I know that, as a white, middle-class, physically fit male, I am not allowed to have an opinion on anything. The reason I know this is because I’ve been told time and time again by the narrative that is relentlessly pushed by the media that only members of protected classes are allowed to speak on pretty much everything. I also know that I should probably say something here about this editorial of mine containing “trigger warnings” for people who’ve ever been bullied—which, as far as I know, includes everybody, including me. So consider yourselves warned that what’s about to follow may hurt somebody’s feelings.
Okay, glad we got all that out of the way.
Now, let me tell you how I feel about “safe spaces” on college campuses. I can basically sum it up this way: Fuck all that nonsense.
There are only a couple of things that any college student has the right to feel safe about:
- Students should have the right to expect that their physical persons are safe from violent assault of any type (provided that they don’t go around sticking their fingers in the faces of people who can whip their asses).
- Female students should feel safe from the threat of rape. No qualifiers needed here.
That’s it.
Students should not feel safe from the following:
- Ideas that are in direct opposition to their own
- Words that are “hurtful” or “hateful”
- Political positions that conflict with their own
- Facts and/or truths that don’t support their own myopic worldview.
In the wake of all of racial tension at the University of Missouri this week (about which, in all honesty, I don’t feel compelled to have an opinion), University of Missouri Police sent an e-mail to all students that they should report “hurtful or hateful speech.” Not only that, they should take a picture of the individual and his/her license plate.
I’m sorry. The world has lost its damn mind.
This is the United States of America. As far as I know, the First Amendment is still in place. We have the right to say hurtful things to each other. Sometimes, we are obligated to say hurtful things to each other. A college campus is supposed to be a place where young people challenge ideas, express new thoughts, encourage discourse—not report people to the police for saying things that hurt their feelings. If you can’t have your preconceived notions challenged on a college campus, then where CAN you? Even Orwell might not have believed that such Thought Police activity could occur here.
I can’t even begin to remember all the “hurtful” things that were said to me on the campus of The Ohio State University when I was a student—and some of them came directly from faculty members. I was a white kid trying to major in Jazz Studies, for goodness sake. I was in classes with a virtual salad bowl of cultures and ethnic backgrounds, including White, Black, and Hispanic students. You know what was crazy? We all got along just fine.
None of the black students felt unsafe because I was in a Jazz Studies program. They didn’t complain to the faculty that I was trying to appropriate or minimalize Black culture by playing Jazz. They didn’t need a “safe space” where they could “decompress.” We all hung out together. We played in bands together. We went to the clubs at night together. The lack of a “safe space” meant that I, a white kid from Dublin, Ohio, could play in a quintet with two black kids from the ghettos of Philadelphia, and a hispanic trumpet player from Miami, and the music we made together was nothing short of spectacular. Did I share their life experience? No. Of course not. How could I? But we learned more from being forced together than we ever could have in our own, voluntarily segregated safe spaces.
One can only imagine how the future employers of such pansified children will have to deal with such things as corrective action or performance reviews. “But it’s your job to create a safe space for me to work! How dare you give me a “Needs Improvement” just because I failed to achieve a single one of my Key Factors? Why did you take this job? Who the fuck hired you?” Good God.
I’m thrilled that my children will get the opportunity to compete against these fools. However, I’m concerned that by the time my young children are of college age, that none of the institutions of higher learning in this country will be “safe spaces” for independent thought. Can you homeschool your kids for college?
Well said Jack .
The World isn’t safe , Life isn’t fair , get over it and move on .
I had a nifty ” butt hurt report ” form but I lost it , sorry . maybe you can find and post it here , very applicable .
-Nate
I haven’t been posting much here, but this one was mine, not Jack’s 🙂
I didn’t figure out it was you till it said ‘children’ instead of ‘son’
A little angrier than normal Bark piece. Nice change of pace.
I went to Mizzou. This is embarrassing .
One of the most brilliant young women I know got a journalism degree from Mizzou. She’s also one of the most liberal women I know. Not surprising 🙂
Well done and well put, Bark. Something that needs to be said and repeated on every college campus in the US.
