Well, what about white conservatives? They have to deal with things at Harvard that offend them all the time. As Erika Christakis put it:
Even if we could agree on how to avoid offense - and I'll note that no one around campus seems overly concerned about the offense taken by religiously conservative folks to skin-revealing costumes - I wonder, and I am not trying to be provocative: Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious... a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?
If you don't like black tape on peoples' photos, don't look at it!
When eight-year-olds draw on the wall, we understand that it's a normal part of childhood development. So, too, must we respect the experimentation of the burgeoning 1L.
(That said, this strikes me as the sort of thing that someone did To Prove a Point About Racism rather than out of actual racism, because this is would be like the weeniest instance of actual racism of all time. "Oh, yeah, when the black family moved into the neighborhood we were going to burn a cross on the lawn, but instead we decided to just write 'wash me :)' on their dusty car with our fingertips.")
Other than man, people suck.
Hurtful.
3 Yeah, I'm not sure how to read this. Glad I'm not the only one.
The NYT, unsurprisingly, manages to put the explanation for why people would think this is racist stuff right at the very end of the article. I'm sure they didn't realize how many people would read the first half/beginning of the article and start to get a bit confused about why these students would think anything racist was going on, even though that's exactly what happened with the Yale thing.
In a twist, the black tape used on the portraits had apparently been used in an earlier protest, which sought to have the law school change its seal. Students had put the tape on mats displaying the seal to protest the inclusion of the family crest of a slave-owning family named Royall that they say was involved in brutally putting down a slave rebellion in Antigua. The family also owned slaves in Massachusetts and one member, Isaac Royall Jr., bequeathed part of his estate to Harvard, which was crucial to establishing the law school.
"It appears that whoever did this took the tape from those mats and used the strips of tapes from those mats and placed them on the black professors' portraits," said Alexander J. Clayborne, a third-year student here who has been involved in a campaign to change the law school's crest.
Also "In a twist is just a bizarre thing to say. "In the entire explanation for what is happening here..." seems like a better lead in.
7: And there you go. Did the other skeptics read to the bottom of the article? I didn't.
Also "In a twist is just a bizarre thing to say. "In the entire explanation for what is happening here..." seems like a better lead in.
Yes. They drop it in there as though it was some bizarre ironic coincidence. (And use the trademark NYTimes clunky English, too.) "In a twist" would be "hey, weirdly enough, the captain of the team that beat Yale is actually the daughter of a Yale professor!"
The NY Times is not generally an immoral newspaper, but it's really badly written.
9 - I read a thing on Medium from a black 2L, who didn't give the back story.
9 This is Unfogged. Who ever reads till the end of the article?
a slave-owning family named Royall that they say was involved in brutally putting down a slave rebellion in Antigua
I thought these were intolerable weasel words, but research one notch above cursory suggests that this is, indeed, a claim, not an established fact. Apparently a couple of the Royalls' slaves rebelled in some form, and one was executed while the other was banished. Which doesn't sound like a brutal putting down, but I can't say that's the whole story. But there doesn't seem to have been mass executions or intensive corporal punishment.
Info from here.
13 was me.
10.last: I think the reason is that it's written by very clever people (mostly of a certain type--even the ones who aren't the East Coast elites of hicks' fever dreams kind of wish they were) who want to display their cleverness, but also have to adhere to a weird, contingent, in-house style that says cleverness needs to be cloaked in sober news-speak.
The context is still compatible with making a point about racism. The intent could be read as: by not removing the Royall family crest from the HL seal and acknowledging the racist past of the institution, HL is effectively stifling/erasing/silencing minority voices.
It reminds me of the "whites only" gentrification stickers that went up around Austin businesses this year: https://www.rt.com/usa/242365-racist-sticker-austin-texas/
Rod Dreher -- who has seriously lost his rag lately -- is certain this is a false flag operation.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/harvard-law-reichstag-fire-benedict-option/
Bless his heart.
Rod Dreher -- who has seriously lost his rag lately -- is certain this is a false flag operation.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/harvard-law-reichstag-fire-benedict-option/
Bless his heart.
