The whole discussion of the Mizzou issue of DU has made me wonder why it is so easy for us

[La Lioness Priyanka]

to sympathize with those in power (administrators, deans, professors who decide exams are more important than risk to life), rather than empathize with those with no power.

Even on a liberal board, our first instinct seems to be to point to the POC students and say they are making a big deal or being big babies, instead of trying to understand what they may be experiencing.

I don't get it. I don't get why our first instinct is not to believe the marginalized.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

1. honestly, i am not sure why i posted this here

probably should have posted this in GD, but i don't really want to deal with these unsympathetic people today.

[HassleCat]

2. Because most people haven't been marginalized

It's difficult to sympathize with another person's difficulties if you haven't had a similar experience.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

3. i agree with you but i think people should be able to draw from other areas in their lives

i have never faced threats for my race, but i have for gender/sexual orientation. therefore, i can empathize with people persecuted for their race.

i really don't understand this less of lack of empathy.

Cognitively i know you are right, emotionally i don't understand it.

[randys1]

4. Havent paid much attention to this story, so people here are showing sympathy

for the wealthy white boss, and not the minorities.

No surprise.

You cant be a liberal and do that, sorry.

[randys1]

10. Yes, most of the time rich white person BAD , YES

Boy do I bring it out of them or what

Another scary person on the internet, this stalking is really getting scary ...

[randys1]

12. What is funny is you are a stalker, you are here to cause shit, probably from

another well known website that does nothing but stalk liberals.

It isnt funny at all, actually.

It is scary, threatening, etc.

You and your buddies can fuck around with me online all you want, but please dont harm my coworkers or family, wife, etc.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

17. holy crap. what happened

[randys1]

18. One of my stalkers, can the mods tell me what was said please

[JustAnotherGen]

22. I didn't see it

It would have to be someone on MIRT who could tell IF it wasn't a long time member.

[randys1]

23. No, new poster, one post, surely stalking me.

[daleanime]

5. For some people it might be just because...

we tend to think of ourselves as in control, even though we know that's not true, making it easier to sympathize with them. When you add in automatic 'respect for authority' and 'this side looks like me', unfortunately a large part of the problem, and you have a truly toxic stew.

[JustAnotherGen]

6. No - it's a good question

I'm glad you posted.

I think well - I'm not alone in my idea that I don't feel comfortable discussing all issues at DU. A one or two liner yes - but some things I can only discuss while nagivating in black spaces. *sigh*

[Digital Puppy]

19. I'm surprised the OP didn't get an alert and hide.... n/t

[Chitown Kev]

7. Part of it is

that it seems as if only blacks are taking center stage

The University of Missouri student newspaper, The Maneater, actually has a timeline with links to a very impressive set of stories...the protests at Mizzou, for example, actually started when Mizzou cut health care for grad students...it's not a mistake that the hunger striker was a grad student that had multiple complaints with the Mizzou administration...not simply on "black issues" on campus.

BTW, Mizzou has a world-renowned journalism school and looking at their student newspaper, I can see why....those are some damn good stories and news coverage

[tishaLA]

8. Which part of the story are you talking about?

Because there are important distinctions to my mind. If you're talking about the professor who sent a snarky email to his class about an exam, I agree with you. He, and we, should understand the threats the students feel they are under, especially when we know there were death threats involved.

If you're talking about the incident with the student photojournalist, I don't., and frankly I wouldn't be disappointed if the two faculty members involved with that incident were given extended leaves of absence. For the students, it's a different story. As I said in a post about the video the other day, I have the pleasures of teaching fine students at an acclaimed university and one of the things I love about college kids is their desire to push boundaries, to test limits, to challenge paradigms. And it's sometimes the thing I deplore about them, as well. The energy of youth is sometimes accompanied by a hubris that an effective educator can channel into intellectual inquiry, but ineffective (or complacent, or disinterested) ones cannot.

Much of this goes back to the ineffectiveness of the departing administration, I think, because it looks like a rudderless university that turned the other way when students were subjected to racist taunts and a culture of discrimination. For that reason, I understand what I consider the overreaction of some of the students, but I'm not about to forgive the student body VP who, on MSNBC this morning, said “I personally am tired of hearing that First Amendment rights protect students when they are creating a hostile and unsafe learning environment for myself and for other students here."

Sorry, nope.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

13. so you think people have a right on campus to create a hostile environment for minorities?

[tishaLA]

15. I'm afraid I didn't say that

[La Lioness Priyanka]

16. i am really confused about what you are saying, hence i am asking for clarifications

which part of the student's statement did you disagree with

[tishaLA]

20. I can provide numerous examples...

I'll try a couple.

