University to Freshmen: Don’t Expect Safe Spaces or Trigger Warnings

Parents Forum
701

A perspective from a Black UChicago Alum. Not sure if I agree with everything he writes about, but wanted to share so others understand how some Minority Students feel

http://www.vox.com/2016/8/29/12692376/university-chicago-safe-spaces-defense.

Quotes from the post:

The last quote was very interesting. He seems to be saying that you cannot have minority enrollment without Trigger warnings and Safe spaces.

The history and Mission of the Office of Multi-cultural Affairs can be read here

https://omsa.uchicago.edu/page/omsa-history

How does one square the existence of the Phoenix Survivor’s Alliance (a recognized RSO at UChicago) and OMSA with the letter? Maybe the University means something else when it says “We don’t condone intellectual safe spaces?” and the readers understand “something else”?

702

“If, on the other hand, you only want the boring babblings of rich, white, cis, straight men whose worst experience was burying their fourth family pet, then keep doing what you have been doing since your inception. Keep pandering to the politically incorrect and the privileged if you want, but do not expect the depth and nuance that experience brings. Don’t expect us to show up.”

Then go elsewhere already. Btw who the heck are they to decree that “rich white cis straight men are boring”? Tells me they don’t deal in ideas or humanity, but in reducing people to stereotypes. Guess what, some poor black trans women are boring too. No one has the monopoly on that.

But why give rich white people a chance? It might entail changing some of one’s assumptions and prejudices. Oh wait, that only works one way.

703

@NickFlynn, yeah, pretty close with two provisos. I believe the fact of a protest is not anti intellectual. It is only a protest or other action which seeks to silence, rather than rebut, that I take issue with. Two, and as I suspect you know, the devil is in the details. There are some opinions which we as a society have decided over time are outside the bounds of rational discourse. I personally would object to my alma mater hosting a speaker from the Man Boy Love organization for example. Like in all complex things it is a matter of line drawing. By temperament I would be very cautious where I draw that line. Personally, I believe Universities should be even more open to all types of ideas, by their very nature. Make sense?

704

@al2simon #693, yes, it’s a vacuous conclusion on my part, but that’s because the question is of a sort that can’t have a more specific, less vacuous answer than that. That was my point—that there is actually basically nothing to be concluded from what was being asked about.

And @Ohiodad51 #694, I said nothing about active disruption, because I was responding to a question that itself explicitly asked about the raising of objections, and said nothing about active disruption of an event. I drew no connections between objection and disruption of the sort you appear to claim I did—please don’t extend my response beyond its scope.

705

Lol. How many parents can relate to this?

http://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/daily-cartoon-082916-trigger-warning

706

^^ New Yorker cartoon already posted - Post #682.

707

If we’re talking on the basis of how one is treated by visible racial/ethnic characteristics, then yes.

One good example I know of is an older college classmate Double-degree student* who is URM and upper/upper-middle class who grew up in a well-off NYC area suburb. Despite the parents being well-off enough to live in that suburb, being a topflight academic student/student leader/volunteer, him being a well dressed(wears suits most of time time even during undergrad), and his parents being able to afford to give him a Mercedes for his HS graduation present, it doesn’t negate the following facts:

He has been stopped, frisked, and manhandled by LEOs in his suburban town and around the area where our Midwest LAC was located because of his race from adolescence onward.

Sometimes the cops admitted it as much by implying he was a drug dealer as they felt there’s no way someone who looked like him could have enough money for the suits and later on, the Mercedes he drove…even though his parents are well-paid professionals…a fortune 500 exec and a well-paid medical doctor. It wasn’t an isolated incident…but occurred on a regular basis with him and other Black classmates/friends regardless of SES background/educational level.

A female classmate who’s 5’4" who was driving a van full of us fellow college students had a gun drawn on her by an Ohio State trooper during a traffic stop without any provocation/warning. Nothing came of the stop, but we were stunned the gun was pulled on her as it was never pulled on anyone else during previous similar stops on the highway with other drivers. Only difference was she is from the Indian subcontinent and possibly “looked like a Middle Eastern terrorist”. And this took place BEFORE 9/11.

A member of the senior police brass was racially profiled by White subordinates who didn’t recognize him or the fact he was on duty while being profiled:

http://www.npr.org/sections/newsandviews/2008/05/nypd_disciplines_white_officer.html

A couple of actors were racially profiled by local police without justifiable grounds as it turned out:

http://www.wyff4.com/news/columbia-statewide-news/sheriff-responds-to-actors-claim-of-racial-profiling-in-sc/22207798

And there are still police departments which believe racial profiling is a-ok as seen ironically in this Fox News report:

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/03/22/police-chiefs-email-defending-racial-profiling-under-investigation.html

So yes…in light of all this…one can be SES privileged while not being so much in a racial context.