15: Oh yeah, I'm not saying that the absence of a brutal putting down of rebellion makes the Royalls solid citizens. I"m just saying that, for once, the "opinions differ" style seems to be justified. It's clear to me that it would be beyond this journalist's scope to adjudicate the claim about brutality. That the Royalls got rich on selling slaves, and then bequeathed that money to help create Harvard Law, is unquestionable.
And FWIW, false flag had certainly occurred to me, precisely because it seems like a weirdly anodyne hate crime--until you have the context. At which point anything's possible, but "authentic* hate crime" moves back into first place.
*albeit still tame; the only thing that's really much worse than "affirmative action bake sales" is the anonymity
||
Well I certainly can't see how this might have been a bad idea.
I swear to god the MPD response was (paraphrased) "That cop was not pointing a gun directly at the head of the (obviously not threatening anyone) son of the US Representative for the district. He was pointing it at the (also obviously not threatening anyone) people standing next to him." Good job MPD! You show those people who think you're a bunch of psychotic racist goons how wrong they really are!
|>
I should say that I wouldn't be stunned with surprise if this did turn out to be a false flag stunt. I didn't think it was, or I wouldn't have posted it, but it's not impossible: there are jerks on all sides of the issues.
20: I was arguing more about what the point of the current black tape action was. It could be
1) POC, make sure you understand that this is your place here (normative, White supremacist message)
2) POC, make sure you understand that this is your place here (descriptive, anti-racist activist message)
My assumption all along has been that this is a double-false flag. I think real racists, likely student members of the Federalist Society, put the tape on the pictures with the intent to make everyone believe it was a false flag and therefore discredit the student activists.
This is pretty obviously a prank by the pictures themselves on all Muggles.
25 I like the way you think, urple. But then I always have.
The tape has been there all along, but it was transparent.
Reading this post by itself, there was not a possibility in my mind other than this being an act of activism by black students, making the tone of the post confusing. Activists are constantly claiming to be silenced, right? It's one of the classic anti-abortion stunts.
But the tape wasn't over the mouths of the photos, which is what you'd do for a "silencing" message. It's just sort of stuck haphazardly over part of the face.
I'm not sure how much goodwill you can buy by saying "oh, it wasn't a mass execution. It was just a single person executed for demanding he be treated with basic human dignity."
I'm not afraid to say that we should implement a database of all the tape on the Harvard campus, and we should manage the shit out of that database.
But the tape wasn't over the mouths of the photos, which is what you'd do for a "silencing" message. It's just sort of stuck haphazardly over part of the face.
Today's top tier law students aren't as punctilious as they used to be.
28: And again, Scotland is the answer. Or at least Scottish tape.
31: Well, according to the book I linked, Royall didn't even sentence the guy: it was the government of Antigua. So at that point he bears no more blame than any slaveholder.
Being a slaveholder is terrible! But it's not a special or uniquely damning claim, and it's not the same as "brutally putting down a slave rebellion." FWlittleIW, Royall was reputed as a fairly benign slavemaster, with apparently no recorded corporal punishment. Again, not exculpatory, but you can't single out a guy who was absolutely typical of his class, and say, this one is the monster.
Anyway, my point was never to defend Royall; I was merely pointing out that the student claim seems to be just that, a claim. I'm sure they have evidence I didn't find in 10 minutes, but the image conjured up by the phrase in the article doesn't seem to be borne out by the facts I found, so it's either disputed history or an overstatement of accepted facts.
34: Racist. You know Scotch tape is a slur.
Anyway, 30 is a good point, and was something I was wondering about*. I think we can rule out an earnest "Our voices are being silenced" message, because this is no way to express it.
*that is, I'd seen a couple images of the pictures, and it didn't seem like the tape was in "silencing" position, but I didn't look into it further
I don't buy Scotch tape, because it's too expensive.
It's diagonal, as in the red circle-with-slash symbol. To represent silencing, people usually do horizontal over the mouth.
35: I think it's fair to say "We shouldn't have the family crest of someone who made an incredible amount of money on the school's official seal no matter how much of that money he gave us and no matter how genial he was about it" though, I mean, as a general principle. You don't need to add anything else in, or take it as a special case.
