A spin-off of a spin-off! All I know is, I am not starting it.
As a former student of Penn, I wouldn’t put it past 'em. Their dominant ideology is CYOA. Which, um, they didn’t do very well with, either.
I’m sorry, but I’m having trouble parsing about half the sentences in that post. Given that it’s already a hijack of a hijack, maybe I should let it drop here.
I do. I don’t really see why they wouldn’t. If there were a predominantly Black nation at war, massacring a bunch of civilians who had supporters on campus, in response to some horrible thing that had been done to that mostly-Black nation, i think it would have played out similarly.
“Would calling for the genocide of native Americans be against code of conduct on your campus?”
“Well. It depends on if it turns into conduct or not.”
“Would calling for the genocide of Blacks be against the university code of conduct?”
“Depends. In certain contexts it could be harassment …”
Yeah sure that would happen. And I am six feet tall with a full head of hair.
It wouldn’t and the difference is obvious; it is based in the clarity of the presidents’ understanding of those groups as less powerful and oppressed on that line. They know what the reaction would have been.
Reading the Harvard lawsuit linked above might be enlightening. The plaintiffs state that their Zionist identity is integral to their Jewish identity, and document repeated attempts to forbid demonstrations against Israel on Harvard’s campus. Gay might have been thinking about that when she was answering that question: if she said “yes,” she knew the next question would be a “gotcha” about some demonstration or another that the plaintiffs et al considered to be calling for genocide, based on a very specific understanding of Zionism and the state of Israel.
Nice imaginary thought process. As I understand it though it was simpler than that. McGill and Gay were both prepped by the same consultant who prepped them for that sort of question. McGill went first and trained as a lawyer responded in that legalistic way according to her prep. Gay heard that answer and, well copying others work is something she knows how to do 
…
Each would have recognized what the gotcha was if it wasn’t genocide against the Jews but against a group with a higher current oppression score in progressive circles. (The gotcha was starting with River to the Sea, which some claim is not a call for genocide and may be chanted without awareness that it means that to many Jews, and getting them to anchor on that while switching the question to genocide, labeled clearly.)
And this is that blind spot we are talking about.
It’s certainly not controversial here on the Dope to claim that when Ben Gvir or Smotrich calls for removing the Palestinians from Gaza or from the West Bank, this is a call for genocide.
Yet when someone - be it Hamas, a Palestinian activist, or an American college kid - we suddenly get a bunch of equivocating about how calls for the elimination of the state of Israel is only genocidal under certain points of view.
It’s incredibly frustrating.
As I said, reading the lawsuit is illuminating. We’re not talking about “calls for the elimination of the state of Israel.” We’re talking about things like calling for an immediate ceasefire.
Incredibly frustrating, indeed.
Okay, buddy.
It isn’t something you are imagining she might have possibly thought?
Of course it is.
And yes I think it is quite a bit of complicated gymnastics to imagine that.
Relevance? The relative acceptance of a call for genocide against Jews, the question asked, as needing clarity for whether is becoming conduct or needing context? It reflects the thinking among college administrators and students alike.
I am not talking about the lawsuit; I’m talking about the chants we have all seen on the news, of “river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada”.
So not interested.
Okay, but I was, so it’s pretty frustrating to get called out because you were talking about something else.
My experience on Threads suggests that there’s a strain of thought, particularly among young progressives, that racism comes in two forms: institutional and interpersonal. White people can be guilty of both and black people can be guilty of neither. I’ve asked a good many of them, point blank, If five black guys beat up a white guy for being white, would you call them racist? and without exception the answer is always ‘No’. I’m not sure if this school of thought is burgeoning or prevailing, but the sheer number of such exasperating conversations I’ve been involved in suggests to me that it’s more likely the latter.
