The articles and open letters that student groups have been releasing give a more detailed (though obviously biased) view of the situation that shows how complex it is. Here's one from the protests at Claremont McKenna, worth reading to understand where they are coming from: http://cmcforum.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/FINALMarginal...

On the flip side, organizers of groups and movements should be held accountable since they directly represent their movement. Earlier today, a protest organizer at Smith College demanded that only journalists that "agreed to explicitly state they supported the movement in their articles" would be welcome at the event. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/11/19/th...

I was raised by journalists and academics. To me, there's no question that universities must be neutral platforms and good journalism reports what's there without taking a side. But I am a straight white man from a middle-class family.

A supporter of the movement will tell you that the elevation of free inquiry and free expression to "value" status, as something with intrinsic worth and deserving of protection, was a fraud perpetrated by white men to sustain their power. A good many of my acquaintances actually believe the idea that there is objective truth that you can uncover scientifically is a similar fraud, so that white male academics would have access to tools like rational arguments or pointing out logical fallacies to better oppress everyone else.

To these people, the only thing that matters is the subjective "lived experience" of people who are not straight white men. Everything else can go to hell. Viewed in this light, their actions actually make perfect sense.

That's a hard problem. It does seem like there has been a lot of talk and not a lot of walk from the people/institutions that hold power, and if I were on the activism side, I'd also be extremely frustrated. Not related to that open letter, but this article gives a view into some of that frustration: https://medium.com/@aaronzlewis/what-s-really-going-on-at-ya...

What's interesting is that the closest case I can find that relates to how some of these student protestors, who seem to be mostly liberal, perceive the situation, are conservatives. In reaction to social science studies that show that, say, African-Americans are systematically disenfranchised in the country, some conservatives attack social science itself, saying that it is inherently leftist, or biased in some way, the methodology is wrong, it's not a real science, etc. Similarly, some activists, like you said, would respond to the appeals to free inquiry and free expression by attacking the 'holiness' of free inquiry and free expression. Certainly possible that that's all a fraud to elevate those in power, but they seem pretty self-evident to me, not the least because free expression and inquiry, on the whole, seem to benefit the minority rather than those in power IMO.

I experienced this in a discussion several years ago with a young lesbian university student (I'm not trying to shoehorn a complex individual into a category - I'm merely adding context). She referred to me as "cis" meaning Cisgender or that my sexuality agrees with my gender. The way she used it was in the white-straight-guy sense of the term, which to translate further meant any perspective I held was probably tainted, unremarkable, and privileged. I was quite a bit older than her so that possibly added an extra layer of distrust.

Getting back to Cisgender, I'd never heard the term before that point but I thought it was fascinating: that by defining people by gender and sexuality it becomes a kind of matrix. You could define yourself as a gay male sexually while possessing the gender of a female. In effect you're in a straight relationship (female and male) but really it's more granular. I actually like the idea. At least by asking about gender-sexuality matrices I was able to turn the discussion into something a bit more positive with the student. But...yeah, in those situations just ask questions. Your perspective isn't welcome.

I don't think it's generally in terms of sexual attraction?

I think "cisgender" is at least mostly (maybe completely?) synonymous with "not transgender".

This is my understanding of the terminology, based mainly on tumblr posts probably.

When I mentioned matrices I was trying to describe how you could identify, gender-wise, as a male yet have the physical sex of a female and sexually identify as a homosexual (attracted to other males), which results ultimately in a (physically) male and female relationship...which could then be defined as homosexual if the (physical) male were to accept the (physical) female as transgendered and for him to identify sexually as homosexual and male gender-wise.

I was hoping to illustrate if you break apart gender identity, physical sex, and sexuality you can come up with combinations that are best explained in a matrix or grid (two dimensions) because linear descriptions can seem convoluted.

When I was a kid (<5, so in the early 90's), my parents didn't let me leave the neighborhood, and probably rightfully so as I didn't live in a "safe" area. However, my elementary school didn't even let us walk freely on the same block as our school. I then moved to Palau, where my parents were from, in which the local kids make their own firecrackers with kerosene and mountain dew cans. To go from such a protected environment to a less protected one got me to see two different worlds...and may be "balanced" me out.