Excellent Storify of tweets from the Harvard Law public meeting.
I admit that I didn't really understand why tape would generate this kind of reaction until I saw the portraits. It felt very visceral -- a threat. And I'm white.
(And I hadn't seen the damning point about the tape being taken off the seal and put on the portraits until the OP here. Bad news media.)
Being a slaveholder is terrible! But it's not a special or uniquely damning claim, and it's not the same as "brutally putting down a slave rebellion."
It certainly doesn't seem to be bad enough to stop you having things named after you in the US, like aircraft carriers, libraries, universities, hospitals, roads, airports, states, and the capital city.
I think it's fair to say "We shouldn't have the family crest of someone who made an incredible amount of money on the school's official seal no matter how much of that money he gave us and no matter how genial he was about it" though, I mean, as a general principle.
But we can still call libraries, buildings, colleges etc after them, put up statues and portraits and so on?
40: Is this missing a phrase like "from slavery" somewhere in it, or do you mean that as a general principle, no matter the source of the money?
42: Well exactly. I mean, in this case the only reason the guy's crest is there is because of the blood money, whereas those other guys for the most part accomplished something other than stealing the bread earned by the sweat of others, so there's kind of a line there. But it seems that the students wanted the line to be "he was extra-bad", or they wouldn't have made the claim.
41: good link. Yes, as LB says, that's definitely a kind of crossing-out mark. (The NY Times published only one photo, the one in which that was most unclear.)
those other guys for the most part accomplished something other than stealing the bread earned by the sweat of others, so there's kind of a line there.
A railway line, to be precise, on which there are a lot of trains running on time.
22: God, 40 comment rule. But anyways, that's not a gun, it's not being pointed at Ellison's son, let alone his head, and it's definitely not being point at anyone's head at all unless that person is three feet tall and immediately out of the picture's frame.
43: There have been/are a bunch of protests over those things too, actually...
49: really? Over naming things after George Washington?
Um, congratulations on repeating the exact same bullshit line as the MPD, there? Adding "it wasn't a gun it was just a thing that fires projectiles at high speeds being pointed at unthreatening people close enough that it could absolutely cause fatalities!" doesn't actually make it a better line, either.
Also yes of course there were other people right there. Jesus. It was a protest.
anyways, that's not a gun
Yes, it is. And it's being brought into the shoulder, and the barrel is almost horizontal.
51: People at the protests have been chucking rocks and bottles. If you want to break up that kind of thing without shooting people in the face then you deploy the 40mm non lethal stuff. The primary target area for a foam baton round is the thigh, hence that downward angle on the aim.
Over naming things after George Washington?
Reading the tweets in 41 definitely makes me feel like what this article (written by a Harvard Law Professor, via Leiter) is pointing out feels like a trend:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-new-family-feeling-on-campus
Many observers of the student protests of the nineteen-sixties noted those movements' Oedipal aspects. That generation of student activists was seen as killing the father (figuratively) in their organized political resistance to university faculty and administration, and, more broadly, to war and oppression. Today's student protesters are certainly directing anger at faculty and administrators, but this time the parental dynamic is notably different.
Particularly in the way things have unfolded at Yale, students' social-justice activism has been expressed, in part, as the need for care from authority figures. When they experience the hurt that motivates them to political action, they're deeply disappointed with parental surrogates for not responding adequately or quickly enough to support and nurture them. The world in which it's not bizarre for a young person to rebuke someone for failing to "create a place of comfort and home," or to yell, "Be quiet ... You're disgusting!," and storm away, is the world of family, where a child in pain desperately desires empathy and understanding from a parent. The online scorn heaped on the student who was filmed behaving this way represents an unproductive refusal to compassionately translate her behavior across the generational divide. In a piece called "Hurt at Home," another Yale student wrote, "I feel my home is being threatened," and contrasted her comforting relationship with her father to the care she felt students emphatically did not receive from the master of Silliman College. Yale tells its students that the residential college is their "home away from home," but this generation might be the first to insist so literally on that idea."
