“Universities Are Trying To Teach Faculty How To Spot Microaggressions”
“”The term ‘microaggression’ is really professional jargon that has arisen from research on the subject, and it obviously doesn’t translate well to a popular audience,” he added.
The reason schools are doing this, according to University of Illinois urban planning professor Stacy Anne Harwood, is because students are demanding it. Students in recent years have engaged in activism around campus climate issues tied to race and treatment of minorities…
“The reaction is more like, ‘Oh, we have to be [politically correct] and ‘thought police,’ without thinking about well, if your words are harming people and limiting access and contributing to students dropping out and not succeeding,” Harwood said. “There is this disconnect.””
Oh my god. It pisses me off so, so much that people saw this list and immediately perceived it to be a limit of free speech. Why can’t a brown person ask a white person to stop being hurtful without that white person freaking out like their civil liberties are being limited??? Why is it everyone’s right to be offensive to me, and my responsibility to just take it and avoid making anyone uncomfortable with my emotions???
I think about this sometimes- in kindergarten, we were taught that sometimes people would do things we didn’t want them to be doing, and to react by turning to them and saying “I don’t like that, please stop that.” But we were not taught that sometimes we would be the ones doing the wrong thing, even if we didn’t think what we were doing was wrong, and we were not taught to have a moment of self-critical thought. So there are some people who still respond with a sneer and a tantrum.
(^ written before the past six months of protests on campus around safe spaces/free speech. I don’t think I would write it this way today, but I’m not re-writing it because I want to keep those thoughts…)
