I have just one complaint with what he says here:
"It’s not just sometimes folks who are mad that colleges are too liberal that have a problem. Sometimes there are folks on college campuses who are liberal, and maybe even agree with me on a bunch of issues, who sometimes aren’t listening to the other side, and that’s a problem too. I’ve heard some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. I gotta tell you, I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. I think you should be able to — anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, "You can’t come because I'm too sensitive to hear what you have to say." That’s not the way we learn either."
http://www.vox.com/2015/9/14/9326965/obama-political-correctness
My only complaint? Referring to these students as 'liberal' when there's nothing liberal about them.
Brittany Cooper at Slate has a defense of 'safe spaces' out. She argues that it's necessary to make minority students 'feel safe.'
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/11/obama-on-pc-a-recipe-for-dogmatism.html
But what she doesn't do is really convince me that all such students are really unsafe. In a time of 'microaggressions' it now seems that even very small beer can make someone feel unsafe.
She also makes a comment here that is a pet peeve of mine. She claims that black folks lack the institutional power to be racist. Maybe not at the Macro level but at a Micro level I'm not so sure.
Full disclosure: I am a mulatto-my Dad is a white man from England, my Mother is Afro-Caribbean-born in Jamaica and her father brought her to England when she was 17.
So I'm a mulatto. In high school my Mom made me go to a religious boarding school-yep, as I've divulged previously, she is Seventh Day Adventist.
At the school it was mostly black students and they certainly seemed very hostile to white students or Latino or even other black students who they said 'acted white' or 'wanted to be white.'
I am a mulatto but fairly fair skinned-my Mother herself is a mulatto. In school, many black students would scorn me as 'white.' My point is that whatever you want to say about institutional power-black folks can still behave badly and it can be destructive-one effect is it adds to hate and fear between the races.
I do find it interesting as well in a time when we have President Obama, Susan Rice, Eric Holder, Condeleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Elijah Cummings, and Cory Booker-who has been talked about as a possible Veep for Hillary-blacks allegedly are held to have no institutional power.
And this was by no means an exhaustive list of powerful African-Americans
Hasn't this in fact changed a great deal?
As for Black Lives Matter, a separate but related phenomenon, I agree that there is a problem with policy brutality and excessive force and racial profiling. But I do sometimes worry that this whole movement isn't in some sense, legitimizing illegal and antisocial behavior.
What has to be admitted is that most of the folks in these videos were engaged in some kind of illegal behavior. This doesn't mean that the cops in any particular case didn't behave wrongly or illegally and should be punished accordingly.
But you hate to say it but it makes you think of Bill Cosby. You know, now that he's turned out to be a crazy serial sex abuser, it's easy to discount him. But there is truth in what he used to say. You have a better chance being shot when you're running away with a stolen pound cake than minding your own business while obeying the law.
Even Sandra Bland was far from innocent. She did everything she could to antagonize that officer. This was neither smart nor was it right.
No, she didn't 'deserve to die' over calling a cop a pussy repeatedly to his face-though no one said she did. That doesn't mean she should have done it or that it was smart to have done it.
Had she not done so, she wouldn't have been arrested.
And we don't really know what happened to her. While at first we were hearing no way could she kill herself, we later heard that she actually had been struggling with depression.
P.S. My point that these campus activists are not liberals is made well by Jonathan Chait:
"A recent column I wrote on this drew a comparison with its ideology and Marxism, leading a number of left-wing critics to conclude that I had called p.c. culture Marxist. I did not, but the question of just how to define p.c. ideology is an important one. The column drew a comparison, not an equation, between p.c. and Marxism. Obviously, p.c. ideology is not Marxist — it has no dialectic theory of history, and no real program or end point, among other differences. The case I made in my longer story in January is that the p.c. left “has borrowed the Marxist critique of liberalism and substituted race and gender identities for economic ones.” P.c. thought substitutes a model of group rights for the liberal model of individual rights. It dismisses liberal arguments for universal rights as a defense of privilege. And since it places the conflict between privileged and oppressed classes at the center of its thinking, it treats political rights as a zero-sum conflict — any defense of political expression from members of privileged classes threatens the rights of the oppressed. Some of these arguments against liberalism have been made in serious ways by theorists of the left, like the radical scholar Catharine MacKinnon (who is also not a Marxist)."
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/11/obama-on-pc-a-recipe-for-dogmatism.html
I see the activists not as liberals but as mitigating an illiberal attack on liberal values. Chait anticipates Brittany Cooper, who in her post dismiss free speech concerns as a defense of privilege.