Harvard Law School has long had an intense and bizarrely OTT actually racist relationship with its black faculty, supposedly mostly solved by Elena Kagan. Of course, the most prominent Harvard Law Scholl alumnus is black, except for arguably Rutherford B. Hayes. Still, distinguishing vandalism (the tape) from speech is usually the kind of thing that constitutional lawyers are supposed to do and are usually capable of.
52: Are we splitting hairs or something here? Yeah, technically it's putting a round downrange but it's a 40mm launcher for the less lethal rounds. I believe the green nosed ones he has on the side saddle there are the Safariland foam rounds that also have a marking agent. It's the kind of thing you use in a situation to mark an instigator who's chucking stuff so a team can easily spot and go snatch up a particular guy out of the crowd.
Yeah it was real dangerous looking (and of course everyone else disputes police claims about violent riots). That's why all those other cops are standing there calmly without putting their hands anywhere near any lethal or nonlethal weapons. Please. That's about as convincing as "it's not a gun it's a grenade launcher!" as a defense.
And, of course, if you've been googling around which I guess you're claiming to have been doing then you'd have seen the fully zoomed out version of the photo, where it's clear that if that thing goes off he's not hitting anyone in the thigh.
Back in my day, Harvard Law students waited until after graduation to take concrete actions in support of white supremacy. That way they could bill for it.
"School" obvs. And the "we affirmatively haze our students into the profession" tradition at Harvard Law School (eg the Paper Chase) is obviously in tension with the norm described in 56. Hard to feel at "home" in a cauldron of assholes, unless you're Ted Cruz.
contrasted her comforting relationship with her father to the care she felt students emphatically did not receive from the master of Silliman College.
But students are supposed to be adults, or at least in the final stage of preparing to be adults. Why should it therefore be incumbent on colleges to give them a family environment?. They won't get one at the office.
58: not splitting hairs: that is a gun. A firearm. In the UK that would come under the Firearms Act.
And it's definitely lethal at close range, even with something like an M1006 foam round. Minimum M1006 engagement range is 10-15m for exactly that reason.
Or to put it another way: if a suspect pointed that at a police officer and the police officer responded by shooting the suspect dead, would that be a legitimate shooting?
53: don't you often insist that people can't really tell much from images, still or moving, about these sorts of situations? Assuming I'm right about that, how, other than the fact that your job has eaten your soul -- mine has too, probably -- can you possibly claim to know that he's following procedure and aiming for the thigh? I don't normally engage with you about this stuff, because the inevitable pile-on here always makes me feel shitty. But your reflexive defense of your colleagues has become predictable and depressing as fuck, man, especially because I'm enough of a procedural liberal (read: weenie) that I want to believe that being a cop isn't necessarily corrupting.
63: Well yeah, it's technically a firearm, just not what people think of when someone claims (at least here) when they hear the cops are point a gun at their heads.
I don't know for sure, but I think the civilian foam rounds here are softer than the M1006's. A pretty standard minimum range on the ones I see is like 5-10 feet rather than the 10-15m for the military ones.
64: Of course I can't know it's all above board from the pic. He could be about to shoot a foam round right into a protester's nuts or a midget's face. But it's also pretty much what you'd expect to see if you had someone chucking shit and you wanted to bean that guy and mark him.
...which, in the photo, is pretty clearly not happening so why would you even bother to bring it up?
62 is basically right, and certainly contributes to the unease I feel about the Yale protests. But the connection with the workplace is interesting -- it's also arguable that the Yale students are demanding something like the modern US workplace HR norm of give no offense for their daily lives (if, for example, Christiakis was an HR director the email would have been totally inappropriate). I do think there's an element of "take care of us like a well-functioning employer would." At one level, that is sympathetic -- why should a college student have to put up with stuff a cubicle worker wouldn't? At another level, it is basically indicative that these protests (at least the Yale ones) are not really at all about challenging authority but see themselves as closely linked to authority.