Either way, when I returned to the US a few years ago, and I've begun to see this protectiveness intensify. Just today, I saw kids walking on the street lead by an adult with their hands holding onto a string. When I was a kid, I perhaps walked holding hands with a partner in line, but a string? I've even seen children on a leash...

I understand, we should look to protect vulnerable children and teens from bad situations, but after a while, should we let people who are, as the article says, old enough to drive, marry, own guns, and some old enough to smoke and drink alcohol, make decisions and perhaps face the consequences of those decisions? This makes them more receptive to situations were they might be hurt or feel offense, and given that they are bound to face this, it will just make them better people and better adults.

The desire to feel safe and worry-free is instinctive and powerful, but at the same time I believe we should not let the pursuit of that state get in the way of what makes life actually interesting and a unique experience; risk, failure, sadness, anger, and all the other "negative" things are just as important to experience as happiness and the feeling of security.

Yeah, this particular thing isn't terribly new. This was around in the 1990's, and quite possibly even earlier than that.

I assume you mean the way he was treated was disappointing, not that he acted as a role-model for young, inexperienced and still developing students.

When you say he was mistakenly expecting reason, I think if he was having a discussion with each individual he would have been convincing.

When it comes to hanging out with people I live by a (perhaps mean-spirited) rule - the larger the group of people you're talking to, the fewer topics you can delve into deeply. If you have one person you can find a common topic that you can share and dive into. However if someone else joins the two of you, you now need to find a common topic between the three of you. The likely outcome is that it will need to be more popular and less esoteric, thus probably less interesting. Now have a group of people: discussion will be centered around what's on TV etc and political or philosophical discussions need to be watered down heavily or cut out of the discussion. I think a similar thing is going on here - the crowd, collectively, is dumb. Even if it's composed of smart individuals.

These "kids" can't regulate their emotions or put themselves in another person's shoes. Those are difficult things. Teaching them isn't easy either.

This started when someone at Yale sent a relatively anodyne email suggesting (but not ordering!) students be reasonably racially conscious in their costume choices (ie no blackface) [0], and someone who is "charged with setting the 'intellectual, social, and ethical tone of the College'" [1] decided to salt the wound and mocked the idea that students may be legitimately offended by cultural appropriation [2].

As mostly male white people, it's easy to defend free speech when it isn't your people or culture being treated as a costume.

If you're curious about Yale, imagine, for starters, how living in, say, Calhoun hall would feel if you're black [3].

   Calhoun College, one of the 12 residential colleges at the heart of the 
   university’s undergraduate life. It is named for John C. Calhoun, a Yale 
   valedictorian-turned-politician from South Carolina and one of the 19th 
   century’s foremost white supremacists, who promoted slavery as "a positive 
   good."

[1] http://silliman.yalecollege.yale.edu/people/masters-office

[2] https://www.thefire.org/email-from-erika-christakis-dressing...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/nyregion/yale-in-debate-ov...

Repackaging a Reddit comment I wrote:

Actually, let's back up a bit and talk about Elihu Yale, the namesake of the university, who was a slave trader[0]. Anyone who is oppressed by living in a Calhoun building, should have first thought about how they'd feel about spending years on a campus named after a slave trader, putting his name on their résumés and personal history for the rest of their lives, giving money to such an institution (either now, or later as alumni donations), building a career on the name of a man who enslaved their people. Yale has also been funded by slavery[1]. To be honest I had no idea this was the case, but I had a feeling if you dig deep enough, pretty much everything has a past that is looked down upon from the modern view.

Bottom line is that if you're looking for offense, you'll find it everywhere. You can decide to either reboot the entire society because it's all irrevocably tainted by people with some negative elements of their legacies, you can choose not to go to Yale because it's named after a slaver, or you can accept that it's just a name after all and doesn't have any actual oppressive effects on your life.

[0] http://digitalhistories.yctl.org/2014/11/01/elihu-yale-was-a... [1] http://www.yaleslavery.org/Endowments/e2schol.html

I do not know of any black people at my school who openly criticize this recent string of college protests (the debate seems to be predominantly centered around blacks in these incidents). Surely, if this pain is something only black people can understand and they are so united in this movement, then it suggests that their grievances ARE legitimate.

