Luckily, my head already exploded this morning, so this story, from College Fix, did no further damage:
The student newspaper at Evergreen State College has a section in its opinion pages described as “for people of color by people of color.”
“This should be a place where we can be us without it being overshadowed by the dark cloud that is living under white supremacy and having to see things from a white perspective. This is why when we do cover these issues it will be in the context and from the perspective of POC and POC only,” according to the section’s editors as they reintroduced it to readers in September.
The anonymous column, known as “POC Talk,” debuted in the bi-weekly Cooper Point Journal last year and returned this fall to the newspaper’s pages following racial unrest that erupted at the public university this past spring.
“Dear White people, please take a step back, this isn’t brown-people-answer-white-people’s-questions-hour, we’re asking specifically for submissions from POC,” the section’s editors added in their September intro. “As being told no seems to be a difficult concept for some of y’all I await your emails about the Irish, how the term white fragility is mean (great example of white fragility) and how we need to view people through a color-blind lens (just lol). You will 100% not get a response!!!”
- You remember Evergreen, don’t you?
- I want to hear prominent voices in the black community, Democrats, and progressives, condemning this. Republicans and conservatives can’t because that will mean they are racists.
- Is this school receiving federal funds? It shouldn’t be.
- Cue the “white racism is different from black racism, which isn’t really racism but a reasonable response to historical and cultural factors” apologists! A white school that dared to have a “white opinions only” section in a school publication would be attacked far and wide as an example of alt-right creep. There is no difference.
- The reference in the headline is to this post…
Ethics Alarms 
Again, I’ve concluded the solution to misery of all these unhappy students of color is re-segregating colleges and universities. Schools should be made “Coloreds Only.” What’s old is new again.
Remember when saying “people should be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin” was not racist? Now somehow that is racist. The concept that we should be colorblind has turned into we should clearly see others color, and expect them to act in a way that we associate with people of that color (or in that group for that matter).
“Is this school receiving federal funds? It shouldn’t be.”
Student newspapers have editorial independence from the university.
They are still funded though federal money.
So you are saying that there would be no problem with the KKK having a page dedicated to their despicable beliefs? This is no different.
As a social justice leftist, I hate to say it.
But parts of the social justice are now indistinguishable from a segregationist movement.
And you don’t see that as a natural consequence of “social justice”?
No. It is a perversion of social justice.
What’s your definition of social justice?
The Google definition of “justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society” works for me. Note that does not say equality of distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society; there will always be some level of inequality in all of these. What I think all “social justice warriors” have in common is that we believe these inequalities could and should be reduced from their present state.
But a “POC-only” section of a student newspaper does nothing to reduce inequality, and like many radical social justice warriors, the idiots behind this are only perpetuating inequality.
It certainly would ring true among many, especially those looking for power or with an axe to grind, that “justice” for decades of segregation would include some type of segregation in reverse.
With as nebulous an idea as justice, it opens the doors for all sorts of retribution for perceived slights, not the least of which includes turnabout.
There are scores of people who think that a little discrimination against white males is perfectly fine, since they’ve been on the receiving end of preferential treatment for so long. Is this not justice?
No, it’s vengeance, which is often confused with justice.
This is not unique to social justice.
And how does one differentiate between justice and vengeance? Why is stealing a person’s life (whether thru capital punishment or life imprisonment) justice, while revenge killing is not justice?
Hahahahaha, just like the reason Communism keeps failing is that no one’s done it right yet?
No, not like that at all. Social justice has plenty of success stories. The Civil Rights Act, the 19th Amendment, Obergefell v Hodges…
Of course, it also has many failures. Capitalism also has successes and failures. I am unaware of any Communist success stories, on a societal level.
There aren’t any Communist or tight socialist success stories, Venezuela is just the latest failure. Of course the Civil Rights Act has had its share of problems, the 19th Amendment gave us Harding, and Obergefell is creating as many problems as it is solving. I might add that the Civil Rights Act was created with as much input from business leaders, etc as from social justice loudmouths who never tried to read a balance sheet, and the 19th amendment was passed as much by persuasion and patriotism as it was by SJW bullying.
Well, to be fair, I think that if the suffragettes could time travel between 1920 and now, and saw their movement being being lumped in with 2017 social justice, they’d probably hide their heads in paper bags and die from shame.
I think both JFK and LBJ, the motivating men behind the Civil Rights Act, would look at the current SJW movement and go “huh?” I also don’t doubt there are more than a few gay people who, with the ruling in Obergefell, would just as soon partner up however they want to, and move on with their lives, and get out of the SJW business.
