You are saying a black person with a different opinion from you is supposition and hypothetical? What? You aren’t saying that, are you?
Incidentally, a US military base issued more strictly worded guidelines instructing base residents to not wear certain costumes which may prompt security concerns/fears.
Despite the fact soldiers are ostensibly adults, one soldier opted to disregard those guidelines by dressing up as a suicide bomber which prompted a massive security alert including searches for live explosives and is likely to face disciplinary action from his superiors because he disobeyed those instructions.
I get the feeling that some believe, that all of us black folks, just need to say a polite no mam or yes sir, and all the gates would tumble down. Personally, I find it borders on asinine to place a young woman of color, in the position to approach someone on Halloween night, a night where a fair amount of drinks might be assumed to be part of the festivity, and you see someone in an offensive outfit, and you shyly approach to make inquiry whether you can have a meaningful dialogue about the narrative it creates. At best you get shouted down and at worse, a full size riot takes place…brilliant.
@cobrat Are you equating dressing up as a geisha and offending Asian students with dressing up as a suicide bomber on a military base?
Maybe some do but the white race is no more homogeneous than any other race.
I am wondering why some argue that Yale’s administration shouldn’t issue some guidelines calling for greater civility and consideration among students when choosing what Halloween costume to wear because Yale students “are adults” and yet…other institutions routinely issue similar guidelines to their ostensibly “adult” charges without as much outcry that it “infantilizes them”.
US military soldiers are presumably adults of around the same age and older* and yet, the military base commander felt the need to issue more strictly worded instructions banning the wearing of certain costumes to soldiers living on the base. By the very arguments advanced by some posters here, shouldn’t the military base commander have enough confidence in the maturity and intelligence of his/her soldiers to not feel the need to issue such instructions in the first place?
- Not to mention expected to have greater levels of responsibilities in areas such as handling deadly weapons, being responsible for expensive equipment worth millions or even billions of taxpayer dollars, and risking their lives to defend the nation
He should not have had to issue the warning and the idiot who dressed like that is quite lucky he was not shot on sight.
Fairfield is literally all white, and Passiac has literally very few whites. But, what is your point or are your just being sardonic?
This puts a finger on what I think is at the root of Ms. Luther’s behavior. She’s a girl from a nice Fairfield County town who–judging by the photos–has at least one white parent, her mother. She is woefully lacking in the kind of street cred @boolaHI demands. So she is motivated to prove herself. She’s like the black girl who lived in one of my dorms who was the daughter of two doctors who, when requested to turn down her stereo during exam period, said the person who asked was racist because it was “her culture.” Right.
BTW, I have family who live in Fairfield, and have known various other people who have lived there, and it is not all Greenfield Hill. The town has plenty of modest housing.
Well, the base commander felt the need to issue such restrictive instructions on Halloween costumes and in many other areas of “adult” life…one will be subjected to such “reminders” or moreso…instructions some may consider “infantilizing” to adults. And if one happens to be in a supervisory position where there is a perceived need to issue such instructions due to actual past history of poor judgment calls or fears of such, one may feel compelled to issue such “reminders” or more starkly “instructions”.
And like how students who are part of marginalized groups feel past negative incidents/events prove a critical minority of Yale students or undergrads in general cannot be trusted to completely police themselves without some oversight from the university admins…even if it is limited to an advisory “reminder” email, the base commander’s assessment that a critical minority of soldiers under his/her command need to be “reminded” through more strictly worded “instructions” on Halloween costumes was unfortunately proven correct by the ill-considered costume choice by one soldier and the massive inconvenience and tying up of security resources which ensued.
Re: post 461: Yes, because dressing as a suicide bomber at a military base is exactly the same thing as wearing a sombrero and poncho to a Halloween Party. Absolutely no difference.
What scares me so much here is the extremity of the student reaction I don’t think EC should have sent that e-mail, simply because it was an over-reaction to a pretty pro-forma reminder from a diversity office. The appropriate response would have been to roll your eyes and move on. I can see how a student might have been hurt, not so much by EC’s opinion, but by the fact that she was so fired up by a pretty mild request for sensitivity that she sent out a lengthy rebuttal, no matter how moderately worded. My own guess is that she was primed for an argument by more legitimate instances of PC-culture run amok, and chose the wrong hill to die on.
But let’s keep this in perspective here: this was a person voicing an opinion. It wasn’t a terribly extreme opinion. It was politely expressed. It wasn’t indicative of hostility toward students of color. It was, at worst, slightly tin-eared. In the context of her position, she probably shouldn’t have sent it – at least not in that forum – but it wasn’t something she came up with out of the blue, it was in response to an existing conversation about the issue. To say that she (and her husband) are unfit to be a nurturing, respectful presence for a group of legal adults because they think there are some gray areas when it comes to offensive Halloween costumes is ridiculous.
“I’m offended” can’t always be a winning argument, and the appropriate response to a feeling of offense isn’t always the most extreme one. As a white woman, I need to be aware that I can’t entirely understand the experiences of people of color, but it doesn’t follow from that that I can’t listen, evaluate, and decide that a person is being oversensitive, and possibly not reflecting peak mental health.
The fact that we aren’t any longer in an age of de jure segregation and lynchings doesn’t mean our country no longer has a racial problem. Neither does the fact that we have a black President, or that Yale already has oodles of diversity initiatives and programming. But it does mean that it doesn’t seem out of line to expect that a Yale student should show a little sense of perspective. Or that it should be considered a microaggression to utter it.