"It’s not just sometimes folks who are mad that colleges are too liberal that have a problem. Sometimes there are folks on college campuses who are liberal, and maybe even agree with me on a bunch of issues, who sometimes aren’t listening to the other side, and that’s a problem too. I’ve heard some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. I gotta tell you, I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. I think you should be able to — anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, "You can’t come because I'm too sensitive to hear what you have to say." That’s not the way we learn either."
http://www.vox.com/2015/9/14/9326965/obama-political-correctness
My only complaint? Referring to these students as 'liberal' when there's nothing liberal about them.
Brittany Cooper at Slate has a defense of 'safe spaces' out. She argues that it's necessary to make minority students 'feel safe.'
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/11/obama-on-pc-a-recipe-for-dogmatism.html
But what she doesn't do is really convince me that all such students are really unsafe. In a time of 'microaggressions' it now seems that even very small beer can make someone feel unsafe.
She also makes a comment here that is a pet peeve of mine. She claims that black folks lack the institutional power to be racist. Maybe not at the Macro level but at a Micro level I'm not so sure.
Full disclosure: I am a mulatto-my Dad is a white man from England, my Mother is Afro-Caribbean-born in Jamaica and her father brought her to England when she was 17.
So I'm a mulatto. In high school my Mom made me go to a religious boarding school-yep, as I've divulged previously, she is Seventh Day Adventist.
At the school it was mostly black students and they certainly seemed very hostile to white students or Latino or even other black students who they said 'acted white' or 'wanted to be white.'
I am a mulatto but fairly fair skinned-my Mother herself is a mulatto. In school, many black students would scorn me as 'white.' My point is that whatever you want to say about institutional power-black folks can still behave badly and it can be destructive-one effect is it adds to hate and fear between the races.
I do find it interesting as well in a time when we have President Obama, Susan Rice, Eric Holder, Condeleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Elijah Cummings, and Cory Booker-who has been talked about as a possible Veep for Hillary-blacks allegedly are held to have no institutional power.
And this was by no means an exhaustive list of powerful African-Americans
Hasn't this in fact changed a great deal?
As for Black Lives Matter, a separate but related phenomenon, I agree that there is a problem with policy brutality and excessive force and racial profiling. But I do sometimes worry that this whole movement isn't in some sense, legitimizing illegal and antisocial behavior.
What has to be admitted is that most of the folks in these videos were engaged in some kind of illegal behavior. This doesn't mean that the cops in any particular case didn't behave wrongly or illegally and should be punished accordingly.
But you hate to say it but it makes you think of Bill Cosby. You know, now that he's turned out to be a crazy serial sex abuser, it's easy to discount him. But there is truth in what he used to say. You have a better chance being shot when you're running away with a stolen pound cake than minding your own business while obeying the law.
Even Sandra Bland was far from innocent. She did everything she could to antagonize that officer. This was neither smart nor was it right.
No, she didn't 'deserve to die' over calling a cop a pussy repeatedly to his face-though no one said she did. That doesn't mean she should have done it or that it was smart to have done it.
Had she not done so, she wouldn't have been arrested.
And we don't really know what happened to her. While at first we were hearing no way could she kill herself, we later heard that she actually had been struggling with depression.
P.S. My point that these campus activists are not liberals is made well by Jonathan Chait:
"A recent column I wrote on this drew a comparison with its ideology and Marxism, leading a number of left-wing critics to conclude that I had called p.c. culture Marxist. I did not, but the question of just how to define p.c. ideology is an important one. The column drew a comparison, not an equation, between p.c. and Marxism. Obviously, p.c. ideology is not Marxist — it has no dialectic theory of history, and no real program or end point, among other differences. The case I made in my longer story in January is that the p.c. left “has borrowed the Marxist critique of liberalism and substituted race and gender identities for economic ones.” P.c. thought substitutes a model of group rights for the liberal model of individual rights. It dismisses liberal arguments for universal rights as a defense of privilege. And since it places the conflict between privileged and oppressed classes at the center of its thinking, it treats political rights as a zero-sum conflict — any defense of political expression from members of privileged classes threatens the rights of the oppressed. Some of these arguments against liberalism have been made in serious ways by theorists of the left, like the radical scholar Catharine MacKinnon (who is also not a Marxist)."
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/11/obama-on-pc-a-recipe-for-dogmatism.html
I see the activists not as liberals but as mitigating an illiberal attack on liberal values. Chait anticipates Brittany Cooper, who in her post dismiss free speech concerns as a defense of privilege.
P.S. Finally I can't help but ask: With all the theatrics over microaggressions and safe spaces on campus where do students actually find the time to study?.
Mike, very small beer doesn't make me feel unsafe.
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