Academia Anthropology Psychodrama

The Wrong Neighbours

August 30, 2017 by David 159 Comments

In progressive academia, that blueprint of utopia, it appears there’s some unrest: 

Black and Latino student groups at the University of Florida recently protested a plan to house their organisations in one building, saying it would erase and marginalise their black and brown bodies and their cultures at the predominantly white institution.

The university had revealed plans for a U-shaped building that would accommodate both organisations:

The two groups would each get their own wing of the building and simply share a walkway and elevator. 

Sounds swanky.

But members of the Institute of Black Culture and the Institute of Hispanic-Latino Culture expressed fury at the plan.

You see, being so pious, and so very, very special, they mustn’t endure proximity to the wrong level of melanin, what with the risk of contagion and a loss of specialness. A student organiser of the protests, Daniel Clayton, said,

My main complaint to the University administration… is that we are not taken seriously at all. It is not appropriate to dismiss student concerns as being ludicrous.

However, inevitably, university administrators have been cowed by the usual histrionic rumblings and have agreed to build the immensely tolerant groups two entirely separate buildings. And with equal inevitability, the students are now insisting that the new buildings, the cost of which is unclear, should be “visibly distinct from the rest of campus.”




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