In a course I teach each summer that deals with representations of race and inequality, I have sometimes taught Dave Chappelle's old skit about Clayton Bigsby, the blind black white supremacist, which I think is a sublime example of tropes of race and privilege--especially the way it implicates affluent whites with its PBS Frontline framing--and it has led to really good discussions about the construction of identity, how those identities are represented, etc. One year, a student objected to the video because of the liberal use of "nigger" throughout the skit because she thought the word was ipso facto hurtful. I told her that I understood her concerns, but that I felt the kind of intellectual work the skit permits also has to be taken into consideration when the other students in the class and I use language that offended her. She wasn't happy about it, and I understood that, but we moved on and, about 8 years later, we still email each other. (I should also say that this class was part of a program that entering underrepresented students at UCLA can opt to take in the summer before the official start of the school year; classes are almost entirely "minority," but since the "Color Blind California" initiative, a few low-income white students are part of the program of about 700 students each year, but they are distinctly outnumbered and mostly non-white instructors, both professors and grad students, teach the classes.)

I have also used Chappelle's "Niggar Family" skit, sometimes alongside the Bigsby episode.

One more, this time more quickly, I hope. When I was a grad student, I was a TA for a white professor who assigned Harriet Wilson's book "Our Nig," the first known novel by an African American woman, for the class; she also assigned "Huckleberry Finn" and "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and I think we all know the problems associated with those books from a teaching perspective. The white professor refused to say the name of Wilson's book, preferring to call it "Wilson's text" or "Wilson's novel," which I saw as a supreme cop out: if you are going to assign the text, even if you are white, you can at least use its name. So she obviously didn't repeat the more "colorful" language in Uncle Tom's Cabin or Huckleberry Finn, either. But I did, not because I wanted to offend my students, but because as a then-graduate student of literature, and now as a professor of it, my job is to examine language. It seemed to me, and it still seems to me, that not being honest about what Stowe or Twain wrote did a disservice to both their education and the novels. Funny fact: the only thing that offended my students in that class was when I discussed Leslie Fiedler's canonical argument about the "innocent homosexuality" between Jim and Huck and the queerness of Bartleby the Scrivener.

So each of these instances are about how to balance the educational mission with language's potential to harm. I feel in both instances that I did the right thing, but others may disagree. I do not think this is the same as hurling racist insults at students,

[La Lioness Priyanka]

21. i agree about the positions you took in both these examples

[Kind of Blue]

24. May I suggest reading and listening

to some contemporary sociologists, one in particular, who can break it down easily and perhaps even som black existentialists thinkers/philosophers?

Starting with Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, her lectures to me are directed to white liberals/progressives. Here is her paper http://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/viewFile/249/116

Below, two of her videos, one is a lecture and over an hour, the other is less than 9minutes.

"What Does It Mean To Be White? Author & race studies professor and scholar Dr. Robin DiAngelo describes how race shapes the lives of white people, explains what makes racism so hard for whites to see, and speaks back to popular white narratives that work to deny racism."

The Sketch Factor: Policing Racial Boundaries Through Everyday Discourse

Everything by Tim Wise http://www.timwise.org/

If after, DiAngelo and Wise, you want to know more of The black existentialist philosopher I'm following, I'll send more info.

I hope these two thinkers help

[Kind of Blue]

25. From DiAngelo's paper that I think

Last edited Thu Nov 12, 2015, 06:49 PM - Edit history (1)

can answer part of your question:

Entitlement to racial comfort
"In the dominant position, whites are almost always racially comfortable and thus
have developed unchallenged expectations to remain so (DiAngelo, 2006b). Whites have not had to build tolerance for racial discomfort and thus when racial discomfort arises, whites typically respond as if something is wrong, and blame the person or event that triggered the discomfort (usually a person of color).

This blame results in a socially-sanctioned array of counter-moves against the perceived source of the discomfort, including: penalization; retaliation; isolation; ostracization; and refusal to continue engagement. White insistence on racial comfort ensures that racism will not be faced. This insistence also functions to punish those who break white codes of comfort. Whites often confuse comfort with safety and state that we don’t feel safe when what we really mean is that we don’t feel comfortable. This trivializes our history of brutality towards people of color and perverts the reality of that history. Because we don’t think complexly about racism, we don’t ask ourselves what safety means from a position of societal dominance, or the impact on people of color, given our history, for whites to complain about our safety when we are merely talking about racism."

[mcar]

26. I always ask

"Have you walked in those shoes?" If not, you don't have perspective.

SO and I saw "Suffragette" last weekend. Good film but I'm still pissed off at what those men put women through. SO really liked the movie but as a white male didn't have the same reaction as did I. He is sympathetic but hasn't walked in a woman's shoes. I haven't walked in an AfAm's shoes. I can sympathize but I have no grounds to comment.

Hope that makes sense. Thanks for this thread.