I think I have a more reasonable answer to ITR Champion’s question about minority students at his school versus schools like Yale and Mizzou.
He teaches within MnSCU; so do I. I doubt the demographics of our students are that dissimilar, even if I teach in the Twin Cities and he teaches in Moorhead.
I have a lot of Somali students, with enough African American, Latino, and Asian students to think that this community college is pretty special for diversity. These students do not complain about racism. Many are struggling to get through college financially and academically. Many have an upbeat attitude despite those challenges.
I think the reason these students don’t organize the way students at Yale and Mizzou do is that they do not SEE white students who embody the kind of privilege they do at Yale and even Mizzou. They don’t see preppies and frat boys. They see white students who settled for community college because they’re broke, who had kids in high school, who work full-time jobs selling shoes and cell phones and take classes at night. And they see a faculty of tired, hardworking, and not particularly ivoried or towered.
So the setting makes a big difference. I think the reactions at campuses with more privilege have to do with the privilege.
Probably also something to be said for a residential campus vs. a commuter campus, but I’m not sure if that’s the case in Moorhead.
What he is talking about is reasonableness. The slaves had a reason to feel bad. Any reasonable person in their situation would feel bad.
Contrast that with the plight of the minority students at a top university. They have access to a very valuable commodity, an elite education, and great future prospects. Yet they seem to feel aggrieved and oppressed because not everyone is as nice to them as they would like. Are their feelings reasonable? No, by any reasonable standard they are among the most privileged people who have ever lived and yet they are whining and moaning like toddlers who just had their pacifiers taken away.
:dubious:By that logic, American working-class poor people (that is, not homeless or the like) are unreasonable if they feel poor because by any reasonable standard they have a lot more stuff than most people who have ever lived anywhere. But they’re not in ancient Rome or medieval England or modern Somalia, they’re here, where they are in fact poor. :smack:
The minority university student isn’t comparing himself or herself to people who never got into college, or people who went to community college, or whoever, but to the people around him/her, the other students at the same university. And I don’t think that’s an unreasonable thing to do.
The kind of “reasonableness” we’re talking about here is not an objective standard. It’s a gut feeling. Some people do maintain that poor Americans should feel grateful that they’re not poor Somalis. It all depends on what basis of comparison you choose, and I see no objective argument for choosing one basis over another.
What do you think that people should do in the face of actual racism? That is, actions that through discrimination based on skin color, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, religion, etc., actually limits your ability to move into the kind of social group or career or whatever you want.
Because these kinds of things actually do affect people’s lives. They actually do affect the reality of what is supposed to be a society based on merit. They do actually create hostile social environments for minorities. They actually do create places where bigotry and discrimination that take root and grow and create further inequities.
Why do you consider it “whining and moaning like toddlers” when someone takes to the streets to protest what by any objective perspective is an act that society should consider reprehensible and shameful?
It’s through actions like this that society is actually changed, by shaming the shameful. Indeed, with the rise of the internet and fractured media, the kind of racism that was on the decline for the last few decades now seems to be on the rise again, because they’ve found their shadowy little corners to hide in. The purpose of public protest is to shine a light in those shadows and halt the spread of the pestilence that’s growing there.
And every word of that is legitimate regardless of your relative place in society. If you are being unjustly discriminated against, then that’s unjust, regardless of whether there are people in the world who are worse off than you are.
And what function do you believe that gratitude should play in the lives of people who encounter discrimination? How broadly does that apply?
These discussions are always abstract and they tend to devolve into arguments over what counts as racist, a conversation no sane person wants to be involved in.
What we ought to ask about are specific acts, without worrying about how to label them.
Based on the news, the grievances raised by the students at Yale strike me as extremely lame. It’d be bad enough if they were complaining about an actual Halloween costume, but it wasn’t even that - they were complaining about someone suggesting that the university should not take a position on these hypothetical offensive costumes.
I am willing to admit that I probably don’t have the complete story. We never get the real story from the news. So if there have been some incidents more harmful than the costumes, the building names, the university seal, and that sort of thing, that is what we ought to be talking about.