I’m not sure how valid it is to assert specifically how individuals or movements would have reacted to certain things, I know I just did that with my suffragette example, but that was more of a “there two things are very different” assertion than an “I know how x would have responded” assertion.
Comparing “literally shaking” over sticker campaigns, screaming at the sky, and safe space culture to the Abolitionists, Suffrage movements, and 50’s era CIvil RIghts movements is almost offensive. And if that’s where one has to go to make a point, perhaps the point is better off not being made.
Comparing “literally shaking” over sticker campaigns, screaming at the sky, and safe space culture to the Abolitionists, Suffrage movements, and 50’s era CIvil RIghts movements is almost offensive.
Of course, that wasn’t the comparison. That’s the face of social justice you choose to pay attention to…just as many chose to pay attention to the Back to Africa movement, the pro-communism, and other ridiculous aspects of the Civil Rights movement in order to discredit the whole thing.
Ok Chris…. Give Social Justice it’s best representation: What issues from 2017 would you stack up against Emancipation, Suffrage and Jim Crow repeal?
What Chris is describing as social justice isn’t the motivation behind or movement responsible for The Civil Rights Act, the 19th Amendment, Obergefell v Hodges…that was the proper operation of law guaranteeing the inalienable rights Jefferson identified: life, liberty, and the pusuit if hapiness.
Social justice warriors, in contrast, attempt to use the government to enforce non-existent rights at terrible cost to society, fairness and justice: the right to equal success and results rather than equal opportunity to see those results, the right to avoid the consequences of bad decisions; the right to claim the fruit of another’s honest toil, the right to take the life of the unborn, the right to take away from current citizens as compensation for the misdeeds of past citizens; the right to censor expression and eliminate the right to arm oneself for “the greater good”
I missed a few, I know.
Gosh. When you put it that way, you make it sound like the society that Social Justice Warriors envision isn’t much better than a barbarism protected by law.
Really?
Well, it just sounds a lot like taking from others, harming the weak, and dis-empowering individuals to stop those actions.
That sounds like barbarism to me.
Only it would be protected by law.
What Chris is describing as social justice isn’t the motivation behind or movement responsible for The Civil Rights Act, the 19th Amendment, Obergefell v Hodges…that was the proper operation of law guaranteeing the inalienable rights Jefferson identified: life, liberty, and the pursuit if happiness.
You say this, but I have been called a social justice warrior for supporting gay marriage.
That’s because gay marriage was already supported by more than one section of the Constitution, and is a clear example of Jefferson’s right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. No new right, just one that we had unjustly denied.
No, it’s the logical natural conclusion, and you just haven’t thought it through. I get your brand of social justice, and it’s even nobly intended, but there are no natural stopgaps between the good intention and the insanity, and so the movement is doomed to die on hills like this.
Bingo.
It seems to me that a lot of “social justice” advocates read Animal Farm and think, “Those pigs had a pretty sweet setup.”
Just kidding. None of them have read Animal Farm.
Evergreen was the same school that produced Rachel Corrie, the idiot who essentially majored in leftist activism before she got pressed flat by an armored bulldozer while trying to protect a gang of PLO terrorists. To the left, she’s a hero and a martyr, whose death was covered up by a racist state, while to anyone with any sense she looks like a fool. The best part of this was that all happened 14 years ago, before all this Black Lives Matter and Resistance crap got started. The fact that a school that would produce an idiot such as this is now publishing something like this should come as no surprise to anyone with any sense.
The left say they are about kindness, about harmony, about love, about equality, and about a billion other platitudes that boil down to “we’re right, dammit, now shut up, we’re not listening.” The mask has been coming loose since 2014, with the attacks on law enforcement and the casting of the police as hunters of young black men. It just got peeled further and further back as time went on. With the violent hate of the white and the conservative generally this year it was half off, and with the revelation that most of the powerful men on the left are precisely what they accuse men on the right of being, it’s now completely off. The left are a population of the hypocritical (Weinstein and his ilk), the self-pleasing (Bill Clinton), the tyrannical (Hillary Clinton), the narcissistic (Obama), the sociopathic (Lauer), the out-and-out bullied (antifa) and their hangers-on. They are the enemy, and places like Evergreen are their strongholds.
I’m unaware of any efforts to remove federal funding, but there is an effort afoot to take away state funding from Evergreen.
https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/33028/
The “It’s Okay to Be White” catchphrase is first class, advanced-level trolling from the Right. Meme something that no sane or decent-hearted person could possibly disagree with, but that rustles the jimmies of progressives so hard that they can’t help but decry it as oppression and hate speech (as they tend to do with everything.) I don’t generally endorse trolling of any sort, but I am impressed with this.
Absolutely.
