Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
Milwaukee is still smoldering because a black cop shot an armed black suspect Saturday afternoon and thereby sparked riots by black residents of the city who proceeded to run around looting and burning their own neighborhood. In a moment of clarity, the deceased’s sister called on the mob to “take that shit to the suburbs.” Because, presumably, that’s where the white people somehow responsible live.
Of course, Milwaukee is just the latest powder keg to explode in this downward spiral of race relations in the United States, the other ones going back to Ferguson are all recent history and don’t require expounding upon here. Alongside those major flare-ups of violence is a constant undercurrent of general unrest that seems to be constantly getting worse in every way; and that unrest has taken on a unique and truly bizarre form in academia of late. The concepts of “safe spaces,” “micro-aggressions” and “trigger words” are newspeak terms that originated on college campuses and have done wonders to make having a meaningful discussion about any controversial topic all but impossible. As millions of college students prepare to head off to fall semester classes around the country, it’s likely reasonable to expect the absurdity to be even worse this season.
By way of preview, Yahoo News’ Nicole Ortung posted a nice article on a not-terribly-surprising Facebook post. According to the article, Pitzer College junior Kare Urena was looking for someone to join their off-campus apartment; specifically, someone of color. A classmate then challenged her having this sort of criteria, which prompted Urena to reply “It’s exclusive (because) I don’t want to live with any white folks.” Urena is black.
This apparently sparked quite a debate, which prompted Pitzer President Melivin Oliver, also black and the first black person to lead a Claremont undergrad campus, according to Ortung’s article, to weigh in.
“This is but another example to us that social media is not an effective platform to engage in complex dialogue on seemingly intractable critical issues that have varied histories and contested understandings. They create more heat than light and invite extreme viewpoints that intentionally obfuscate the nuanced context that surrounds these issues,” wrote President Oliver, making an astute observation of social media that frankly needed saying. But, be sure to “like” my Facebook page anyway.
According to the article, the matter was even reported on by The Washington Post, and Urena, and her roommate Sajo Jefferson, expounded upon their rationale therein.
“When and if you understand this context, it becomes clear that students of color seeking a living space that is all-POC (Person Of Color) is not only reasonable, but can be necessary. We live in a world where the living circumstances of POC are grounded in racist social structures that we can not opt out of. These conditions threaten the minds, bodies and souls of people of color both within and without the realms of higher education. We are fighting to exist.”
Come again?
The article reminded me of my time as a student at Western Michigan University in the awesome town of Kalamazoo, Michigan.
On the wall of the Director’s office of the first dorm building I lived in, back in 1996, hung a poster that read: “No one can insult you without your permission.”
At that time, there were some similar inter-racial tensions, though no where as heated as today. The O.J. Simpson murder trial had just wrapped up with an acquittal, Malice Green had been beaten to death a few years earlier in Detroit; his photo was included in the CD booklet of a Pearl Jam album. A little before that, someone with a big, clunky VHS camcorder caught the LAPD beating the hell out of Rodney King. When those officers were acquitted anyway, riots and looting took over Los Angeles.
The 24-hour cable news cycle, at the time dominated by CNN, was the big new, disruptive force in media. Its immediacy made the relative freshness of newspaper reporting seem stale, beginning a downward slide toward oblivion that the then-fledgling Internet would soon hasten along. That same immediacy also served to foment a false sense that bad, bad things were happening all the time because there was news coverage of bad, bad things available at all hours instead of just at the prescribed times local network affiliates aired their newscasts. Not-so-oddly, in coming years the Internet’s literally instant immediacy would only serve to help exaggerate that same notion.
It was against the aforementioned backdrop that during my Sophomore and Junior years at Western, I lived in a “triple” – an odd-shaped, slightly larger room that could, according to the university, accommodate three people. My second year at Western, I was assigned another white kid and a guy from Kenya. My third year, I was assigned an exchange student from Japan and a black guy from Michigan. Both years were awesome.
I’m sure the university continues to mix up students within rooms racially when they put in for a random draw, as I did since none of my friends went to WMU; or, at least I hope so. I’m also sure that poster is long gone from the Director’s office. It has to be; it’s contrary to all that academia preaches today.
That poster hung on a wall I haven’t put eyeballs on in 20 years. I still remember it because I remember being immediately struck by how true it was when I first saw it, and almost embarrassed that I hadn’t had the same thought myself unprovoked. That was only twenty damn years ago!
What the hell has happened? Seriously? I’m only 40, so I can’t be having a real old-person moment because I’m not a real old person yet – I’m not some half-senile nonagenarian decrying the showing of unmarried couples in the same bed on TV here.
And to what end, this self-identifying as a victim? Instead of teaching young people that really, nobody’s opinion matters, and someone can only say something “offensive” if we give their opinion enough weight to care about it; we’re conditioning young people to be vigilant for “trigger words” that represent “micro-aggressions. How the hell is that helpful? Has feeling sorry for one’s self ever helped said person in any way? No. Having self-pity validated by over-sensitive peers doesn’t actually legitimize that self-pity, instead it helps contribute to the prevailing groupthink, and the group thinks they’re victims.
So, really, who’s wrong here, in this case of the off-campus apartment ad? Really, nearly everyone. Some are wrong because they’re just wrong in general because they’ve allowed their individual mind to be swallowed up by the aforementioned groupthink. Others are so because they’re guilty of the sin that I consider to be the root cause of most of the world’s problems today: nobody knows how to mind their own shit.
First, presumably Urena and her roommates are all paying rent to a private property owner, as such they have the absolute right to put whatever limitations they want on prospective roomies, so long as they don’t violate their rental contract. While the spirit of the intent behind their wishes may well fly in the face of the sort of values academia is supposed to teach, the line gets drawn where campus ends. Making such a demand of the student housing department, to be put in a color-controlled dorm room should be a bridge too far, but if you’re paying your own rent, you can set terms. Everyone else needed to mind their own shit.
Is Urena and company’s “reasoning” and explanation an exercise in complete and utter hyperbole? Of course.
The only college students “fighting to exist” are the few that are actually putting themselves through school as strippers. Seriously. It’s college, not a war zone. In fact, colleges were where people went to avoid war zones in the 60s and 70s. And colleges need to do everything they can to quit allowing their students to acquire a sense of perennial victimhood that’s only guaranteed to stunt them as human beings throughout their lives. Worse yet, such attitude only leads to more rampant-non-own-shit-minding. If one never learns to ignore what people who don’t matter say and instead becomes conditioned to react with hostility to anything considered “offensive,” it’s a very short leap for them to rationalize nearly any effort to suppress the source of the perceived offense. This is why people sneak air horns into the auditorium when conservative pundits and writers book campus speaking engagements. This is why “offensive” or “remotely edgy” or “Hillary-critical” Facebook memes and posts get reported and taken down. And then, when the big, mean world won’t quit doing the same damn thing it’s always done – being big and mean – they retreat to their safe spaces to engage in a hive-minded commiseration inside an echo-chamber booming with their wails of perceived self-righteous misery.
Seriously, grow the hell up already.
Any college student who thinks they’re “fighting to exist” is due for a real shock after they turn the tassel on their mortarboard. Just wait until they see what they can do with that degree in art history, or music theory, or broadcast and cable production with a minor in journalism. Just wait until they have, you know, actual problems. Hell, someone give me a “safe space” from the IRS’s macro-frigging-aggressions, already. Please. Sorry, I’m just triggered by the phrase “income tax.”
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