College professor caught on video telling couple to "go back to your home country"

The weird thing about the OC is that you have a serious mix of all ethnicities in pretty significant quantities, with little enclaves of the uber rich (and uber conservative) whites. Little gated communities 5 mins away from a strip mall with a check cashing business, a carneceria, and the obligate “smoke shop”. I’m not going to even get into the freaky weird HOA’s in those places… If you were a caucasian racist here, it’d be pretty easy to feel like your little world was surrounded by the scary brown people (because it is). The rest of us just call it having diverse neighbors.

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I know it isn’t politically correct these days to be a lefty who thinks racists shouldn’t all be banished to Siberia. But.

Firing someone from their job because they have a bias that interferes with their work would make everyone unemployable.

I took a social studies class taught by a woman who shared my biases toward prioritizing diversity and inclusion. Unfortunately the way she implemented this was by creating an environment where the students who were passionately prioritizing minorities were the only ones who felt included. It was totally clear that her biases toward political correctness were interfering with her teaching and were disadvantaging the education of students who prioritized equality over affirmative action for instance. And yet I don’t think she should be fired.
It just seems to me that inclusiveness means including racists in our society. Not blacklisting them so they have to stop their careers.

This even includes drumpf saying a Mexican judge can’t be objective. Sure all of this stuff is good reason not to hire or elect someone and this video should be seen by people who consider hiring her. It just isn’t a slam dunk firable offense in my book.

Well… there are…

But yeah, I get your point. As a 1/2 asian, I’ve been told to “go back to my country” numerous times over my life (strangely, always by white old people). The weird thing is that my Japanese grandmother was born here, OK, actually technically Hawaii wasn’t a state back then, and it wouldn’t be a state for another 20 years after my mother was born there… I’m guessing that a lot of the people who basically told me to piss off out of their country, that their families may have actually been here for a shorter amount of time than my slanty eyed clan.

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Hell even the non whites are conservative enough to overlook the racism in the party and worry more about their money.

I was with you right up to the comment about “the displacement of European-Americans”. Eww.

There’s only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people’s cultures and the Dutch.

Possibly, but telling them “Hey, your bias is interfering with your work, you should stop letting that happen” as a disciplinary matter seems more reasonable.

If one can’t stop one’s bias from interfering, perhaps one ought to consider another line of work.

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Indeed. It needs to always be written as

Right wing “academic.”

I’ve long thought that leaders on the right generally hate effective education at all levels because it helps people see through the bullshit that is conservative ideology.

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Say what now? AA is all about equality. It’s an effort to help bring it about.

No, for those who recognize that racists want to exclude non-white people, that’s not at all what inclusiveness means.

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You misunderstand @Ceran_Swicegood’s point, I think. Nobody should be subject to dismissal from their job without due process. Basic labor rights. Even racist jagoffs. Perhaps, especially racist jagoffs because being given every single right they are due and then still firing them because there’s a video out of them acting in a way that the college standards surely do not support is the best way to deny them the martyr narrative they so desperately crave.

Besides, do you really want to make employment decisions so hair-trigger? Anyone can gin up an internet outrage storm, not just people you happen to agree with, and video is easier to fake by the day. It’s a precedent we don’t want, I’m sure, for too little a gain. I mean, the professor is absolutely not keeping that job. When she gets fired is immaterial.

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I admit to hyperbole, but this is got me all concerned:

Now I can understand the concern from Carla, but I think how we handle the clearly guilty says a lot about how we handle the iffy cases. I want to encourage the college to put the interests of its students first, but also to not react in a panic because the internet is baying for blood. Very milquetoast of me, I know, but I am a very cautious guy.

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I was wondering the same thing. I formed an opinion all by myself, just by watching the video. That opinion, incidentally, is that I wouldn’t want this woman representing my organization’s values or on my payroll.

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I agree. I would also add that due process in a case like this should be both transparent and pretty damned swift.

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If a racist gets a job collecting garbage or bagging groceries or washing cars then at least we can tell if they’re still doing the job right by checking to see whether or not all the groceries get bagged or the garbage gets collected and the cars get washed.

If a racist gets a job in academia then they are making subjective evaluations of their students on a daily basis, as well as making judgement calls about how much time and attention to direct toward each student. Student success is fundamentally linked to that teacher’s ability to treat all students as if they have equal worth.

A professor who has loudly, explicitly stated that certain people don’t even belong in this country cannot be reasonably expected to give all students a fair shake. Even if they somehow managed to keep their racism under wraps in the classroom their judgement would be forever suspect. Not an appropriate career path for a known bigot.

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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.

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To me that’s the more damning thing she said. It’s one thing if she was caught behaving like badly on the street once. As a person with mental illness and a history of thyroid cancer I can relate to having been in public making a fool of yourself one way or another and then roiling in shame later. However she literally thinks she can “enlighten” us with her racist bullshit still, which is pretty fucking not likely. That pretty much says right there what her mission is and how she intends to use her position to achieve it.

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Can’t tell them from the bleating sheep, which outnumber them significantly.

Totally agreed that this affects her job performance and should be taken into account in performance reviews which should affect the trajectory of her career up to and including dismissal.

Just trying to keep this in perspective as one of many factors that affect performance and ability. Zero tolerance always has unintended consequences especially when driven by emotions like fear. Absolutists are always at least partially wrong. Even when I agree with them.

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“On the one hand, she doesn’t believe in fundamental human rights for a significant portion of her students. On the other hand she has well-organized syllabi. So you can see our dilemma.”

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Oh please. There is bias and then there’s racism. Don’t equate the two.

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