What I wonder is how many students were let out of tests and assignments because well… they demanded it? It doesnt look like much learning was taking place at that school.
“Sorry I couldnt do my homework, I was busy attacking white staff members”.
In an attempt to move these discussions forward I want to expand on this.
Cognitive dissonance or the mental discomfort of finding out a fact that you were not aware of and provides a conflict with two beliefs or moral views is not uncommon.
Privilege is NOT AN INSULT but call feel like one or yes sometimes used as one, just as the term ignorance is. We are not omniscient, we simply are mostly ignorant, and privilege is one example as a case where that is often true.
Unless you believe you are some type of omniscient god to not take insult to someone pointing out that there are ideas and information that you may just not have experienced. And check your pride when you assume that you some how know how someone else feels.
Fragility is also a pretty good term for what happens with ‘white fragility’ or in other types. Where a person, even due to no fault of their own, have no possibility of knowing some information but also lack the ability to talk about the subject.
Both of these terms even if they are used as an insult do not need to be taken as an insult. If you want to de-weaponize them you have a choice to do so by just refusing to view them as an insult and address the topic at hand.
The crux is if you just ignore it or show it down with irrelevant counter examples you are not addressing it. And yes people will get pissed off and frustrated by this and to be honest even if you simply ignore it you are adding to the problem.
When a person says “Political candidate X is causing problem Y” returning with “Well political candidate A also caused problem Y or problem Z two decades ago” does nothing to solve problem Y.
People are justifiably frustrated with problem Y never being honestly discussed and problem Y will never be solved. As the discussion is about problem Y and not problem Z it is not useful to focus on problem Z at the same time even if it is important.
If you are concerned that the terms white privilege and white fragility are weaponized you have the power to disarm them. You can do so by simply choosing to not taking it personally, not trying to shift the blame, and staying on topic.
If someone said “I think you are stepping on my foot” you do not solve that problem by saying that “well Bill Clinton stepped on this other persons foot” you simply look at your own foot and see if it is true.
If you practice this a few times and work through the discomfort it will become painfully obvious how childish and unnecessary your previous response was.
Yes there will still be sexists, racists and bigots on all sides, but eradicating all of them is not in scope at all.
This is a misdirection, and the only people who are still stewing about this are people who are trying to use it as a proxy for ad hominem attack related to national politics.
You do realize you are talking about a private collage that is famous for not having grades BTW?
Yeah, I wonder. Got any idea?
Focusing on a small college with an enrollment smaller than most school districts which has been declining for years, which accepts 95% of applicants and has no grades, no departments, and no majors as the only example for months of outrage shows the argument is pretty weak anyway.
It is merely a special case to justify the mythology of terrified white men.
To fight ignorance, and to also show that men don’t need to be afraid of admitting being wrong.
Evergreen is a publicly funded college, just not part of our state University system, so I was wrong but that doesn’t change majority of my point.
Wow, somehow doing the right thing wasn’t painful…
I’m not terrified.
You can call me ignorant but I thought the term “College” meant real learning like grades, tests, papers, all nighters getting ready for finals, sweating thru tests, taking good notes, etc… My college, the University of Kansas, had all those and they did kick students out who didnt make grades.
Your right, I expected a little more from a place called a “college”. And your right, this level of stupidity is rare at REAL universities and I should not focus on it.
Why would any real student who desires to work hard in an academically challenging environment leading to a respected degree waste their time and money there?
No I wasn’t. Sorry I wont bring up Evergreen again.
BTW, if they dont have grades, then how do they make sure the students learn?
Isn’t it obvious? They get to yell and scream at white teachers and protest the assignment of homework while having ignorant Americans think they represent the entire base of Liberal thought and/or the Democratic Party.
I see that KU education is spectacular.
The teachers give a pass fail by the teachers evaluation, which is why some of the claims made by the video you provided were clearly not realistic to me. If you piss off a teacher enough they can simply fail you in the course and without grades you have no recourse. I personally didn’t like the idea as I want feedback or metrics, so I can’t answer why others may find the idea compelling.
Right. Me either. But my background was more in the sciences and grades were based on things like tests and labs.
Tests for example, were graded by computers and you were either right or wrong on a calculus test.
OTOH I can see it as a good life lesson because often you have to kiss up to your boss and its always good to be on the good side with your professor.
I wonder if this is a kind of “last chance” college for students who couldnt get in or couldnt hack a real university?
Looking back I remember all the students who flunked out of KU their freshmen year because they couldnt hack the heavy homework and work load and hadn’t learned good study habits. They often switched to community colleges which like Evergreen, took anyone.
Do you understand the difference between “isolated incident” and “indicative of politics as a whole”? You can’t take one isolated incident, point to another isolated incident, and say, “this is representative of typical politics in the US”. It isn’t even indicative of a movement! And what the fuck does that have to do with what happened at Evergreen?
Bit of a shifting of the goal posts here. Yes, a general hostility towards those who will wear MAGA hats on campus is definitely a thing at institutes of higher learning. This should come as no shock; in an environment that tends to lean smart and young, Trump is phenomenally unpopular. Wearing a MAGA hat doesn’t just say “I’m a republican”, it specifically says “I support Trump”. It’s akin to, say, having a “black lives matter” or “Fuck Trump” bumper sticker in Buttfuck, Texas - see what kind of reactions you get there. Or showing up in literally any hick town high school wearing a shirt from the rival town’s high school football team.
But no. Nice try, but no. This is a very different story. If this were, in fact, emblematic of colleges as a whole, you would be able to bring up stories like the riots at Evergreen - not two teenagers wearing MAGA hats to a historically black college the week of Charlottesville and seeing some backlash - on a regular basis. These “alternative media” sources you bring up would guarantee it! But you can’t, and that’s my point - this kind of thing does not happen regularly. It’s not typical. It’s a rarity. It’s not a real problem.
