Nice post - I think it is different because (hopefully) all of us can recoil at the “dirty Jew” or find the Sunday morning prayer service inappropriate, but it’s harder to generate universal outrage at the well-intentioned “what did you get for Christmas” type of thing. I used to be a lot more hard-you-know-what on this stuff but as I’ve aged, I’ve gotten more tolerant. Assuming Positive Intent, I suppose.
@jym626 Thank you for sharing your experience with your former bullies.
My story was about trying to rationalize with teens when they are hurt and I described how I had been hurt in an educational environment. I also described how others nurtured my hurt and helped me to move forward and excel. That young woman at Yale seems to be hurting and it does not appear that Ms. C understood that her email could be perceived by teenagers (even those at Yales) as “words can never hurt” or “suck it up.” I can only pray that the young woman speak with Mr. C and Mrs. C to gain a better sense of what was trying to be conveyed by Ms. C’s email.
Personally, having read the email, I thought that she was correct but inarticulate to her young audience. If the email was being sent only to faculty, that would have been another story. But, again, I think Mr. C, Mrs. C, and the young woman all learned a valuable lesson and I pray they will each grow from this experience.
Once you close yourself off and refuse to engage in dialogue then there is no hope of finding common ground. And that goes for any kind of conflict or hurt that one might experience in their life. And I do think the point that many, many people experience some form of ostracism in their early school years is a good one. We read of teenagers committing suicide because of being bullied for their sexual orientation or because they may not have fit into the dominant social norm. These are issues that need to be addressed not buried.
@Tampa if your story is an accurate depiction of what you experienced, do you see no value in finding a way to illustrate to those that were unkind to you that it did not hold you back? Personally, I would make it a point to do so.
pittsburghscribe,
Nice post. My experience has been a bit of the reverse. As a kid I enjoyed trying to dye eggs and hanging a stocking on the mantle. But as I got older, and am married to someone with stronger religious convictions than I grew up with, and having had a few experiences with ignorant people, I’ve perhaps become more sensitized. That said, I would probably prefer to attend a party where it is clearly indicated that it is a Christmas party, with an open invitation for people of other faiths to participate, learn and enjoy. I might like to learn to make a gingerbread house, though I doubt I’ll ever develop a taste for eggnog. But if a party is presented as a “seasonal” or “holiday” party, and ends up really being predominantly a celebration of one faith, that would be more bothersome to me.
We have invited Christian friends to our seders, and Chanukah, and they have invited us to their Christmas celebration. It was informative and enjoyable. Openness is a good thing.
@panpacific You need to speak in facts. Yale student body is close to three-quarters white, see:http://oir.yale.edu/yale-factsheet
As an aside, some people might be well intentioned, but ignorant. Recently, our supermarket, which caters to a large Jewish population, put up the first of its Chanukah display… They put out matzo :-B
I was using that, in part, to illustrate the point that one can be privileged in one context and be marginalized in the other. Sometimes to the point of effectively erasing other privileges as the case of my older Black college classmate and several other cases I have heard from other URM classmates/colleagues from similar upper/upper-middle class backgrounds.
In fact, one shameful historical event which underscored this was the 1921 Tulsa Riots which was not only motivated by racial hatred of the Black community there, but also because many of them were so wealthy a part of it was known as “The Black Wall Street”. The White rioters ended up burning down the entire community and subsequent local authorities attempted to prevent the rebuilding of the Black community there. There were even a few lawsuits to get the municipality and state to establish resources for healthcare and educational funding for current Greenwood residents and an 2007 attempt to pass a bill in congress to extend the statute of limitations due to the fact records and other documentation related to the riots had long been suppressed according to the plaintiffs.
We know that verbal bullying is painful for most people. Most people don’t like being repeatedly insulted. And having someone else patiently explain to you that you just shouldn’t pay attention to your bullies because words don’t hurt-- it doesn’t work. Trying to apply rationality to emotions never works.
It’s good that you can ignore bullies, Pizzagirl, but most people can’t. And telling them that they should be able to is not helpful. It just makes things worse. Instead of telling the victims that if they just ignore it it’ll go away (pro tip: it doesn’t) we need to tell the bullies to stop bullying.
I agree that we need to “tell the bullies to stop bullying” @CardinalFang, but that doesn’t work either. If it did the problem would be solved by now. So what do we do in the meantime? It’s very hard for teenagers to do, but we have to encourage them to dig down deep and find their own value.
My mother used to always say “your value does not decrease because of someone else’s inability to see your worth.”
I agree, CF. I was talking about jerks, not bullies. Two different things.
The guy in the other room dressed in a way that offends me is a jerk. He hasn’t done anything to me personally; he doesn’t care about me one way or the other. The guy who comes up to me and calls me a vile name (etc) or threatens my physical safety or says I don’t belong in a place I have every right to be at is a bully. I agree bullies shouldn’t be ignored, but jerks can be.
The double-standard illustrated here is interesting.