The thing about all this that is truly remarkable is the students carving out these “safe spaces” either literally in terms of public locations at colleges or virtually in terms of “people of color” -only pages at newspapers and online fora proclaim their right to do so derives from the desire not to deal with “white fragility.”
Do these people not understand that it is their own fragility driving these exclusions. They are apparently unable to articulate whatever racial issues they have to a white person. Not only that, they require white people not only to sympathize with their perception of racial inequality, but to do so out of their presence, lest they be exposed to “white fragility” and, I don’t know, be permanently scarred by it?
Do these people not see the profound irony in their absurd segregationist crusade? They fear whites might not understand them, yet they call whites fragile and need “safe spaces” so as not to be fractured by white fragility?
Black is white, up is down, left is right, one is two. I wonder if the 1960’s were this weird? I guess they must’ve seemed that way to my parents.
Yes they were, Glenn. And they’re back like a super bug. Stronger and more virulent than ever.
Alright, Ethics Alarmers. I must declare that I had one miserable weekend. A propos of absolutely nothing, and related to nothing on this post, I thought I would relate the weekend’s experiences, simply to show that Ethics Alarms is having a positive impact on your humble correspondent. This is long, so bear with me.
It all began this past Friday evening. Our son is 13, in eighth grade, and is considering high schools choices. The top three are Catholic, and the main differences are the cultures within the schools. The top two choices are all-boy schools, one Jesuit and one Basilian. The other is co-ed. Great schools. Friday night’s descent into madness began with a declaration that the Basilian school is his preferable choice to the Jesuit, resulting in a very strange argument, with hurt feelings, confusion, chaos, and shouting (handled very well by little ol’ me, oh yes, indeed! Sheesh.). On an ethics scale, my handling of the situation is still being calculated as it has passed more than -3500 on the Kelvin Scale of Absolute Stupidity, perhaps setting a new world record.
Anger and recriminations festered until the next morning. I took The Boy to his HSPT prep class. Ah, yes. The exalted HSPT. The all-important, all-consuming, all-destructive HSPT upon which the entire fate of humanity rests. Discussions in route to the class included such observations as, “Great! You left your notebook at home. That shows real organization skills and concern for you to do well, son.” Ethics Score: 2.9, or possibly a 3, if you discount the yellow-to-red light I rolled through.
Then, I returned to home to get some stuff done before picking The Boy up from the class. I was already on edge, and discovered that the pooch had decided to enjoy some of my wife’s lovely tree ornaments and left the resulting elation in shreds in the middle of the living room. That lead to a stern pooch reprimand. Considering that his mind is simply a buzz with constant low-level static, he wagged his tail and asked for a treat. Considering the torn apart ornament, he did not get a cookie. Ethics Score: 6, as I realized that he is still a puppy, the red-coated Santa ornament looked an awful lot like his favorite stuffed jalapeño toy, and was hanging in the perfect spot so he couldn’t resist the temptation.
Aggravated by having to fix a door latch, which took longer than I expected, and cleaning up the destroyed ornament, and a host of other nuisances, I was late picking up The Boy, well, by 2 minutes and nobody was annoyed. The trip to get him though, completely fails to register on the Ethics Score Board because of the many cursings and deleted expletives still echoing in my car. Rush’s “Hemispheres” could not fix that problem. Wow.
After leaving school, I had to get new screws for the door latch. That is when things got really ugly. Mind you, all of this happened between 8:30 am and 12;30 pm. A mere four hours. See? Awful.
I intended to go a local hardware store to get larger flat-headed wood screws and sanding paper to fix the mess I made on the door’s frame. A ten minute drive took well over 30 minutes because of traffic (horrendous), bad drivers (way too many), incessant stop lights (why can’t they be synchronized to ensure traffic flow?!), and already frayed nerves. Now, this hardware store is where you go to get things you won’t find in big stores, and is generally a wonderful experience (except for that damn parrot that shrieks when I walk by, but that is a different story), and the employees are wonderful. For some reason, the entire city of Houston, Texas, decided to be in the store and the same time. I needed two screws and two anchors. Is that too much to ask? They remodeled since the last time I was in the store and moved everything around so I couldn’t find the screw section. The aisle markers hadn’t been changed so I was wandering around looking for screws. I give the store a two-point deduction for that.
At this point, I am no longer rational. I asked a fellow who I believed worked at the store where the screws were. He couldn’t tell because he didn’t work there. I hang my ethics head in shame at my response. I was rude, inconsiderate, and terribly unkind to this man, who was as pleasant as a person could be. I was completely in the wrong. He did not deserve my response. But, I was too committed to being a tool to stop. I walked away in disgust, and then found the damn screws and anchors, which I bought. Then, it dawned on me: I insulted a man with no justification. I had to make it right. Ethics Score: Zero. F-.