Not the university—they were complaining about the individuals in charge of their residence hall, whom they view as having the primary responsibility for ensuring that their residence is a secure and non-threatening place.
They were complaining about the residence hall master’s wife, an instructor at the university, who said the university should do better things with its time than scrutinize students’ Halloween costumes.
Then, when the residence hall master, a university professor, responded with something other than complete self-abasement, they threw a literal hissy fit.
If there’s a real problem, let us deal with it. But let’s not bring the higher education system to a halt because someone’s feelings were hurt. Many of these ‘incidents’ are not just trivial, but rather transparent hoaxes.
Erika Christakis was not just the wife of the master. She was also the associate master of the college.
Yes, it’s easy for you from your position and perspective to minimize the students’ concerns and denigrate their reactions. Maybe you should try wearing someone else’s shoes for a moment.
Are you going to listen to students who think there is a problem? Or are you going to judge from where you’er sitting that there’s nothing “real” about it?
Has the higher education system really been brought to a halt at Yale? And are you sure that there is nothing more than hurt feelings at stake? Or that hurt feelings can’t be a “real” problem?
There’s a considerable history of minorities’ concerns about discrimination in society being dismissed as trivial by the majority.
Do you really need cites of racist incidents at ordinary universities? Here are just a few. Note some of the incidents listed occurred at places like U of Iowa, U of Kansas, SUNY-Plattsburgh, BU, Miami University, Bucknell, American University, Alabama, Illinois, Wheaton College, etc. Honestly, the idea that you would need a cite for this is kinda ridiculous.
I don’t think you know my “position and perspective” aside from what I’ve posted above. As for wearing someone else’s shoes, I can say that if I were able to study at Yale, I’d be trying to get an education instead of making a public spectacle of myself over hypothetical Halloween costumes.
These students and others like them exhibit a consumer mentality. They issue lists of demands that would make them feel happy today, but would damage their colleges’ ability to educate them and others. They expect the college to deliver what they demand because they paid tuition. That model may work for a grocery store but it can never work for a college.
If you think the Halloween costume thing was important, we are not going to agree about that. There could be other, more substantive and less controversial issues, that we might agree on. But you would have to tell me what those are, because I don’t see any in what has been reported.
Most of these are unsubstantiated. It may seem unfair to require independent proof of such incidents, but there is an equally long list of hate-crime hoaxes. It’s standard procedure for self-proclaimed anti-racism activists. My favorite one is when a Klan hood was reported on the campus of Oberlin College and they had to cancel class so everyone could recover from the vapors. Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with Oberlin could smell that one coming a mile away.
I’ve heard the term, and you have explained it well in the abstract sense. If I understand it goes something like this: I am a 19 year old black male at Central State U. The administration and the professors are largely white. They do not intentionally discriminate against me, in fact they enact policies in an attempt to ensure I am not discriminated against. But as people, they bring their own life experiences to the table, and for white people it is unconscious racism towards blacks in general which includes me.
How does that manifest itself? When I go to physics class, how is my experience different than white students? How is it different when I go to the student union or hang out at a house party? Try to join a frat or another campus organization? Where will I have a different experience?
That’s exactly what I’ve observed teaching racial minority students both in Minnesota and elsewhere. Most of them are friendly, upbeat, and willing to work hard. They do not believe that they’re the victims of racism, much less that racism is ruining their lives. The contrast with the left-wing Ivy League students couldn’t be sharper.
I would agree that students at Yale are more privileged than students at a community college, or even a university like MSUM. But is there any meaningful difference between the privilege enjoyed by a white Yale student and a black Yale student?
By all accounts, students from all races at the Ivy League schools come mainly from the rich and upper middle class. Perhaps the average white Yalie is richer than the average black Yalie, but not by a whole lot. Perhaps white students are more likely to be in feats. But in what way does that justify the extreme claims we’re getting from students? Here’s the quote from the OP again: "We begged this university to hear our stories about how racism, sexism, and a whole host of other problems prevail … and prevent us from being safe, from being at peace, from being whole and from being well. "
So the students claim that the racism that’s happening at Brown is so bad it ruins their health. I’d think that such a severe problem would be caused by some more severe cause than merely seeing white people who embody privilege.