  • At Oberlin, a double degree student is someone who earned admission and enrolled at both the Conservatory and the College. No mean feat considering both require separate applications and the Con was traditionally considered much harder to get into than the college when I attended. It also requires a heavy workload so even with allowed overloadings per semester...it takes a minimum of 5 years to graduate with both degrees.
708

MOMANDBOYSTWO: Although it’s not a short explanatory guide easily googled, I found this article by, Ta-Nehisi Coates, very helpful in considering white privilege:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

And even more so, his book: * Between the World and Me*. I recommended it to PG a while back, but maybe she hasn’t have time or interest to read it. Or maybe she did. Who knows.

Maybe you have already read Coates?

Most white folks I know, IRL, who talk about white privilege, have read Coates. My kids recommended him to me. For me, the reparations article explores why we can’t just say, “let’s ignore skin color and move on from here and just quit fussing about the past” The past impacts the present. imho.

fwiw

709

It seems to me wrong-headed to say that “white privilege,” under the strictest definition of the word, doesn’t exist, because of course there are certain privileges that come with being in the majority group, even if we don’t consider instances of discrimination. An upper-middle class white couple doesn’t have to think about where they can move and still be comfortable as white people. An upper-middle class black couple often has to weigh the benefits of a beautiful house in a great school district against the fact that their kids will be among the only black students in their class, or that the family won’t have easy access to black churches and cultural activities. That isn’t nefarious, or an accusation against white people. It is just a fact.

The problem I think a lot of us have is with the overemphasis on this one form of privilege over all others. Earlier, someone used an analogy involving disease to explain why even disadvantaged whites have white privilege: the fact that someone has heart disease doesn’t change the fact that they enjoy the “privilege” of functioning kidneys, which someone on dialysis doesn’t have.

There is, however, a problem with that analogy. A person with heart disease and a person with kidney disease are both suffering from very serious diseases. If both of these people were your friends, it would be horribly insensitive, and rather baffling, to only organize meal drops, hospital visits, and prayer chains for the friend with heart disease and not the only with kidney disease. and not the other. An out-of-work miner in Appalachia, hearing the near exclusive focus of certain groups on the privileges that accrue to whiteness, and not the ones that accrue to class, must feel something like the second patient in that analogy.

And, it is actually even worse than that, because in many cases, looking at the totality of their experiences, opportunities, and circumstances, the people complaining about “white privilege” seem to actually be doing immeasurably better than a lot of people who DO have white privilege. The out-of-work miner in Appalachia has white privilege. An African-American lawyer does not. But if the lawyer complains about “white privilege” to an out-of-work miner, that isn’t, any longer, akin to the guy with heart disease complaining that the guy with kidney disease can’t possibly understand how bad his condition is. It is more like a person with Celiac disease complaining about the insensitivity to their plight to a person with Lou Gehrig’s disease.

That doesn’t mean black people don’t have plenty of non-trivial grievances, or even that the existence of horrifically bad injustice or problem A doesn’t mean you can’t bring up the merely ordinarily bad injustice or problem B. We can talk about John C. Calhoun AND police killing of minorities AND the decline of working class jobs in rural America. But talking about white privilege or lack thereof as if it is or should the primary factor in assessing a given person’s overall advantages and disadvantages – which seems to me frequently the case – is frankly insensitive and myopic.

710

@CollegeAngst Post #702. Thanks for sharing those links. What would happen if rich, white kids wrote about similar demands or the babblings of gay, black men? Who are the politically incorrect they refer to, and why is it that these kids consider themselves the politically correct ones? Is the University defunding Student Services? What classist onslaught are they referring to? No need to actually answer these questions, but I think these rants are a little immature and extreme. Very sad that these kids feel so put upon at one of the top universities in the world, where so many others woulld love to attend but were kept out.

My white son has a black roommate in college. I hope the roommate and my son both have great, positive experiences and don’t get brought down by complainers.

@NickFlynn I think you were a bit condescending in Post #699. I am fully aware of what white privilege is assumed to mean, but I am trying to be completely rational. Using terms like white privilege just creates more divisiveness.

In my opinion, moving away from so much focus on skin color and sexual orientation needs to be a goal. There is too much animosity. But, I’m just an old white woman, so my thoughts don’t matter.

Carry on.

711

“I know for a fact that these people do not feel they are privileged.”

Of course they don’t. That doesn’t mean the privilege isn’t there. It’s typically invisible to the people who enjoy it. Able-bodied people don’t even notice the stairs. I sure never thought about the privilege of using the public bathroom where I belong until transgender folks pointed it out. You can’t know the value of being white unless you listen to the people who aren’t.