... and yet, something feels wrong here. Something feels wrong when I see hyperbolic signs like "our culture is not a costume" or retroactive counterarguments like "it's not only about the Halloween Costumes". Something feels wrong when I see people sharing FB statuses with #concernedstudent1950 when it implies they support the demands made by the student group [1]. Something feels wrong when my peers believe that whites cannot be the victims of racism, due to their racial privilege. I don't have a good response to your points, but I'm interested to see others' replies to your comment.

At any rate, all I'm sure of is that the political climate has dramatically changed in the last 2 years.

[1] http://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/columbiatribune....

The ability to have protests like we've seen on campuses and elsewhere are defended entirely on 1st amendment grounds. Watering that down to push an agenda, no matter how righteous, is the kind of idea only those truly ignorant of history would propose.

http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/civil-rights-first-amend...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinker_v._Des_Moines_Independe...

etc.

They can wear nun's dresses or vicar's clothes with very inappropriate insinuations, etc. (given the "misconduct" of priests, etc.)

Or banning Nazi, Ghadaffi, Kone, BinLaden, etc. costumes, they are in poor taste, but I don't see the merit in banning them outright. Or doing untoward things to the effigies of unpopular politicians.

It's my opinion, and I imagine others would be offended, and I might be offended by some costumes, maybe even feel uneasy about them, but I still would say people have the right to express themselves, so long as they don't engage in threatening behavior. Some (political) expression will feel very uncomfortable, but that's necessary to have in a free-ish society.

If the situation was the reverse of now and the majority was openly racist and found anti-racism costumes offensive [say, Martin Luther King Jr costumes] ... would you still favor banning "offensive" costumes?

I guess I just feel we don't have the luxury of determining what speech should be allowed because sometimes the majority is in the wrong.

Please don't stop here - please try to understand where their grievances are coming from. College is when a lot of people are at their most radical, and on top of that, a lot of nuance is lost in soundbites. There's a lot of noise out there.

I think something especially important that's lost on people here is how emotionally exhausting it is to live in a place where you're constantly denigrated (I mean it's the root of that word, lol). It's especially hard to draw an empathetic picture when there's no common personably relatable situation to draw a comparison to. Like at best you could say "it's like getting picked on for being a nerd," except that misses the hundreds of years of American slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, media representation, and a hundred other small issues.

And then that's multiplied by the fact that when you try to explain it to a single person, you face a mountain of resistance every time, and the rest of your society doesn't really want to hear your complaints. Most people in this thread won't even acknowledge that they MIGHT have a point! Imagine that every day in every interaction for your entire life!

I disagree with the point being made that not alienating students (and minority students in particular) is more important than free speech, but...

if you are downvoting because you don't like what is being said then that speaks volumes for what you really think about the importance of free speech, and your actions are essentially the same as the students trying to shout down the professor.

x0x0, I disagree with you, and think that free speech is more important, but have my upvote.

There are other ways to express your opinion of the value of said speech without trying to remove someone's ability to participate in the discussion.

The email wasn't saying that white students should be able to wear blackface without feeling uncomfortable - in fact it said the opposite - that social norming (e.g. making people feel uncomfortable for wearing offensive costumes) was the way to deal with the problem, rather than the university dictating what students should/shouldn't wear.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3760275 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

Arguing in favor of both simultaneously is completely incoherent.

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/194874/per...

You know what.... all races behave badly sometimes and make others feel bad. It's not a white phenomenon. People should be more sensitive towards others. But others should also be less quick to take offense at every perceived or imagined slight. That's just how it's gotta be for this all to work out. Otherwise it's a cycle of negativity with no forgiveness and no progress towards an integrated society.

Saint Patrick's Day.

For someone who drags up history, are you really going to pretend that Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Assembly aren't the reason we can protest in the first place?

https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/rights-protesters

http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/civil-rights-first-amend...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinker_v._Des_Moines_Independe...

etc.