@cobrat See my reply in post 463. I don’t equate the physical safety of soldiers and a military base with the safety of Yale students’ hurt feelings. Maybe you do. I’ll just chalk it up to a poorly chosen analogy.
Is anyone other than me sick and tired of the currently popular vocabulary of victimhood?
I think that a large part of the problem is that words such as “hurt” and “hurtful” just sound whiny. “Offended” is not only weak, but tired. Let’s not hear about people being upset. Boo hoo. Let’s hear about people being FURIOUS.
I think that it is time that people embraced a stronger vocabulary. “Your habit of calling women ‘hoes’ and ‘bitches’ demeans me and all women and makes me ANGRY.”
Is there some way to convey that certain behaviors make people feel not “hurt” and “offended,” but MORTALLY offended and angry as hell, and ready to do something about it?
Along those lines, the guy from FIRE who apparently made destruction of a village a joke, without going on to talk about the brutal reality of what that meant in human terms, appeared to be a jerk of the first water. I thought that the protesters chanting “genocide is not a joke” were absolutely correct, although spitting on people whose only offense was being in the audience was totally over the top.
I don’t think anyone has a problem with a university issuing an email reminding it’s students to be sensitive when choosing Halloween costumes. I think it’s great; it’s a good idea.
The problem I have is the huge reaction to the Master’s wife’s follow up email. That email expressed parental-type advice re: how best to handle any offense arising from any poorly chosen Halloween costumes that might nevertheless show up. Maybe some students did not agree with that advice, but to react the way they did was inexcusable.
The initial email could not possibly have addressed every possible offensive costume that might be worn. So what would your advice be to your son or daughter re how to handle a moderately offensive costume (i.e. not a threatening costume, just an insensitive one). This follow up email could certainly be interpreted as an attempt to give these kids some real world tools.
@consolation I think that was what the hunger strike was about at Mizzou. The grad student (like him or not, agree with him or not) said he got tired of being ignored when working through the normal channels, so he went on a hunger strike to call attention to the issue. It got the football team’s attention and they got the national media’s.
The NYT has a story about a march going past the SAE frat house because protesting something that may not have happened at all and which, if it happened, was a remark by a single person that didn’t reflect that SAE chapters policies or beliefs is and which SAE has repudiated … well it’s a just a mob acting stupid. And adopting the fake street cred of the privileged chanting “we ain’t leavin’” as though they’re not Ivy League students who live in and go to school in a nearly gold-plated campus where every sidewalk is perfectly-laid out stonework and every lawn is manicured. “We ain’t leavin,” … yeah, that makes your protest so much more important, so much more real. Because ganging up on people without any proof that anything bad even happened and which they deny happened and which they deny represents them has never happened to minorities unjustly in the history of this nation … but I guess when you’re the mob, it’s fine.
Just like in Missouri, which has real racial problems, and a bleeping journalism professor is caught on camera calling for “some muscle” to eject a photographer because they don’t believe in free speech unless it’s their free speech.
What’s more, the photographer was a student!
That would be Greg Lukianoff, who just happens to be the person who made the video of the confrontation between Nicholas Christakis and the student. https://www.thefire.org/yale-students-demand-resignations-from-faculty-members-over-halloween-email/
Lukianoff was a guest at a guest at a master’s tea at Silliman College—the master of Silliman is Nicholas Christakis-where the topic was free speech at universities. (The usual topic for Lukianoff) Following the tea, Erika Christakis sent out the email to all Sillimanders about Halloween costumes. IMO, EC was not engaging in any “dialogue” with Dean Howard; she seems to have sent her critique of it solely to Sillimanders, not to the Dean or any of the other groups which signed the original email–or to residents of the other 11 Yale residential colleges. One point a Yale student made is that, while Dean Howard sent out the email, and some adults, notably the chaplains, signed, the email was ALSO signed by student groups. So, I think her whole adults are intruding into the students’ space argument is not wholly valid…especially since that’s what she herself is doing while vehemently denying that she is.
The next day, speaking at the Buckley forum, Lukianoff opined that you would have thought her email lead to the wiping out of an Indian village. This is the remark that fueled the spitting incident. (The organizer of the protest regarding those remarks condemned the spitting.)Opening remarks for the forum were made by Nicholas Christakis.
Lukianoff is the author of the Coddling of the American mind, which is what EC tweeted to those who responded to her email. http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2015/11/09/students-protest-buckley-talk/
Since Lukianoff was the guest of the Christakises and Nicholas Christakis went out to where the students were writing chalk messages, I have a question: Did Nicholas Christakis know he was being filmed by Lukianoff–and did he fail to advise students that they were being filmed?
Again, I am NOT condoning the student’s conduct; she was way out of line. But…is it ethical for Christakis to engage a group of upset students in a conversation without informing them that it was being filmed by the leader of a “free speech on college campuses” advocacy group if he knew it was?
If FIRE’s Lukianoff hadn’t been there to film the incident, would this be the big hoopla it’s become?
I thought I saw more than one camera being held up. I think that, these days, you have to assume your conduct can be filmed whenever you are in public. That said, if the Master was actually inviting an incident so that it could be filmed, that would shed a whole new light on it.
Not quite understanding this; The same happened last year. How can the same remark happen two years in a row?