Posted on 11/19/2015 1:58:34 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Recent student protests at Mizzou, Georgetown, Yale and other campuses across the country have reignited national conversations about whether the right to freedom of speech should be defended more than the right of students of color not to endure racially charged verbal harassment on college campuses. At Yale, much of this debate has pivoted around an administrative suggestion that students be mindful of the potential racial and cultural insensitivity of their choice in Halloween costumes. After Black students demanded that administrators be more responsive to their concerns, a group of people identifying themselves as "students, faculty, alumni, and other concerned citizens" formed a group called "The Committee for the Defense of Freedom at Yale."
In an open letter to Yale University President Peter Salovey, the group argues that "speech panels that seek to punish, police, or preempt expression have no place at a university like Yale." They also express great disdain for the audacity of students to make "demands," writing that "'Demands' made of our president, in any case, are inappropriate and offensive." (The writers of this petition clearly don't see just how much they sound like their ancestors who balked at "uppity" Negroes who demanded to be treated with dignity.) Finally, they take great issue with the possibility that being forced to do any kind of diversity training "will force students into an environment where they are presumed to be 'microaggressors' and where those who hold different opinions will automatically be delegitimized as racist..."
The ability to fight for a more racially just society is predicated on the ability to name and confront the continued presence of racial injustice through public speech acts that bring attention to these issues. To suggest that the call for a limit to racially harassing language is an attempt to curtail freedom of speech is to grant legitimacy to a deliberate mischaracterization of the issue. Black students exercise their freedom of speech every time they call attention to the racially hostile conditions they face. I exercise my freedom of speech, the linchpin of what universities call "academic freedom," every time I express unpopular racial opinions in the pages of this magazine. We all hold dear the freedom of expression.
The integrity of the U.S. Constitution, the very document that emboldens these anonymous defenders of "freedom," has been secured through the bloodshed of enslaved and lynched Black people. There is no softer way to put it. We fought an entire war so that Black people could access the protections of the constitution. If the Constitution cannot guarantee the right of Black people to move through the world unharassed on the basis of skin color, then it is not worth the paper it was written on.
The suggestion that Black college students who ask not to be confronted with Blackface on Halloween or not to be called "nigger" as they walk through campus are somehow seeking to undercut the power and importance of the Bill of Rights evinces a poor understanding of American History. If the defense of freedom means always defending the right of white people to engage in racial recklessness at the expense of racial minorities, then perhaps we should consider whether freedom is the thing for which we are really fighting.
So these battles on college campuses remind us that white freedom is always prior to Black safety. When administrators use their considerable power on campus as Nicholas and Erika Christakis did at Yale to fight for the right of students to engage in racially offensive costumes, they did so strictly from the vantage point of making the campus hospitable to white students. These conversations about freedom of expression always take white students' experiences as the zero-point of conversation. University policy and advocacy always begins by seeking to secure conditions that make white students feel most safe.
When the experiences of students of color drive discussions of safety, the conversation changes dramatically. Suddenly, considerations of faculty diversity, questions of policing tactics and approaches, and conversations about racial and cultural sensitivity begin to matter. And addressing these matters not only cost money but time and a commitment to vigilance against racism. Such questions and concerns force a confrontation yet again with a Constitution that was never written with the rights of Black people in mind. The securing of rights for Black people has always been a begrudging addendum to the American freedom project.
Those fraught histories show up in stark relief in these conversations about freedom. Most of us are not conceptually equipped to think about what it means to be vigorous defenders of free speech while also acknowledging how hate speech has done and continues to do untold amounts of harm and damage to people of color, especially Black people in the U.S.
Many who defend the right of white students to be racially offensive mistake the problem for one of discomfort. Discomfort, in most cases, does not in fact equate to encroaching on another person's rights. By not being precise in our language, we open ourselves to defining the problem the wrong way. Moreover, in a world where discomfort is the benchmark for administrative or state-based intervention, then privileged students who are discomfited by discussions of their privilege falsely equate their discomfort with the actual unsafety of students who have endured homophobic, anti-Semitic, or antiblack slurs on campus.
I don't have easy answers to these questions. America does not have a one-size-fits-all definition of freedom. Many of us ally ourselves under the banner of constitutional promise, but these schisms remind us just how tortured these solidarities are. The Constitution doesn't love all of us. Black people are a constitutional afterthought, an unplanned birth in a nation without the resources or wherewithal to welcome us into the fold. I know for the liberal-minded this is a hard truth to stomach. But justice, as opposed to liberalism, demands a distinction. I do know that the right of Black students to move around on campuses free of hate speech and overt racial antagonism has to matter as much as everyone's right to freedom of expression. I do know that discomfort and unsafety are not the same thing.
Thus as I have grappled this week with what freedom means to Black people, I return to one of the theorists who has been most influential to my own thinking. Anna Julia Cooper famously wrote in 1892, "When and where I enter in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me." These conditions marked Black freedom in Cooper's estimation: moving through the world with undisputed dignity, without violence enacted upon one's person, and without needing to sue for inclusion or know somebody with power to be treated like a person who matters. When students at Mizzou demanded "safe space," on campus, this is what they meant. This is what they demanded. Yes, many white people perceived these "demands," as the Yale committee said, to be "inappropriate" and "offensive." But dignity, by its very nature, is always a demand, never a request.
The Constitution has enshrined within American democracy the foundational principle that white freedom is always prior to black safety and white rights are always prior to black freedom. To defend freedom of expression without thinking through these histories, and to accuse Black students of attempting to take rights from white students as though they actually have the institutional power to do such a thing, is a gross distortion of the facts.
