Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/13/georgia-college-students-start.html
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5 Likes
I’m not sure which is worse:
- These kids being so absolutely clueless and insular they don’t realize what this looks like; or
- Them knowing exactly what this looks like, and doing it on purpose.
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Not liking a book is fine.
Organising a protest against a speaker that you don’t like is also fine.
Holding a book burning- yeah, that’s where you’re going well over the line and into crazy territory.
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I get that this is a public university and they have to be conscienscious about trampling 1st Amendment rights. Though of course right wing jackholes reach for “but mah First Amendment rights!” any time they perceive that they’re being “censored”. But they’re weirdry narrow in their protectionist stance here (not piping up about separation of church & state, etc.)
Just the same, the role of a university is in very large part to promote tolerance and open-mindedness. And to do that, the thing you must be intolerant of is intolerance itself. Which this demonstrably is. So damn the torpedos, this should be grounds for expulsion, or at least a 1-2 semester suspension.
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you misspelled “Trump Country”
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Liberals and progressives burning books by Nazis that effectively advocate book burning would be very paradoxical.
I’m starting to think that Georgia Southern University is one of those schools that eliminated all its liberal arts departments, including the history dept.
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Maybe not? Maybe just privileged white assholes assholing? I know nothing about this school, but I like the story about the pres getting fired in the 60s for supporting integration, then getting rehired.
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Yeah, I was being facetious about their not having access to history courses, but it’s most likely just that.
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Both of these are true - but it would be NICE if they could come up with a legitimate critique for a reason to protest. It seems like the objection is to how it made them feel, but couldn’t actually counter the argument the book was making.
Eh - some of our favorite boingboingers are from Georgia.
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I unfortunately went to high school with many kids who ended up at Georgia Southern. Too many. I can confirm that a lot of them benefit from the privilege of growing up in white upper-middle class families, but few benefit from intellectual privilege.
I may come off as an elitist jerk by saying this, but I’ll say it anyway: the stereotype of Georgia Southern (as an undergraduate institution) is that it’s a party school with an extremely high STI rate attended by mediocre-at-best right-wing-leaning students from the Atlanta suburbs, who were rejected by UGA, and are unwilling to take advantage of the many fine educational opportunities in Atlanta because the city is too “urban.” A good number of these students can afford to pay tuition, but attend the school for free thanks to the HOPE scholarship, which is funded by the state lottery (and thus overwhelmingly funded by people without any of the privilege that these students are born into).
Given that stereotype, it is not at all surprising to me that these kids decided to burn books after being told to examine their own privilege. Many are anti-intellectuals who are only at a university because their parents forced them to be.
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The very definition of white fragility.
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My wife is from a privileged white Atlanta suburb. Her college-aged brother lives at home and has frequent houseguests. Whenever we go down there to visit, and the topic of race inevitably comes up, the white privilege just seems to ooze out of every pore of everyone involved, especially among the older men who seem hell-bent on hammering this stuff into the heads of every successive generation The “crabs in a barrel” analogies, the “I have a black friend who agrees that black people suck”, the “welfare queens” and “young bucks buying lobster with food stamps”…all the greatest hits. I just sit back and observe, being horribly outnumbered in my viewpoint that whites have historically created 99% of this mess and continue to perpetuate it with this horrible “race-realist” nonsense.
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I attended a high school near there in the 90s, and about half of the few college-bound graduates of my school ended up at Georgia Southern. I can say that the non-Atlanta-raised kids who went there came from an even more backwards environment. Full-blown unreconstructed confederate shit was the predominant culture, pretty much everywhere besides Atlanta back then… and I’m not surprised if it hasn’t changed much. Cute example: the official high school mascot in my county was a confederate soldier.
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I realize I don’t have any choice in what society labels me (white) but do I have to identify as white? I don’t think white’s an actual thing it’s not an ethnicity it’s not a race. It’s a weird cultural club who’s hallmarks seem to include bland food and being shitty to people not in the club.
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an Hispanic
Get out.
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Regardless to how you may see yourself or whatever you choose to call yourself, you cannot extricate yourself from the unearned privilege that is automatically heaped upon you by our society because of the mere happenstance of your genetics.
What you can do is choose to actively use that privilege to help support marginalized and disenfranchised people of color.
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Why did you selectively quote what I said? removing the part where I acknowledge your premise?
That was the part I was addressing; your core question.
That you know how ‘being White’ is all too often used as an excuse to treat other people like complete shit is great, but it wasn’t the main focus of what I assume was an honest inquiry.
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I don’t think you should worry about this: it wasn’t a malicious act, and the full text of your original post is right there, only separated from @Melizmatic’s by just one small post, so nobody is going to miss the context.
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