If some black people at Yale and Princeton don’t feel okay because there are too many white people, they could solve the problem easily by moving to the South Side of Chicago, or to Haiti, or to Nigeria. But I’m fairly sure that the students claiming to be oppressed by the white people in the Ivy League won’t do that.
Because no matter how much they claim that Yale and Princeton are horribly racist places, they know it’s a lie. Yale and Princeton are great places to be black or any other color. Where else would other people spend $60,000 a year to provide you all kinds of luxuries and ask nothing in return? Where else could you always find numerous parties with free booze and all kinds of free athletic events, movies, concerts, and more? Where else is a large staff of adults paid to act like they’re your servants? Certainly not on the South Side or in Haiti.
That’s because they basically are consumers. This is a trend that crept into higher ed long ago, and is both pervasive and largely distinct from the conversation in race in the Ivy League. It’s clear you are not really familiar with the topic when you say things like this.
This is completely speculative and likely untrue. How does tamping down on White supremacy, hiring more minority professors, or ensuring a safe place free from overt racial animus damage a college’s ability to educate students?
It generally does work as evidenced by the fact that the majority of Universities operate this way to some extent, and they in toto are among the best in the world. One of the main reasons US post-secondary schools are the best in the world is because they are responsive to students’ needs as they pertain to both education and extra-curricular activities.
But there actually isn’t an equally long list of hate-crime hoaxes. That’s where you err. Sure it happens, just like false claims of rape, paternity, or anything else, but you generally give someone who has been allegedly victimized the benefit of the doubt. That’s even putting aside the fact that the vast majority of those incidents are not actually unsubstantiated, and that finding “substantiated incidents” of racism is REALLY not that hard. Are you really denying the fact that such incidents exist, or are you just trying to handwave away that specific cite?
Here are somefirsthandexamples. Since, I doubt you’ll read all of that, I will point highlight some of the ways a physics class might be different for a Black student. Slights experienced by Black student range from students not wanting to do group projects with them to professors being condescending or dismissive. Yes, a physics class is not generally going to highlight the racial divide, but even in similar largely academic environments, many people have experienced it.
This first presumes that the number of White people is in an of itself the issue (it’s not), and ignores the fact that college campuses by and large look and feel the way they do by design. What minority students are asking for is for that design to highlight their concerns are well.
I don’t think anyone has claimed that Yale is a “horribly racist place”. Certainly not relative to many other places in the present and recent past. What they are saying is that Yale and other universities have done little to make their campuses fit for many minority students to thrive, and have a lot of work to do to disrupt the inertia of White supremacist policies and perspectives on their campuses.
Who is in a better position to know this, you or an actual Black student at one of these places? I honestly don’t get what you doubt the sincere beliefs and motivations of these students.
You mean nothing in return except $60k (or whatever amount) and multiple voluntary donations in the future? Do you even read what you post?
Again, none of this is free.
Maybe, but the is ample evidence school integration works if it is done in earnest. You do raise in interesting point about Jews given I doubt most people would have consistent beliefs on prescriptive remedies on how to fix discrimination against Jews and Blacks. That said, it’s pretty clear integration worked for Jews. It is part of the reason there are so few of them: they stopped being Jewish.
If racism actually existed at Ivy League schools, it could be factually verified.
For example, many left-wing campus groups complain that people of color are underrepresented on the faculty and imply that this indicates structural racism. It would be easy for a university to investigate if this was caused by racism, or instead by the universities choosing fairly from the pool of qualified scholars. Just compare candidates by measurable qualities, such as papers published, teaching evaluations, and so forth. Determine whether minority candidates with equal qualifications are more, less, or equally likely to get a job offer, vs. white candidates.
Obviously, if there were any real evidence of racist hiring practices at Harvard or Yale, a civil rights investigation would have been launched years ago.