Now, I’m aware that this could be a mirage. The algorithm might have picked up on the fact that I tend to get involved in these conversations and might be feeding me more of them. It might be that, for some reason I’m unaware of, Threads is particularly hospitable to young people who’ve not had the time to think these issues through. However, I can only go by what I’ve experienced and my experience suggests to me that, at the very least, if progressives whose understanding of their own beliefs is unsophisticated are in a minority then that minority is not negligible.
Individually, I don’t believe these people don’t have any meaningful power to speak of. However, as a group I believe they have a great deal of power. Their combined voices have the power to completely derail important conversations about race, sex, the Israel/Palestine conflict, and a slew of other topics. If there’s one thing we can take away from the ascendancy of Donald Trump it’s that we underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups at our own peril.
Furthermore, I think it’s inevitable that some of these dummies will eventually find themselves elected to positions of power just like dummies from the Tea Party ended up being elected.
I’d be willing to provide you with cites (although I’d rather not cite directly from the conversations I’ve personally been involved in because I post on Threads under my own name). However, I think you’d find it more useful to sign up to Threads yourself and have a look around. If you spend a couple of weeks on Threads posting as you believe a reasonable conservative would post then, if your experience is anything like mine, you’ll be inundated with examples in short order. Obviously, I’ll completely understand if you don’t want to do that so if you’d prefer me to provide some examples then just repeat your request and I’ll oblige.
That wasn’t the question asked.
Despite all the talk about “from the river to the sea”, every time I actually see photos of protests at Harvard, or read reports that spell out what the signs say, they say things like “free Palestine” and “cease-fire”. I read stories of students lying down to simulate death, or sitting quietly in the library holding up signs like those ones. I am once again asking for actual evidence that things are as bad at Harvard as the op-ed pieces claim they are.
I think Gay failed. But it’s partly because she was trying to answer in good faith, based on the actual range of political protests she was dealing with, and the questions weren’t asked in good faith.
That was McGill. Her testimony was by far the worst. And what she said was inexcusable. I don’t have the transcript handy, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what Gay said.
My recollection is that Gay was asked if “from the river to the sea” can be taken as a call for genocide. And later was asked if it’s always a violation of Harvard’s rules of conduct to say that. My verbal recollection isn’t great, but i remember thinking that she was asked ab awkward question.
I don’t know anything about the conversations you get involved with in that forum, nor anything about the people conversing with you there. Nor do I want to get into a hijack about racism in this discussion, so apologies if I’m just dropping this in the thread and leaving it.
However, I think it’s worth pointing out that for decades, a very widespread and well-known interpretation of racism has invoked the concept of “prejudice plus institutional power”. That is, according to this interpretation racism is understood to be something more than just racial prejudice: it’s the combination of racial prejudice with a dominant culture that endorses and enforces that prejudice.
So yes, according to that interpretation—which, again, is not particularly new or niche—it’s valid to say that in the US black people cannot be racist against white people, no matter how much they may be prejudiced against white people on account of their race.
It’s not the fault of young progressives that you somehow missed the existence of this line of thought over the last half-century or so. Nor does it necessarily imply that the young progressives you talk with are unable to recognize or admit that black people can have prejudice against white people.
Okay found a transcript. She was possibly more fumbling but to her credit she also refused to straight answer about calls for genocide against Blacks. So my obvious thought was incorrect.
She had apparently made the mistake of agreeing that intifada and river to the sea meant genocide, or did not correct that anyway, and from there stepped in it.
But she did also respond to a call for mass murder of Blacks with an attempted comment about free speech.
So for her at least I was wrong.
As I used to frequently see on the internet a few years ago, check your privelege. This sounds like something college educated individuals might know while the hoi polloi who didn’t double major in diversity and sensitive, or even go to college, doesn’t. Which is a problem when people try taking their knowledge and terms they learned as an undergraduate and applying them in the real world where such words might be used differently.
Yup.
And the question she answered was squishier.
I don’t know what’s happening at Penn. I have no relation to Penn beyond having worked with a lot of Penn grads in the past. I’ve been following the Harvard and MIT stories much more closely, because I am pretty close to both those schools.