Yeah, you really don’t. You’ve made all kinds of insinuations about how awful Evergreen is, and how it’s a hippy-dippy-radical-leftist school that makes no sense and where students get coddled and don’t learn anything. Here’s the thing, though - it really isn’t. Graduation rates, post-graduation earnings, and student loan repayment, all well above the national median. By all accounts, Evergreen is a thoroughly decent liberal arts college, whose students go on to find decent employment.
So if we’re talking about whether these actions are emblematic of the school as a whole… Well, no. Fuck no. Not any more than god knows how many schools should be seen as “That rioting school” because their students land them headlines by setting cars on fire after losing (or winning) some sports game. It’s just that when a student screws up at Evergreen, right-wing hack pundits take it upon themselves to turn it into national news.
Ever seen Penn State after a football game? :rolleyes: Most schools have some kind of riots or parties or something. Ohio State riots over winning a football game. Evergreen riots for social justice. Somehow the latter is national news, and the former is just what we expect after a sports game.
(Side note - the same thing happens after major protests. The average San Francisco NFL game leads to 11 arrests. But when 20 Antifa activists were arrested at a far larger protest in Berkeley, this is suddenly national news.)
Keep in mind that these are college students - young, often still teenagers, and often quite stupid. You are complaining about a bunch of teenagers demanding “no homework”. Shit, I should transport you to every single high school classroom in the world for some perspective.
Again, I feel the need to point out that college students rioting is nothing new. Ohio State rioted after they won a football championship. Notre Dame’s football team is named after a particularly famous riot against the KKK. Here’s a little list of noteworthy riots - number 20 might interest you. Notice how many of these are over sports or over nothing whatsoever.
You’re treating this like a big deal we really need to deal with. It’s really not.
But that’s just it - leftist protesters go overboard protesting racism at evergreen, and the entire “alternative media” freaks out over it for weeks, months, years (seriously how long are you going to flog this single fucking case as though it were emblematic of colleges as a whole?), right-wing politicians argue we should privatize a state college which is, by all means, reasonably successful, the campus sees countless threats of violence, students get doxxed and threatened, and ultimately the right-wing backlash is far more significant than the actual event.
That is the part of this which is emblematic of policy in America. Abusive accusations of abuse of accusations of sexism/bigotry are a real, endemic problem. You don’t really address any of my points, beyond saying, “Hey, maybe privatizing this college is a good idea if the students are going to riot like that!”
So with that in mind, do you support privatizing University of Mississippi? 
To be clear, Evergreen is ranked #7 in top public schools in the Western region of the country. It’s not a #1 school, but it’s also very far from a “last chance” college.
My transcript from UNCA is 1 page long. My Evergreen transcript, for twice as many years, is thirty pages long.
Every single professor wrote a full-page evaluation of the work I did in their class. In one science/history of agriculture class, I lamed out on the weekly homework assignments, and this shows up in the transcript. My transcript also mentions that I did extra research to challenge the veracity of claims in one of our textbooks, and that I filled a gap in the syllabus (the history of post-Civil War agriculture in the South) with an excellent project/presentation I did with a friend, and my score on the soil chemistry exam.
My transcript also includes the full-page evaluations I wrote of my own work. Sometimes my opinions of my work differed from my professors: in some cases I evaluated myself more harshly, and in other cases less harshly than my professors did.
If you don’t want any feedback from professors, Evergreen is the wrong school for you. If the only feedback you want is a grade, Evergreen is the wrong school for you. If you want an insane level of feedback, go to Evergreen.
And yes, it has a very strong science program.
If my explanation on why Evergreen wasn’t right for me made it sound like a sub-par school I apologize. It serves a very specific population, but that small population is often highly self motivated.
A self motivated student will learn more from the back of a cereal box than a legacy ivy league student will if they are just trying to get a piece of paper.
It is fairly common for Community Colleges to have better teachers and more access to those teachers compared to a lot of research schools BTW.
Yes, and it works fucking beautifully if what you are trying to achieve is electing Donald Trump president, losign both houses of congress, losing the majority of governor’s mansions and state legislatures and dealing with a shift in the Supreme Court.
It doesn’t make the claim that black 15-19 year old boys are 21 times more likely to be shot that 15-19 year old white boys based on 1200 shootings of 15-19 year old boys. It is using a data set of 1200 shootings but that includes ALL shootings for which they have data. They are reaching this statistical conclusion based on a few dozen shootings.
In a democracy, you have no other choice. If you don’t really care about changing society then all you are really doing is whining and hoping to annoy society into doing what you want. Without popular support, and voter support I don’t see how you get the changes you think you want.
Its a horrible thing. Its a cancer on reasoned rational thought.
No, its called democracy. Throwing tantrums just gets you ignored or disdained.
Its the only reason that counts.
Of course you do. Only piss-poor democracies are tyrannies of the majority with no judicial checks and balances.
Patience and education of the next generation, usually.
A cancer, you don’t say?
Anyway, exclusive reliance on supposed “reasonable, rational thought” is highly overrated, especially when its underlying assumptions, like whiteness, are never questioned.
Hell, here you’ll find peoplearguing how rational the Nazis were. That’s what prizing rationality über alles gets you.
Pre-Civil Rights America (the era we were specifically discussing there) was not a democracy in anything but name, any more than Apartheid-era South Africa was.
History shows that’s not *entirely *the case.
… for the fragile Whites. For the oppressed PoCs, not so much.
Here, try an experiment - put “democracy” in one hand, and shit in the other, and tell me which gets filled first…