Well a university president did write an apology for having cotton as a decoration. So it’s definitely far more than one crazy. It’s a culture of crazy. And even worse, a culture of accommodating crazy.
There’s a lot of fear out there. Sure, we probably could have gotten away with calling this crazy. But it’s hard to tell which way the zeitgeist will blow. End up on the wrong side and you end up in big trouble.
And that is the REAL problem.
The left won’t call out the crazy on the far left…and therefore the “right” thinks the left IS fucking crazy…and therefore Donald Trump ensues…
Not to say the right doesn’t often also fall in the same trap…
But seriously people of all sides…call out this crazy shit…
The black students were right to call out the University president.
Inviting black students over for a black students dinner, and specifically selecting cotton stems for the centerpiece of that dinner, is offensive and ignorant.
That’s not the same at all as being offended by Hobby Lobby offering the product. The context matters.
So the whipping post in my parterre has to come down, I guess? Pity.
That makes sense. Kinda like showing your feet to an Arab. It sounds stupid, but if it’s something that most in a culture agree is offensive, we should respect it.
It’s not hard to understand why showing a dirty part of your body would come to be seen as offensive in Arab culture, so I don’t know what you mean by “sounds stupid.” As cultural traditions go, that one ain’t hard to understand and explain.
And this is even worse. It takes some willful blindness not to see why intentionally selecting cotton as the centerpiece for a black students dinner is offensive.
The student reaction was perfectly appropriate. They asked why it had been selected, and listed it among various complaints about the evening. Pretty mild. Even more mild than the conservative reaction to the story, IMO.
Especially considering that the President had a dinner with Hispanic students the night before and served tacos (no joke).
More info here:
The day before, the school president invited Latino students for dinner and served fajitas. This day, he invited black students and served cornbread and collard greens, with cotton-stalk decorations.
The criticism seems pretty damn reasonable to me. Not the end of the world, but serving stereotypical food, with slavery-related imagery (even if it wasn’t intended that way) decor, is pretty frickin’ tone deaf at best.
Would a “fabric of our lives” joke be offensive now?
He sounds about as sensitive as Fuzzy Zoeller when Tiger Woods won the 1997 Masters:
“So, you know what you guys do when he gets in here? You pat him on the back and say congratulations and enjoy it and tell him not to serve fried chicken next year.”
He should have served them baloney and mayonnaise sandwiches on white bread.
“Welcome, my friends. I would be honored to share with you the cuisine of my people.”
Good news. Nobody on the left gives a damn when some idiot claims cotton is racist. We just ignore idiots like that.
The only people who care are conservatives. If you want to find a single outraged left winger, just look for the crowd of outraged right wingers surrounding him or her. Easily offended conservatives outnumber easily offended liberals by around twenty to one.
These nuts are inspired by someone. And ridiculing the goofy “that cotton is racist” is not really outrage. It’s appropriate ridicule.
I’m not seeing that. All of these responses are taking this way more seriously than it deserves:
All of these came before the first example of ridicule:
I remember a few years back someone at the Zynga forums was whining that Farmville was racist because cotton was one of the crops you could plant. People basically told them to shut up.
But raw cotton is decorative. I see it around quite a bit, specially around Christmas. What makes the school president a moron isn’t the cotton; it’s the “I can’t think unless someone hands me a stereotype”.
My underwear is HELLA racist! Strict segregation of yellow in the front and brown in the back.
Exactly. It’s about context.
Frankly, I want to see this moron throw a party for the school’s Armenian population, or Tuvans, or some other ethnicity which doesn’t have a distinctive hat and food in his mind. I just want to see what inspired idiocy this moron comes up with.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not angry, upset, outraged, etc…
Mostly…I’m just tired of it all. Emotionally and spiritually weary of being on pins-and-needles that some innocent, innocuous something is going to offend someone, somewhere, somehow.