I agree with you, and yet I’m torn. She teaches classes like “Counseling 104” and “Career and Life Planning.” Intro psych and intro social work -type stuff. Can she teach these classes fairly? Do the students have the real, practical option of taking those classes with a different professor?
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Hmmm, a few, but none are likely:
- Prior to the video the other person just said “I miss my home country”, or “I need to visit my parents in my home country”
- Prior to the video the other person said “Ok, read this script convincingly and I’ll give you this $100 here”
- Prior to the video a gun is aimed at the woman, and “read this script convincingly or I’ll shoot you once in the chest, and again in the head”
- I’m really running out of reasons
- None of theses are the least bit likely anyway
- The woman in question can’t actually speak English, she has a bad translation handbook, and is really just looking for the bathroom (or a hovercraft full of eels, it is hard to tell)
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The notion of “employer” is a fuzzy one in academics; her immediate supervisor is a Chair, who might not even officially be management (they’re not in most universities, but this is a community college so who knows). Above the Chair in the org chart is usually a Dean, who will have signing power, but their ability to terminate, especially in the case of tenured faculty, is limited; the traditional model is that administrators work for the Faculty, not the other way around, and while the corporatization of American universities has changed that over the last couple of decades the vestiges remain, especially in decent institutions.
Untenured faculty can simply be taken out of the classroom and nonrenewed, which is the easiest path in a situation like this, even if there is no past record of incidents. For a tenured faculty member a one-off incident will probably not suffice, though it seems likely that this is not an isolated incident. Like principals in high school deans’ offices keep “permanent records” for their faculty, and a repeat-racist (especially in California!) probably has a thick file. While there are all too many cases where administrators choose to ignore this file (eg, powerful or well-funded male faculty with a record of sexual harassment), I don’t think that will be the case here…again, if it is not a one-off.
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edit never mind my brain is not parsing words well today…
So this is what I was thinking. Suppose instead of saying she “wasn’t even racist” and that her words were “skewed by a guy named Tony” she had said, “Whoa, whoa whoa! They told me they wanted me to read lines with them for a play they had coming up. I would never say racist shit like that!”
That would be an actual taken-out-of-context defense.
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I was going to say something like this, but I think you said it better. Which is not to say that I don’t find her behavior abhorrent. Everyone deserves due process, everyone.
At the end does she say “I never voted for you?”
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Even if it is a “one-off” as you so nonchalantly put it, there will likely be additional pressure from parents and students who attend the school, due to the internet exposure.
At the very least, her private life is about to become very uncomfortable because of that aforementioned exposure, and I don’t have any sympathy.
Long story short: actions have consequences, no matter how long it may take for those consequences to be felt.
And I never said or even implied otherwise.
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Unfortunately, this seems not usually to be the case at community colleges, which are, for some reason, places with low emotional investment and buy-in compared to residential four-year institutions.
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At the end of the second video she says, “you’re making my culture extinct.”
So I think she makes her perspective pretty clear. Not sure what positive context that could have been removed from.
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Sure, but the system at most schools has incredible amounts of inertia in it, and can weather outside pressure until controversy blows over. I don’t know about Golden West.
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As a North American Aboriginal I found her comment rather amusing.
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Don’t know, and honestly?
I don’t care.
All I know is I’m getting really tired of people treating other people like shit… and then hearing even more people argue endlessly over any consequences that may come of treating people like shit.
It’s tedious, futile, demoralizing and makes me wonder if Sarte was right.
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Yeah, I read something like
“I feel my perspective will be twisted if discussing the skewed video which cut out part of the incident,” she said in a statement to the station.
And I think, well, maybe what she said was misunderstood, and it wasn’t that, or taken completely out of context, but then she just admits it with:
“If you would like to have a full normal interview about the displacement of European-Americans, then I gladly am available to enlighten the public.”
And it becomes clear that, nope, she’s full-on racist, all right.
Also: “It was part of a conversation in which I was repeating what I heard some racist asshole say…”
Yeah. I assume she means in the sense of “I never voted to allow you to exist.”
It’s extra-specially ironic in California, where something like 99% of the population was just straight-up murdered by European immigrants. (And included the forcible imposition of a foreign culture at weapon point, in between bouts of rape and murder.) It’s yet another example of right-wing projection, basically.
Look, these are the kinds of people who call multiculturalism and intermarriage “white genocide” - because future generations will be less white. Words and logic don’t mean anything. The act of loving someone and having children with them is literally on the same moral plane as mass murder to these people. You can’t make sense of it.
Leaving aside the fact that she must be creating a hostile learning environment, and that she’s obviously an idiot unsuited to work with other people, I would think that the university, if nothing else, opens itself to lawsuits over every single bad grade given by that teacher to a non-white student (or, hell, any white student who openly rejected racist views). They’d have a hell of a case. Maybe that’s what it would take.
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Because I can’t imagine it doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
I see nothing wrong with looking into the matter, finding out if there IS some magic statement that makes everyone go “Ohhhhh.” and THEN take action. Of course, it’s not likely, but it’s ludicrous to be immediately fired with nobody even asking you what happened.
Two weeks does not seem unreasonable for the speed of administration.
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Anyone of European descent who says to anyone else in this hemisphere “go back to your home country” is delusional in a way that somehow continues to surprise me. Because it’s not ignorance; literally everyone knows better. These people are trying to will their delusion into reality.
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Only if she carries this into her classroom; I think the video was off-campus. Does every employer have the moral right to fire anyone who holds a hateful opinion? Should every racist be universally unemployable? (OK, I know many people are probably saying “yes!” to themselves, but probably just as a momentary reaction…)
An argument can be made that faculty are different and in some sense are always “on the clock”, but then maybe faculty salaries should be higher.
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If she feels free to heap racist abuse on total strangers - and then publicly make racist justifications for it - then yeah, I’d say it’s absolutely her classrooms are hostile environments. If she makes an effort to hide her racism there, that only means people aren’t entirely sure why it’s hostile. Certainly there’s no way she’s not unfairly treating non-white students. To claim that while she holds openly hostile views on a group that she’s in a position of judging on a daily basis and that she can do so fairly is laughable.
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There are some people who are great fans of the coordinating conjunction “but” as in “I am not racist, but…”
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