One minor point, though. If the standard is women should be FEEL free of the threat of rape, rather than just being free from the threat of rape, I would be in total agreement.
But the brainwashing has become so pervasive and beneath-the-radar that you missed the fact that there might be a woman who FELT threatened by rape even though the male involved may not have done anything or said anything that would give a rational person a belief that rape was imminent.
I speak from first-hand knowledge, though rape was not the subject. I had two cars, a big dog and a job that used to take me on the road as much as yours. When my neighborhood dog walkers raised their prices from a hundred dollars a month to a hundred dollars a week, I found a young woman who was an open lesbian, who was good with animals, and lacked only three months of park work experience to get her degree in parks and recreation.
Since my house backed up to a park that hired a half dozen extra workers every summer, we struck a deal. I would even let her use my diesel Rabbit to go shopping.
Only problem was that she let her GF sway her into riding over an hour away to see some old friends, where they got into a wreck that totalled the Rabbit.
The GF needed to submit a statement in order for me to get paid by the insurance company, but she kept dodging it. Finally, after I called her and left her a message that I was going to have to take other steps to get her to fill out the paperwork if I didn’t have them within a week, she was counseled by another lesbian, who was a rape counselor, that she should file with the police, telling them that I had threatened her.
When I went to the first level court, I represented myself, and was promptly convicted.
I spent a couple of grand to hire a lawyer and to appeal. Whereupon the judge in that court, having actually had to understand law to get his job, said in open court that I should never have been arrested in the first place. And he promptly dismissed it with no chance of reinstatement.
But it cost me between two and three grand, and a night in the local jail til I could post bond.
But to get me arrested, all she had to assert was that she FELT threatened by the fact that I insisted that she had to fill out the accident report, and that I would take her to court if she didn’t. And the entire conversation had lasted less than a minute, when I accidentally bumped into her in a local restaurant, several weeks after she had wrecked my car. But for that, I was entitled to be arrested for “threatening or menacing”.
So you could say that I have had sensitivity training about the right of anyone who merely FEELS threatened to obtain support of the legal system based solely on his or her feelings.
Otherwise, a great article that says something that definitely needed saying.
“I know that, as a white, middle-class, physically fit male, I am not allowed to have an opinion on anything. ”
You left out heterosexual cis gendered.
Isn’t black students getting upset over a swastika a case of cultural appropriation?
FWIW, I read the police report about the fecal swastika at Mizzou. Campus police believe the person who did that may be the same drunk person who earlier called a white student a “bitch ass nigga” during a heated discussion involving black students in the same dorm. The same drunk student is alleged to have made Jew-hating remarks to members of a Jewish fraternity on campus.
Interestingly, none of the Mizzou officials identified the ethnicity of the accused student. It wouldn’t serve the narrative of the protesting students if the swastika drawer turned out to be black.
As an aside, I have to say that I’m appalled by all the adults who feel they must infantilize their speech with “poop”. Frankly, saying shit is even more mature than poop, but what’s wrong with “feces” or “excrement”?
http://thefederalist.com/2015/11/12/mizzou-releases-photos-of-poop-swastika-discloses-details-of-previously-unreported-racial-slurs/
All punning aside, that is a shitty swastika.
I don’t know when the stash of forbidden fruit in the form of George Carlin, John Valby, Lenny Bruce and Kent Bowman comedy recordings are revealed to our kids, but I may just forget to put them away one evening before heading to work once they’re in their later teen years.
The ony
Not completely related, but wouldn’t you agree that the first amendment protects freedom of expression, but NOT freedom to hate speech?
The struggle for racial justice and freedom of expression are not too mutually exclusive ideas.
No, I wouldn’t.
Me neither.
Don’t even bother with the “Hate Speech” tag; once any arbitrary category of dialectic or rhetoric is defined as off limits, it takes but a simple logical twist to redefine every single utterance as falling into that category.