I searched the store for the man, and upon seeing him, I could tell he was thinking, “Here comes that jerk.” I approached him, and said, “Sir. I need to apologize to you. I was terribly rude to you and you did not deserve it. I sincerely apologize for my behavior. I am having a bad day and I took it out on you without any justification. hope I haven’t ruined your day. Please accept my apology.” His response: Instead of giving me a much-deserved tongue lashing and possibly a kick in the ethics backside, he said, “Apology accepted. I could tell you were not having a good day. I hope your day gets better.” His Ethics Score: A+. My response: “Sir, you are very kind and I truly appreciate your considerate response.” We shook hands, and smiled, him patting me on the back, reassuring me that “this, too, will pass.” A very nice fellow. My Ethics Apology: I hope a 1, especially because I resolved to settle down and reevaluate my behavior, which I did. My nerves mended and I was less agitated for the rest of the day. That evening, in the confessional, I confessed my terrible conduct especially to my wife, son, and that poor-unsuspecting hardware fellow. The priest gave me advice, absolution, and penance. Which I did.
Then, Sunday, I decided that I would begin the day with a different outlook, especially after eating my wife’s incredibly tasty French toast. Whoa. I worked in the flower beds, trying to tackle that confounded vine-weed thing that keeps covering my gardenias. Man, that is a hardy weed. Oh, I forgot to tell you that I tried to trim my bougainvillea but they would have none of it and scratched the bejesus out of my hands (I didn’t mind because I know they like to fight back and I was prepared to suffer).
I realized I needed topsoil and grass to fill in holes left by the pooch, so I went to Home Depot, which did not have grass. I bought my dirt and went to the upscale garden spot to see if they had grass (they didn’t as it is not the season) and/or azaleas to recommission my flower beds (they only had 2 gallon azaleas which are too small for my needs, to be reassured they will have more in mid-January and on sale). Satisfied, I decided to purchase some poinsettias because my long-suffering wife loves them.
The cashier rang up my purchase but knocked one over and the stems broke. She was kind and apologetic and told me to get another one. A nice Sunday then went weird. This conversation transpired:
She: “I am sorry! I damaged this one. You can get another one to replace it.”
Me: “Yeah, sure.” (pleasantly and not snarky, by any means – she was nice).
She: “That’s, ‘yes, ma’am.'”
Me: “Huh?”
She: “I’m a woman. You said, ‘Yessir.” (Now, she is mid-to-late-teens-early-twenties, tops, attractive, with short hair, dressed in the store’s uniform, African-American, and obviously female.)
Me: “I know you’re female. I didn’t say, ‘yessir.’. I said, ‘Yeah, sure’, about getting another poinsettia.”
She: Adamantly, “No, you said, ‘Yessir’ and I am a woman.”
Me: “I got that. I didn’t say, ‘Yessir’. I am from Ohio, and I would have said, ‘yeppers’ or ‘yup’, not ‘yessir’ to a woman.”
She: “Sir, you said, ‘yessir’. I know what I heard.”
Me: “You think you heard, ‘yessir’ because of the noise from that fan, the children running around and gushing over your Christmas displays, but I absolutely did not say what you think I said.”
She: Defiantly, “Yes, you did.”
Me: “You know what, young lady? This is a pointless conversation. We can keep this up and I will call your manager over to discuss this, if you want. I suggest I go replace me poinsettia and leave. Otherwise, is it going to get really unpleasant, which neither one of us wants or needs. You choose.”
She: Angrily. “Fine. You can get your poinsettia.”
Me: “Oh. Okay. Thanks. Well, not really. I am not pleased by this conversation. You took a comment as an insult which did not occur. You are incorrect and in the wrong. I think you should apologize.”
She: Begrudgingly, “Oh, I’m sorry. Have nice day.”
Me: “Thanks, even though I know you don’t mean it. Take care.”
I left, loaded my poinsettias, turned on Rush’s “Hemispheres” and drove home.
Ethics Score Board: She: 3 as she was inappropriate and rude and really did not want to apologize.
Me: 8 or 9, because I didn’t back down or capitulate for a perceived slight, I didn’t get angry or escalate the situation but stood my ground (probably unnecessarily, but . . .).
jvb
Trying to live an examined life. Congratulations – it never gets easy.
Regarding your last encounter: I know it would be childish and boorish, but how satisfying would it have been to say, as you left the store, “Have a good afternoon, sir!”? I’m not sure I would have been able to resist my inner asshole in that case. You are stronger than me, I think!
I thought about that, but I decided not to be obnoxious anymore than absolutely necessary.
jvb