Eugene Volokh on the now-official “microaggression” of criticising leftist assumptions:
I’m happy to say that I’m just going to keep on microaggressing. I like to think that I’m generally polite, so I won’t express these views rudely. And I try not to inject my own irrelevant opinions into classes I teach, so there are many situations in which I won’t bring up these views simply because it’s not my job to express my views in those contexts. But the document that I quote isn’t about keeping classes on-topic or preventing personal insults — it’s about suppressing particular viewpoints. And what’s tenure for, if not to resist these attempts to stop the expression of unpopular views?
If, for example, you don’t regard a person’s melanin level as both a fascinating detail of their being and an inexhaustible license to invoke victimhood and deference, then you’re probably committing a microaggression. And the publicly-funded University of California thinks you may be “sending denigrating messages” and “creating a hostile learning environment” because you aren’t awed and enthralled by how brown a person is.
Charles C W Cooke finds a modern echo of an old George Orwell quote:
“We don’t want to hear about these bourgeois writers like Shakespeare,” says [Californian school teacher, Dana] Disbiber. “Worry not, teaching him helps the progressive cause,” replies [New Republic columnist, Elizabeth Stoker] Bruenig… When politics is everything and everything is politics, nothing escapes the commissar’s judgment. It is one thing to analyse art for its political content — critically necessary even – but it is quite another to subjugate one’s view of that art to one’s politics.
Of course Orwell, like Shakespeare, is – to use Disbiber’s parlance – a dead white male, and worse, a critic of piously narrow attitudes like those of Dana Disbiber. We must therefore regard both authors as insufficiently progressive and entirely devoid of relevance.
And in other thrilling academic news:
Utah Valley University, with an enrolment of about 34,000 students, is trying out a staircase with lanes. Lane one is for walkers, two for runners and three for texters.
Feel free to share your own links and snippets below. It’s what these posts are for.
We all looked round the other day to make sure no one else was there, and then we…talked about how we really don’t think Bruce Jenner is a woman.
Shh. Don’t tell anyone I said that.
Texting while you walk down a busy staircase? Only the brightest go to university, you know.
Microaggressions are the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership (from Diversity in the Classroom, UCLA Diversity & Faculty Development, 2014). The first step in addressing microaggressions is to recognize when a microaggression has occurred and what message it may be sending. The context of the relationship and situation is critical. Below are common themes to which microaggressions attach….
Trans: “Listen up, whitey. If there’s something about the way you walk, talk….. hell, even the car you drive; if it pisses one of us off for whatever reason, you’re finished, you hear?”
If there’s something about the way you walk, talk…
What’s insulting is the assumption that such unilateral leverage – in effect, the power to threaten someone’s job based on the most loaded, subjective and question-begging criteria – would never be exploited opportunistically or for reasons of petty malice. Even though it’s a license for precisely that kind of behaviour.
I have a standard reply when I’m “invited” to one of these seminars.
“I’d love to attend, but unfortunately it clashes with my Klan meeting.”
What the Clown Quarter™ requires are exchanges between human beings that are totally anodyne and free from nuance- this, from those who profess to teach the humanities (one assumes that the really long shoes are a bit of a give-away).
And what would happen if you played it back at them? Say that you join one of these faculties and you’re on the receiving end of a deluge of PC boilerplate:
“What? Lady, who do you think I am? You’ve got my CV, haven’t you? You’ll have read the part where it says I worked on an assembly line, got made redundant, then won a bursary and paid my other expenses by working as a bouncer at one of these off-campus bars that your students like so much. And yet you think that because I am brown-skinned you have to talk to me in that strange way? You’re bein’ condescending- I call microaggression on y’all”.
Stop using the word “denigrating”!
Stop using the word denigrating and start doing it.
These very special and most sensitive people will one day leave the hallowed halls of academia nuts and face the hell that is the real world. Where the micro aggressions are the sized of watermelons.
These very special and most sensitive people will one day leave the hallowed halls of academia nuts and face the hell that is the real world
Heh…I remember being told by a high school teacher that very soon we would be leaving the safe confines of general education and have to face the “real world” of college. That place where you would be told, “look to the person on your left, now look to the person on your right. At the end of this semester neither of those people will be there”. Which itself seemed like an odd objective for someone you were paying for your education.
We’ve gone from one extreme to the other, though in my opinion neither was any reflection on the “real world”. Yet both extremes are manifestations of the same root cause. That is that in the real “real world” when people are given absolute authority with no accountability, this leads to failure.
Taxpayers may wonder why their money is going towards teaching Marxism.
And by teaching Marxism, I don’t mean studying it like one would dissect a piglet in biology class, but rather using Marxism to analyze society.
“A graduate student lecturer at Rutgers University recently tweeted “until the entire system changes there are no good white people. There are only less bad white people” to his more than 500 followers. The tweet by Kevin Allred, a self-described queer feminist who is also white, told The College Fix in an email that he stands by his comments. “[W]hiteness plays an invisible role in dominating and oppressing everyone else.” Allred is currently teaching a summer course at Rutgers called “Politicizing Beyoncé.””
http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/22991/
there are no good white people. There are only less bad white people
Somewhat related:
Guess who.
rjmadden- I attended Utah Valley University for a semester just after high school when it was still Utah Valley State College. It’s the type of University that should have the motto, “You’re already accepted.”
I did well there, almost always top of the class. Then I went to a real University. That said, they had nice covered walkways between all the buildings.
Anyone else notice how the awful events in Charleston have unleashed a storm of social justice lunacy. It’s as if those who have been clinging to the imaginary “microaggressions” and the selective usage of deaths at police hands (which usually turn out not to be as simple as racist white cop v harmless black child) now have something tangible to grab hold of.
They are smothering social media and the mainstream media with the idea that Charleston is just another ordinary day for black people who are constantly singled out for oppression and genocidal levels of murder by white people.
And that the failure to classify the killings as “terrorism” shows our double standards when it comes to the hallowed “people of colour”
And that “white privilege” is being arrested for mass murder (when you are not resisting arrest) without being dumped in the dirt but black girls get manhandled for having a pool party.
It’s like the lid has come off and finally the SJW’s simplistic demonization of whitey and deification of “people of colour” as Jesus like in their victimhood has been vindicated.
God forbid anyone point out hate facts like the fact that statistically, white on black violence is extremely rare (even if we take into account police brutality) and that white people are far more likely to be victims of black on white violence than visa versa.
No no no! Hate facts are not allowed you racists.
That last line says it all. We have an equally irresponsible Media, that has been the vanguard of where we are today.