Incidentally, I’ve had HS classmates and colleagues get accused harshly and harassed by classmates and even some idiot older alums/parents for “lacking school spirit” and “trying to run a campus tradition” when they complained about the noise in a nearly identical situation as the above…except substitute frequent Div. 1 sports rallies/parties/riots, belligerent drunken students*, and loud obnoxious fraternity parties for marginalized student protests.
I’ve been present on campuses when such sports/fraternity type activities were occurring and was relieved I was only visiting and not attending/living on that campus 24/7. In fact, some parents here on CC still wonder what’s wrong with attending a college well-known for being a “party school”.
- And one can experience them even off-campus as I and several neighbors/friends in my Boston area neighborhood found to our dismay after seeing them in action or their signs in the form of vomit, attempts to start fights with passersby/LEOs, and vandalized/damaged property which the local LEOs traced to some fraternities from 2 nearby private Boston area universities.
When people lower down in social and institutional hierarchies criticize the speech acts of those higher up, it often reads as insubordination, defiance, or insolence. When things go the other way, it tends to read as business as usual.
http://chronicle.com/article/When-Free-Speech-Becomes-a/234207/
I don’t get your point, cobrat. I’m not a fan of disruptive sports celebrations or disruptive fraternity parties either.
If the above was so effective in handling bullying, we wouldn’t need the EEOC and Federal mandates on how HR/employers must handle training, reporting, processing, and disciplining whenever discriminatory actions, harassment, or creating a hostile work environment comes up. No need to involved the government…especially the Federal government. Employers/employees could just “work it out among themselves”, the victim could “ignore it”/“try talking to the offender”, etc etc etc.
One online blogger discussing this issue wondered why is it children/teens/young adults are expected to “work it out themselves” without involving authority figures when bullying or a hostile environment occurs in school or other child/teen venues when this very same expectation isn’t held for adults in workplaces or in other adult venues.
We even have at least one poster calling for the expulsion of marginalized students for the crime of exercising free speech, however harshly.
The very same free speech…harshness included which two recent court rulings have found were protected by the first amendment and thus, arresting/prosecuting someone for such is unconstitutional even when exercised against LEOs however unwise and rude it may be.
I’m confused as to how this relates to the situation at Yale.
@boolaHI http://oir.yale.edu/sites/default/files/FACTSHEET_(2014-15)_3.pdf
Because Yale’s “setup”, I think the racial makeup of Yale College has a much bigger impact to the undergraduate students’ experience. 57% reported to be white included multi-racial, and the international students making up 10% student body (which could easily have more non-white than white) weren’t reported here. It is not an overwhelmingly white society. And I believe among the white, the “offenders” are even fewer. Again, I think it’s nothing outrageous to suggest that this is the type of environment where dialogue can be tried to approach sensitive issues such as Halloween costumes and their impact to others in the community.
@panpacific Why don’t you start, without qualifiers, by stating you are incorrect by saying that you were incorrect by stating that more than half of the Yale student population is non-white :
White and Other 72%
In the spirit of telling our stories rather than “what-ifs”, I was blessed to be invited by my Jewish roommate to her family’s Seder one year in college.
That rich experience of a Jewish Seder caused me to begin to reflect uncomfortably on the Paschal meals that my intelligent, well-meaning Catholic mother introduced to our family and then to our church in the seventies. Paschal meals still pop up frequently in Christian churches during Lent/Holy Week and essentially involve holding a Seder (food and word-wise) in a Christian setting, sometimes with some of the Christian story appended to the end. When I was little, I loved those Paschal Meals. It can be argued that one of the central events of the Christian experience is Christ’s sitting down to a Seder meal with his friends. But to me, now, it’s a clear example of inappropriate cultural appropriation. Today, in my own church, we celebrate Maundy Thursday with our church’s traditional service, breaking for a meal in the middle that has early Christian rather than Jewish roots.
I’m not sure exactly how this all fits into the discussion above, except to say that the lines between welcoming inclusion and alienating appropriation can sometimes be difficult to draw, and our awareness of which is which sometimes grows with time and experience. All of which , at least for me, points to the importance of open and constructive dialogue, concrete personal narratives and experiences, careful listening, and, distinguishing between the Positive Intent of (for example) @Sue22 's daugher and the kind of blatant racism that @Tampa2015 described
At Yale, students were complaining about noise from campus protests disrupting their ability to study in the library and some experienced harsh criticism from some protesters for studying rather than standing in solidarity with them by joining them in protest or wearing something signifying solidarity with them.
I was citing a nearly identical experience some classmates had on their campuses…except instead of complaining about noise from protesters from/supportive of marginalized groups…the disruptive to their studying noise they were complaining about and for which they received similarly harsh criticisms from the offending parties and sometimes older alums/parents were from Div I sports rallies/parties/riots, belligerent drunks, and loud obnoxious fraternity parties.
And yet, not only would there be less support for those in my classmates’ situation versus the similarly disrupted Yale students, some idiot older alums/parents…including a few completely assimilated older relatives in my own family would feel my classmates were in the wrong for complaining about all that noise disrupting their ability to study because “school spirit!”, “Campus tradition!”, “OMG! Stop being so serious about school!”
I think that was Amherst, not Yale.