Well, you are pretty sure of that, but that is your judgement of people you’ve never met, not their judgement of you.
If you genuinely feel that you are black and that you could use a space where you can, as a black person, seek refuge from the difficulties you find as a black person living in a world that is intolerant towards black people, then you might find that they are more open minded than you think.
If you show up with an agenda to show that their space is drawn arbitrarily or that it discriminates against people, or that they themselves are intolerant, perhaps you’ll walk away with what you feel is a confirmation of your conclusion. But maybe that’s not because they are intolerant of different people, maybe it’s because they can sniff out BS and bad faith actions.
Yeah, but Adams said she knew the majority of the demands wouldn’t be met. On the other hand, alumni of the school came back and confirmed that, yeah, they were actually pretty racist in response to the demands. Basically the experience confirmed there was a huge problem for black students who didn’t “know their place.”
And saying to myself: Have we reached the point in society where racism against black people has become such a non-issue that we ought to start worrying about how racist black people are going to oppress white people?
I’ll leave the answer as an exercise to the reader.
I know little about this case, but it sounds like TERF talking points that I have heard numerous times before. From my personal experience and no other reports on this particular case, I’d say it is dog whistle transphobia.
These demands are specifically talking about Oberlin College, as was I. I have sympathy for the young man who was taunted and bullied at San Jose State (although quite frankly I agree with the jury that his oppressors should be legally punished for their illegal actions, and not for their ideology). It might well be appropriate to have “Blacks Only” spaces at San Jose State, although I’d hope that any return to a separate-but-equal philosophy would be the very last resort.
But that still doesn’t solve the issue of defining blackness. My daughter can pass in mid-January, but not in August. Is she still allowed in the Blacks Only spaces when she looks white? How does she prove this to people who think it’s reasonable to make threats and “non-negotiable demands”?
Well, yeah, this specific point you and I have ended up on, is definitely about colourism (I had to look that up, incidentally, so thanks for expanding my vocabulary!).
Fair criticism. I should probably go there and find out.
Well, maybe I shouldn’t visit after all. I am not especially tolerant of sniff tests.
It’s like this. I identify with people who fight fire with water; who fight hate with love, fight segregation with inclusiveness, fight racism with tolerance and acceptance. They people who work to defeat my people are those who pursue segregation, believe in racial exceptionalism, and work towards removal of privileges from others, rather than extension of privileges to all. When I read the Oberlin College student demands, when I read the interviews with and essays by the people who say they represent the Black students of Oberlin College, I don’t see people fighting for tolerance and acceptance. I see people fighting for segregation and for race-based exceptionalism.
It is bullshit, and I’m on the side of the student, and you know I’m active locally to try to get the cops out of the schools… but that headline is also bullshit. As I read it, a black student was ejected for failing to follow a stupid, draconian, pointless dress code, is what happened. His skin color only enters into the incident because people want to co-opt his kente cloth as part of their own segregationist dialog. The high schools in my area would do the exact same thing and yes that’s stupid and wrong. But they do it to every student of every color; there’s a strict dress code and uniform policy (which I disagree with).
Did you know that one of the rationales frequently given for dress codes and uniform policies is to remove stigma from lower-income students, who are disproportionately people of color? I must have heard that one two dozen times at the school meetings.
I can understand this because people’s hunches get pretty wrong pretty fast. I find it very hard to articulate the point I was actually trying to make. It is something like: Engaging in thought experiments about how people in safe spaces would react to particular visitors made me think of real-world experiments where people have attempted to prove one group or another is hostile/non-welcoming, which made me think of myself as a child lying and being angry at other people who didn’t believe me because I didn’t think they could know I was lying, which made me think about a personal rule that if you are lying or acting in bad faith you really don’t know how good you are at deceit and how good someone else is at detecting deceit, so you can’t assume others are falling for it consciously or unconsciously.
The overall point being that even if someone is told they aren’t welcome in a safe space because of the colour of their skin, we really don’t know why they actually weren’t welcome. My experience has been that groups that are supposedly exclusionive for marginalized people tend to be welcoming to people who don’t fit the criteria but are genuinely interested in helping. I’m sure other people have experiences that aren’t as welcoming, but I don’t really know how exceptional my experience was. I do recognize not for me it’s easy to not feel excluded by a safe space for black students because I don’t feel I have any need to be in that safe space. I can understand how it could be a different thing for someone who is a part of the group the safe space is for but who doesn’t always look a part of it.
I think the issue is that we tend to assign cultural neutrality to things like graduation ceremonies and school uniforms. But, of course, the graduation ceremony has it’s own cultural origin. It’s like people complaining about the “war on christmas” despite the christmas tree at the mall. They take the backdrop of their own culture as a given, and see making space for other cultures to be an attack.
That gown and cap isn’t the platonic ideal of graduation ceremony wear, revealed to us as the intent of the universe. It’s a tradition with cultural roots (I know it’s pretty standard at a lot of places all over the world, but, you know, colonialism and all).
So even though the dress code is the same for everyone, that doesn’t mean it’s the same for everyone. For some it is going to represent their culture and for others it is going to keep their culture safely out of view. Sort of like “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.”
I do agree that is more likely a story about a rigidly authoritarian school principal who would throw a Scot out for wearing a kilt than it is about a racist school principle. It’s just that it still affects different people differently depending on their ethnicity.
For what it’s worth (probably nothing!) I did not attend my own graduation. I told the school that if they couldn’t mail me the diploma to let me know when & where I could pick it up.
My relatives were talking about driving from rural Virginia and backwoods Pennsylvania to attend, and I wasn’t going to let them drive six hours and then sit in bleachers for several hours of pointless ceremony.
I had to learn to sing the High School alma mater anyway. I still know it, because it’s so dumb it sticks in the mind.
Anyway, I don’t know whose culture the mortarboard and gown represents, but it’s not mine! My grandfather was the first person in the family known to wear one, after graduating Bible College in the 1920s. My mother never wore one.
They’re ecclesiastical robes; western education (including American high schools) is descended from the European Church. As I was a 1st-gen college student and a Jew by birth they don’t represent my hereditary culture, but I have a doctorate, and I can trace my advisor tree back to the 13th century, and some of my academic ancestors were clerics, mainly from Germany, Italy, and Greece, places none of my actual ancestors ever visited until fleeing through them in the 1910s or returning to fight in WWII.
Like you I didn’t attend my HS graduation because it didn’t have meaning for me, but the ceremony has meaning for me now, and it has meaning for the parents of my college students (many of whom are 1st-gen students, and most of whom are not white), so I often go to commencement for their sake.
Aren’t ecclesiastical robes descended from the dress of the Middle East (pick a culture) [since that’s where the ecclesia were when the traditions were started]?