The concept of free speech is absolutely binary: you either accept all speech as free or you don’t support free speech at all.
“The concept of free speech is absolutely binary: you either accept all speech as free or you don’t support free speech at all.”
That’s worth thinking about. Few physical fights are started in silence. Generally, speech is what leads to action. “Talk shit, get hit” is a real thing.
It’s not an incorrect statement at all: Speech, meaning linguistic expression, is itself harmless. “Free speech” is clear in its meaning, and taken at face value it is binary; all speech and text is protected. But, “hate speech” seems to imply that the words incite physical action against one group by another, or else it wouldn’t be dangerous at all. Is there an obligation for “polite society” to somehow reign in language that could induce violence (and defining that gets weird too,) or is it expected to balance itself?
If a group being incited to violence by speech becomes the criteria for determining hate speech, then any group that is willing to cross the line from verbal debate to physical resistance can cause the speech of another to be labelled hate speech. That is the flaw in your argument.
The breaker of the peace becomes the controller of what speech is free.
That would be “TWO mutually exclusive ideas”.
And no, they are not mutually exclusive.
When someone wishes to express their belief that homosexuality is wrong (protected free speech under the First Amendment?) and someone else says that they feel threatened by someone who does not accept homosexuality (i.e. presumably hate speech), who gets to decide what ideas are not free to be expressed.
I would agree with you that if someone shouts at someone, directly in their face, t he N word, that might reasonably be construed as hate speech. As might calling a homosexual a fag or a queer to their face.
But when an opinion that, for example, there may be demonstrable differences in ability between races, or where someone’s religious beliefs that homosexuality is wrong, can be suppressed as hate speech, then there is no longer such a thing as free speech.
And I understand that in Canada now, if a preacher preaches from his pulpit that the Bible teaches that homosexuality is a sin (which it does, though it also teaches that all people are inherently sinners of one kind or another), that such a statement, in a church, to a congregation that has voluntarily assembled, is punishable by a fine and/or a prison sentence, because it is “hate speech”.
The tables might turn slowly but when they do, you might find that what you thought was a legitimate reason to suppress freedom of expression gets turned around to suppress your own advocacy of your opinion.
Either freedom of speech, as long as it is not delivered directly in the face of someone in such a way as to cause immediate fear for safety, is absolutely protected, or speech will become free to be regulated, with no control over who might get to regulate it or in what way.
I would rather accept that fact that some people may not like or approve of something I identify with, and are free to say so, rather than to lose my right to speak freely without fear of regulation or punishment. And besides, if they are free to speak openly and do so, at least I can see who my enemies are, rather than having them lurking and murmuring, and seething inside, because they cannot freely express their feelings in the same way that others are permitted to do.
Laws
The BLM movement, racism labeling, and media PC police are today’s equivalent of the Red Scare and McCarthyism.
“Even Orwell might not have believed that such Thought Police activity could occur here”
If memory doesn’t fail me, the US was a part of Oceania filled with savages, underclass or both. The thought police didn’t deal with those. I may be mixing Huxley with Orwell since I read both nearly simultaneously a long time ago.
well, “The World Is Not a Safe Space” when assholes are blowing up innocent civilians
fuck those bastards
I suppose that classifies as “hurtful speech”
Your views here are not exactly in line with your piece about shooting down drones that photograph people without their consent.
These kids should learn something about the First Amendment. The grounds of the university are public property, so there is no expectation of privacy there and no right to avoid being photographed. Bullying the media shows is ignorant at best and contemptuous of our rights at worst.
On the other hand, it is necessary to obtain model releases when publishing photos in which the individuals can be recognized. A photographer is free to take whatever photos that he wants, but distribution without consent is another matter.
FWIW, I’m far more sympathetic to the student reporter than to the subjects of his coverage, but he should understand that his publication rights are not absolute. He could convey the story without using close ups of the individuals, and crowd shots don’t require any consent.
Not my piece about drones, Holmes.
You’re right. Sorry about that.