https://www.infowars.com/student-reports-noose-hung-outside-room-turns-out-to-be-a-lost-shoelace/
Yes, there are false/fabricated incidents of racism as well as very real ones that should be taken seriously until proven otherwise.
This definitely looks bad for very real cases of racism. Definitely will create a lot of doubt on any cases that come forward now.
And much snickering in the student body. People do like to make assumptions these days. But a college is a good environment to teach kids not to jump to conclusions. Maybe the conclusion jumpers have never bought new shoelaces in our disposable society?
You know, if it was unheard of for a noose to be put on a black college student’s door/floor/whiteboard/whatever, few people would jump to conclusions.
Sadly, that’s just not the case.
I just found 3 from this year without looking for more than a minute. But it’s fun for CC parents to laugh at those over-sensitive kids, right? They’re so silly, they thought a shoelace was a noose! That’s impossible!
SMH.
…make that 5, still just in 2017.
https://www.amherst.edu/amherst-story/president/statements/node/690271
Not even getting into “n__er go home”, “filthy n–ers” and variations thereof and Confederate flags with cotton attached and the beating at Cornell and and and and…
It was a new packaged shoelace. Not everything in life is a slight against a person or a group or a representative action. Sometimes if you stop and really open your eyes and ears and it looks like a zebra it is a zebra. Knee jerk reactions are wearing thin on a very large segment of people myself included.
Unlike the way that it is cast in the article, the problem is that there are way too many of these incidents that are real. Occasional false alarms really do nothing to diminish real incidents.
Anyone who gets news beyond propaganda / conspiracy theory sights would know that.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/09/22/racist-incidents-colleges-abound-academic-year-begins
Really? A quote from Infowars? A right wing wacko website?
Its amazing how much energy bigots put into promoting the idea that bigotry doesn’t exist.
No, No, No…bigotry exists but people need to think and open their eyes before they leap. I prefer to think that college kids these days throw away their shoes when the laces break instead of going and buying a new pair of laces and had zero clue what they were looking at and that someone thoughtfully put the shoelace where the person who lost it might actually find it.
Umich has had a ridiculous number of racist incidents in the last month. Example from this week: https://m.metrotimes.com/news-hits/archives/2017/10/03/racist-flyers-found-on-u-m-campus-calling-to-make-america-white-again
So yeah, we’re on edge. I for one am sick of having to address a new racist incident on campus every class. (Which, yes, I have to do given the type of course it is.)
ETA: INFOWARS? Seriously?! =))
LOL @ referencing an article at Infowars…Seriously?
They do. Too many false alarms means people have less of a reaction to the real incidents.
a local source for the story.
MSU statement
https://cabs.msu.edu/news/key-issues/issue-docs/racial-incident.html
Seems Infowars was spot on.
I don’t believe anything until TMZ reports it.
@OHMomof2 Perfectly said! Thank you!
Never said it was wrong, personally. I knew the story.
But infowars is still a pathetic disgusting joke that perpetuates cruel rumors like Sandy Hook was a hoax. It should be mocked relentlessly and deserves nothing better.
Maybe the traumatized student who found the shoelace can sue the shoelace manufacturer for their packaging that induced trauma and MSU can recommend students stick to shoes that slide in or are Velcro. Regardless a great laugh for the day and kudos to the first investigator on the scene that didn’t recognize a shoelace straight out of the packaging and a college president who felt the necessity to release a statement before there was any facts to report.
You know, I am always very curious when people make statements like these. What is it about the incident that makes you assume that the student’s reaction was “kneejerk” or without additional thoughtfulness or open eyes?
There’s an extant body of research on this, actually. Most people of color in predominantly white environments actually don’t have kneejerk reactions to ambiguous events that may or may not be racially motivated. They do the exact opposite - they try to justify how it could NOT be racist, brush it off, argue that it’s not that bad or that it doesn’t hurt them or that they’ve got thick skin, maybe it was an accident…etc. It’s even psychologically harder to decide that an ambiguous event is racially motivated and then report it.
Besides, given that this is a right-wing news site, we don’t actually know anything about the way the student reported the incident. I tried to find another more neutral news sites and none of them know, either. The student could’ve simply said “Look, here’s a picture of this thing I found on my door, I think it may be a noose but I’m not sure.” Given that there have recently been multiple incidents of nooses being hung on the personal spaces of black students at multiple campuses across the country, this isn’t a far-fetched guess to make.
I have to wonder about the motivations of folks who are bent on seeing this as some sort of “racist hysteria” (as the website itself puts it) or want to make fun of adolescents who have genuine fears on their own campuses, especially since racially motivated violence is not an imaginary thing and is actually happening right in front of these kids’ faces, sometimes on their own campuses. Especially when none of us actually saw the shoelace and do not know how much it did or did not resemble a noose.
I note that the article’s other examples of “false” hate incidents were both real hate incidents where the perpetrator tried to deflect responsibility for the incident onto someone else. In those cases, the people targeted were not wrong to understand that they were being terrorized based on their ethnicity or religion. Infowars is interested in them solely because they were not in fact (supposedly, at least according to Infowars) the work of white supremacists.
This article was a brief respite from what seems to be Infowars’ obsession of the week, which is to cast the Las Vegas shooter as a radicalized left-winger working with the “Deep State” both to murder Trump supporters and to encourage restrictions on gun ownership. Yeesh!
It’s really upsetting what a sorry view of America the Kremlin seems to have. Thanks for sharing, @barrons .