Now, if we’re talking about economic hardship, there your friends in Appalachia are experts. Would they listen to some upper-middle-class suburban guy’s wisdom when it comes to economic justice? Of course not. They know that the people on top can’t see the view from the bottom. It’s the same with race.

712

One thing missing from the analogy is that it omits three critical facts:

  1. The out of work miner in Appalachia has historically and to some extent...is still regarded as socially superior by the prevailing social order and racists who continue to dominate the local politics* to any Black individual due to the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow....which continued well into the 1960's and to an extent...the '70s.
  1. The out of work Appalachia miners were free to decide on whether to fight for or against the Union....and indirectly...for* or against slavery. Unfortunately, some chose to fight for slavery and later....Jim Crow/segregation.
  • Declaration of secession documents of many Confederate States including South Carolina's explicitly mentioned the issue of slavery as one key reason why they seceded and later on...fought to maintain that secession.
  1. The ancestors of the Appalachia miners came to the US of their own free will and were paid for their labor...however much of a pittance it may have been. Most ancestors of Black Americans had no such considerations for most of US's history.....even after then end of the Civil War in 1865 thanks to Southern White reaction which resulted in what became known as Jim Crow codes/segregation. And the latter bit continued until less than a decade before I was born as a tail-end member of Gen X. Not ancient history here, folks.

Incidentally, some college classmates and a few post-college friends are Appalachia Whites who acknowledged all of this without any prompting.

713

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714

I agree their thoughts should matter *as well. * There is a difference between that, and insisting the pendulum swing so completely in the opposite direction that only their thoughts should matter.

@nickflynn: See the above post from a year ago. I do understand what white privilege is, tyvm. And I’ve acknowledged both here and in other threads that it exists. See the story about the black kid who went door to door in my neighborhood. http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/18657578#Comment_18657578

715

@cobrat. @alh @apprenticeprof Posts 708, 709, 710. Thank you for your very thoughtful comments and examples. I don’t deny that black people have been mistreated over the years just because of their skin color. I just feel like the pendulum has turned and now white people are always “wrong.” Students at places like Chicago and Yale might feel better by focusing on their blessings rather than on their anger. Complain about the few people who are actually rude to them, but not about the whole university and all old, rich, white guys.

So many people of all skin colors would love to be where these students are.

716

It seems that way because up until a few decades ago, the White experience/norms/perspective was the one that was not only dominant, but insisted on dictating the realities/experiences to those who are non-White.

In fact, it was still prevalent during my own childhood in the '80s and to a lesser extent, the '90s…and I grew up in NYC. It was worse for same generationed relatives who grew up in White-majority suburban areas. Especially those from the rural Mississippi branch of my extended family.

Keep in mind that until a few decades ago, many of those non-White students wouldn’t have been allowed to attend those institutions due to explicit racial/ethnic maximum quotas or at all as admins did their utmost to keep most elite colleges as not only White…but WASP as much as possible until the 60’s.

This was a reason why my LAC was notable as from the late 1830’s onward, it was one of the few colleges to accept Black Americans and Women and enroll them on the same basis as their White male counterparts. Much negative references were made about this in the antebellum southern press BEFORE the Civil War.

717

718

This discussion of privilege reminds me of a bit by the comedian Chris Rock that many of you may have seen -

Very funny, but the undercurrent of truth is part of the humor too.

Having said that, I do think when a lot of people say “Check your privilege” they’re really just saying “Shut the %&#$ up”.

719

@Hanna Post #712. It would be wise for those at the bottom to look up and listen, and some actually do learn from other more successful people instead of rejecting their ideas outright. I am assuming that some of the first generation or poor minorities at Chicago and Yale are actually there because they or their parents got the idea from others more successful than themselves that a good education can change lives. (Grammar issue with themselves?)

720

For those of you who are unsure whether or not white privilege exists–this may be interesting and/or useful:

[“White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” and “Some Notes for Facilitators”](http://nationalseedproject.org/white-privilege-unpacking-the-invisible-knapsack)

For those of you wondering how poor white people can be said to have “privilege”–this may be interesting and/or useful:

[Explaining White Privilege To A Broke White Person…](Explaining White Privilege To A Broke White Person… | Thought Catalog)

For those of you wondering what the privilege status is for a person, for instance, who is white but is disadvantaged in other ways–this may be interesting and/or useful:

[url=http://www.intergroupresources.com/rc/Intersectionality%20primer%20-%20African%20American%20Policy%20Forum.pdf]A Primer on Intersectionality/url