One of the more interesting philosophy courses centered on whiteness and critical race theory, and was taught by a brilliant professor named George Yancy. I remember talking with him as we headed out of the building one night, and we were debating terminology after he had shared an interesting story about walking down the sidewalk while traffic was backed up beside him. As we was walking, he noticed that a number of drivers were reaching over and locking their doors (again) as this black man in suit with a red hat was walking near them. A really stupid little action on their part that made them feel safer—conscious or not—but one that was kind of mind-boggling to him as he walked. It wasn’t just one car, but a large number of them even though it looked like the doors were already locked. Racist? Definitely; he was shoehorned into this stereotype of a “black gangster/thug” that might try to carjack them in broad daylight or otherwise threaten them. They took preventive action to protect themselves from this perceived threat, and the general consensus was to label the action as racist. But the question I asked him was whether the term worked in this context. When we hear the term “racist,” the first thing that comes to mind are images of the KKK. Lynchings. Slavery. Overseers trying to “cure” drapetomania (mental illness causing slaves to run away) by “whipping the devil” out of their slaves (interesting how the cure for supposed illness matched up with their normal practices so perfectly). No one wants to be lumped into that sort of company, so the immediate response is to deny it. “I’m no racist! [insert reasons X,Y,Z here].” He felt that there’s definitely a difference, but that the label still worked because it sought to critique racism in its less obvious forms. In other words, the shock of having one’s actions compared to the horrors of the past helps pin down racial privilege behind the scenes that isn’t even given conscious thought.

My argument was that the term is so loaded that it prevents that introspection from occurring. Worse yet, it whips up a frantic frenzy to avoid the charge that serves to further mask that privilege from being seen. Consider an authoritarian state where neighbors are in a rush to inform on one another, constantly pushing further in an all-out effort to avoid becoming the focus of the state’s secret police themselves. Rather than address the substance of the critique, the individual being critiqued is so concerned with the label associated with the critique--"racist"--that they avoid hearing the critique at all.

The end result is that two groups find themselves looking at the same term and using two radically different definitions for it that are, effectively, mutually exclusive. And the worst part is that neither group realizes that they give such radically different meaning to the same term, leading to confusion and pain for all involved while stifling even the hope for meaningful progress. Neither group will ever be able to fully understand these differences without sustained dialogue between them. That dialogue may be painful at times, but it’s still necessary if you hope to see any sort of change or progress. That’s where free speech comes in.

The students at Yale, and those supporting the broader push for “safe spaces” in general, are missing this point to the point where they're undermining the very progress they seek to achieve. Not just because they’re mocked in the media, but because they’re preventing it from occurring in the first place. What good is it to push for everyone to feel “safe” on campus (again, it comes down to how we define yet another word) if those outside that group don’t understand what it is that makes them feel unsafe in the first place. Authoritarian efforts to force this issue, to carve out the so-called safe space by squashing other voices can only end in one thing: the creation of a new, sacred cow. You aren’t creating a dialogue that fosters genuine understanding and respect. You’re purposely avoiding it, which only serves to take the sacred cow in your midst and have it set aside and ignored out of fear of giving offense. The end result is that those you believe to be marginalized are marginalized further.

Nowhere in the Christakis email does she “salt the wound.” It’s an intellectual effort to engage a debate about Halloween costumes and the nature of interpersonal communication in this context. Agree with her or disagree as you wish. But engage her points; don’t make up this interpretation in order to justify ignoring and silencing her in the first place.

Race relations and progress with them have never been easy. Much of their history is written in pain and blood. Why would anyone be so foolish as to think that you can force this issue and avoid the discomfort that comes with engaging with one another? It's an attempt to take a shortcut that avoids the very reasons for the journey itself. Even if you succeed, you only manage to mask the very issues that concerned you in the first place.

If I find Mexican clothing nice, let's say, and I wear it to a "let's celebrate Mexico" party, how on earth is that offensive? Is it also offensive when the people of some other country wear American clothing and use red solo cups at their parties?

There aren't candidates of arguably the most powerful nation in the world getting airtime to millions to holler about deporting your kind just because you're Mexican

To elaborate: It's cherry-picking. Why should people pick fun/cute/cool parts of a culture without considering the utter bullshit hurled at that culture for it existing?

http://cheshireinthemiddle.tumblr.com/post/131407267302/ginz...

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoxJKmuoBmE&list=PLvIqJIL2kO...