons in the library, Diakanwa said.

At a community discussion in Cutter-Shabazz on Monday night, several students voiced concerns over portrayals of Thursday’s protest, particularly in The Dartmouth Review and on Yik Yak.

Vice provost for student affairs Inge-Lise Ameer was in attendance at the meeting, and she apologized to students who engaged in the protest for the negative responses and media coverage that they have received.

“There’s a whole conservative world out there that’s not being very nice,” Ameer said.

Yes, because writing articles and showing videos of what you did is not very nice, but shouting obscenities at whitey is simply de rigueur.


Meanwhile out in the plains...

LAWRENCE, Kan. — Racial tensions are growing at the University of Kansas with a call for three top Student Senate leaders to resign and a recent graduate initiating a hunger strike.
http://www.startribune.com/3-univers...ign/350060961/
The Senate’s Student Executive Committee is demanding that Student Body President Jessie Pringle, Student Body Vice President Zach George and Chief of Staff Adam Moon step down by Wednesday and that the full Senate to take up impeachment measures if they refuse to leave, the Lawrence Journal-World (http://bit.ly/1LfUc9v ) reported. The committee registered a 6-3 “no confidence” vote Friday for the three leaders. One member abstained from the vote. . . Pringle and George were singled out, with the committee saying they did not “stand in solidarity with their black peers and proclaim that Black Lives Matter” at Wednesday’s forum.

[GenuineRisk]

Originally Posted by OldDog

Dartmouth update: College sees no official reports of violence at protest, despite rumors
http://thedartmouth.com/2015/11/17/c...espite-rumors/


Yes, because writing articles and showing videos of what you did is not very nice, but shouting obscenities at whitey is simply de rigueur.


Meanwhile out in the plains...

LAWRENCE, Kan. — Racial tensions are growing at the University of Kansas with a call for three top Student Senate leaders to resign and a recent graduate initiating a hunger strike.
http://www.startribune.com/3-univers...ign/350060961/
The Senate’s Student Executive Committee is demanding that Student Body President Jessie Pringle, Student Body Vice President Zach George and Chief of Staff Adam Moon step down by Wednesday and that the full Senate to take up impeachment measures if they refuse to leave, the Lawrence Journal-World (http://bit.ly/1LfUc9v ) reported. The committee registered a 6-3 “no confidence” vote Friday for the three leaders. One member abstained from the vote. . . Pringle and George were singled out, with the committee saying they did not “stand in solidarity with their black peers and proclaim that Black Lives Matter” at Wednesday’s forum.

First, huge props for the Body Snatchers reference. I love that movie. I give big props to the original, but it shows its age a bit, while the 1970s one is still terrifying.

Gawker ran a long and excellent piece on Yale today, which explains better than I did the long simmering things. It even makes reference to the idea of privileged Yale students suffering discrimination- as it points out, you can't see that a person went to Yale from a distance, but you can see their skin color.

http://jezebel.com/we-need-yale-to-c...s-o-1742070334

Highlight:
"In the sphere of the media, the Yale narrative has since been jumbled, politicized and churned into essays on oversensitivity and the merits of free speech. In some cases, student activists have been reduced to being called privileged millennials; there’s been a stunning lack of empathy that perhaps stems from a lack of knowledge that the burden of living with institutionalized racism is legitimate and real. It’s true that college students are melodramatic, and it’s also true that the world is a racist place. Questions come up at the intersection, inevitably: were these students overdramatizing their experiences? Did they, in a selfish but earnest way, just want to feel part of something bigger? Was there validity to criticism of their tactics as over-policing campus freedom?

That type of trivialization is instinctual. It’s also possible to debate the various levels of intent without discrediting the students’ concerns. But what I found impossible to ignore—and what so many reports did ignore—was the aura of grief at Yale and Mizzou. What’s happening at these schools, as well as many more to come, is the sound of systematic ostracism that had formerly operated covertly being unable to do so anymore. Animosity has boiled for centuries at Yale, a university with a 72 percent white student body, 20 percent Asian, 9 percent black and 9 percent Latino (all according to 2014-15 stats). Small moments evolved into movements that lump into an even larger Black Lives Matter umbrella—this era’s echoing civil rights crusade."

[OldDog]

NBC exec's 'illegals' remark angers Hispanic lawmakers
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/1...igrants-216041

More hurt over calling illegals, "illegals."

[OldDog]

Originally Posted by GenuineRisk

I love talking cultural and political issues with you, OldDog. Always a pleasure and I always learn something.

Thank ye kindly. I hope I'm never too old to learn something new.