It is incumbent upon us to reject these facile conversations about freedom and do the hard work of figuring out how we can secure a robust democracy with lively public discourse without endangering and harming students of color on predominantly white campuses. But to do so, we would have to acknowledge that words and language have power. In my faith tradition, our creation myth pivots on the notion that words create worlds. We frequently say to each other, "life and death is in the power of the tongue." Words, like Black lives, matter.
Anyone know what Eric Holder is involved with these days?
The specter of "Ferguson" rioting over a lie about "hands up, don't shoot" didn't keep the flame of racial tension lit, so it's on to more respectable campus demonstrations to keep the flame of racial tension burning. What better place but in the hallowed halls of liberal education - the soft belly of anti-American thought - ready, willing and able to surrender to the culture they've sown?
"Black Lives Matter" needs to join the real world and accept that they have the RIGHT to be offended, just like everyone else. Period.
......[Eric] Holder has openly discussed his role in the angry clashes with Columbia University when he attended in the early 1970s, telling students at a 2009 commencement speech, “I was among a large group of students who felt strongly about the way we thought the world should be, and we weren’t afraid to make our opinions heard. I did not take a final exam until my junior year at Columbia - we were on strike every time finals seemed to roll around.”
Patrisse Cullors, one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, learned “revolutionary community organizing” under the mentorship of Eric Mann, a Students for a Democratic Society radical who helped organize the 1968 protests at Columbia that received widespread national coverage...
How does one pass a course and/or graduate without taking final exams? Is this the Obama Method?
The opinions of anyone coming from #blackjiveblather are crap, as far as I’m concerned. That movement started on a lie and counties it’s existence on perpetuating that lie.
Does anyone believe this really happens in this day and age? I'd have to see a video of it. Even then, I'd still suspect it was a put up.
” Brittney Cooper, teaches Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers”
Author’s titles say it all.
This mind numbed lib needs to go to her/his safe place and lock the door. It’s people like this (and Obama)and all the thugs out there, that are setting race relations back a hundred years.
*continues its existence
“My job is to offend you. I am not trying to make you something you’re not. I am not concerned about dignity. I am here to offend your sensibilities so that you examine your world view”
The late Dr. Jake Kimmey
Associate Professor of Philosophy
University of North Texas
Circa 1985
More crap from the delusional left..
The real world is that whites need to stand up for themselves. This will not stop with BLM, nor 'safe spaces', nor 'micro-aggressions', nor 'White Privilege' nor... Whites and Western Culture are under direct attack. It will only stop when whites stand up as whites and say enough.
Author�€™s titles say it all.”
That's the first thing I thought when I saw her title. That, and it comes from Salon.
Make me king for a day, and I would eliminate all nonsense courses like this from the universities. It's courses like that that educate students to march got free college with no clue how it will be paid for and then go on with Cavuto to get their asses handed to them
I am “standing up” by posting and commenting on @rap this “educator,” and others like her, generate.
More:
You are White, and You Should Feel Bad About That. So Attend This Retreat.
[snip]
Program Description:
Students will have the opportunity to:
- conceptualize and articulate whiteness from a personal and systematic lens;
- recognize and understand white privilege from an individual experience
- as well as the impact of white privilege on the UVM community and beyond;
- build a community of dialogue and support in taking action against racism.
We will explore questions like:
- What does it mean to be white? How does whiteness impact you?
- What action steps can you take individually to interrupt racism
http://www.redstate.com/2015/11/18/white-feel-bad-attend-retreat/
And with a generation of kids IPhoning and Andrioding everything as stills or film, yes you raise a valid question, where is the film footage of said incident...
Dreck.
Wicca?
So far, I only see this has been enforced one way....to enable the harassment of all racial groups at the expense of freedom of speech.
Notice I didn’t say for the benefit of Blacks....that’s because no benefit can be gained from this form of suppression by any visually identifiable group.
No, the only benefit is for members of BLM for political power, and from the pictures I have seen.....most of these leaders in this group and abusing this group are white pulling the strings.
BLM doesn’t even realize they are cheap pawns for these people.
From John Kerry’s “legitimate” Islamic terrorism, to the racist contrivance of “Black Lives Matter”... it’s all about negating reality in celebration of “otherness.”
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/designertribalism-kimball-2204
...........The ethic of Third Worldism dictates that yesterday’s enlightenment be rebaptized as today’s imperialistic oppression.
“.....The Australian anthropologist Roger Sandall does not mention The Tears of the White Man in The Culture Cult, his new collection of essays. But his discussion is everywhere informed by the same spirit of salutary impatience. What Bruckner criticizes as Third Worldism, Sandall castigates as romantic primitivism” and (marvelous phrase) “designer tribalism.” What is romantic primitivism? In the words of Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, it is “the unending revolt of the civilized against civilization.”
Sandall begins with a small but telling contemporary example. In 1996, the actress Lauren Hutton took her two young boys to Africa to witness a bunch of Masai warriors and their witch doctor perform a tribal dance, slaughter a cow, and drink some warm blood straight from the carcass. The whole spectacle was captured for the television audience by Ted Turner’s minions. Miss Hutton loved it: according to Sandall, “Wow!” was her frequent refrain. But her young children, one of whom burst into tears, were terrified. Quite right, too. The purpose of the television show was to show that “Masai culture is just as good as Western civilization, if not better.” Miss Hutton’s enthusiasm was sparked by the display of “authentic” tribal passion. But her children saw the episode for what it was: a glimpse into the heart of darkness, the abyss of uncivilized barbarism....”
: )
I ponder a bit over that too.
Your out of honey mustard sauce!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.