Obviously minority students at super-fancy schools have a variety of real issues that those schools should deal with, but I can't see anything productive other than another 50 years of diversity-inflected class domination coming from Yale or Harvard protests and I wish people (including me) would just ignore them. There's something about the fancy schools that makes them hard to ignore but it's a trap. There's likely to be no connection between these college students and any broader social change that anyone would want. It's lame that we had a conversation about mass inequality in America and police brutality in places like Ferguson that's now turned to a focus on microaggressions at Harvard Law School and whether or not a Yale residential advisor has appropriately balanced compassionate with academic responsibilities.
I'm sympathetic to the argument that elite schools suck up a lot of oxygen in these debates, but on the other hand, a lot of these people do go on to have a lot of power, and they're steeped in what sounds like a pretty racist environment--these aren't just microaggressions; I've been reading a lot of stuff about frank racism directed at black students.
As for the other question, as I think I said here a few days ago, a lot depends on whether you decide college is adult prep or extended adolescence, and not deciding that is at the root of a lot of these debates.
And sure the job has eaten my soul, are any of us intact these days? My frustration with this stuff is that policing could totally be better in this country but the debate is fucked because BLM has decided that they are going to be the new standard bearers for credulous left wing idiots. They're going to add a woman beating felon to the banners next to the robbery suspect and just poison the hell out of the debate.
Ditto for the decarceration movement who has teamed up hard right and hard left for handling that shit in the worst fucking way possible. Let's just cut the penalties on loads of offenses and turn loose a bunch of chronic offenders while simultaneously doing jack shit about any of the underlying issues causing any of this. They're going to flood the country with a bunch of fucking addicts and we're actually going to increase the crime rate because instead of just legalizing drugs or providing their fix via the govt clincic we're still taking their drugs and either giving them a ticket or a misdemeanor booking which holds them all of an hour or two. What do you think happens then? They decide to stop? They're going right back out to burg a car, or a house, or do a purse snatch because they need their fix.
The sales side is also going to go to hell because they're removing the risk but none of the profit incentive. Oh, awesome, I'm sure that's going to have a happy ending. It's all a giant clusterfuck and I sure hope I'm wrong but I think the end of this is just going to hand "these people are a bunch of unfixable animals" on a silver platter to the opposition.
Yeah, I don't disagree with 69.1, really, and affirmatively agree with 69.2. But we all know that the ultimate result of this stuff will be that it burns out in six months, it will become a resume item for some of the organizers, the goal of integrating some but not too many ethnic minorities into the corridors of power so as to preserve those corridors will go on unabated, the fake "meritocracy" will proceed as usual and the world will remain precisely as fucked as it was before.
70 is some especially epic concern trolling. Made my morning.
67: Quit being a fool. Neither one of us can tell what is clearly happening in that pic other than Ellison's kid is not having anything aimed at his head.
My frustration with this stuff is that policing could totally be better in this country but the debate is fucked because BLM has decided that they are going to be the new standard bearers for credulous left wing idiots.
Dude. The debate was fucked way before BLM got involved. I mean, why the fuck do you think the movement got started in the first place?
They're going to add a woman beating felon to the banners next to the robbery suspect and just poison the hell out of the debate.
I really shouldn't get into this but here's the thing: it doesn't fucking matter if the dude was a woman-beating felon. Bad people have rights too. Bad people's lives matter too. The fact that he was a shitheel doesn't mean you should take less care with his life than you would with a white dude who's an upstanding citizen.
Ehn. He's mostly right. My corner of the internet has spilled jillions of words talking about whether a stupid House Master at one of the most privileged places in the US should be fired from their cushy job because they weren't doing enough to make their less privileged students feel comfortable and privileged, but no one is talking about the addiction problem that is behind a surprising amount of crime. I'm not a big fan of "but why aren't you talking about X" type arguments, but here I really do think it's focusing on the wrong aspect of the problem because it's easier.
Or what she said:
http://www.atlredline.com/i-dont-care-about-the-hate-crime-at-harvard-law-schoo-1743563836
75 is correct. How in the world could you think that "the debate is fucked because BLM has decided" anything?! The terms of "the debate" have been dominated by white racists since before the country was founded, with little-to-no interruption.
Okay, so what do we as trollable liberals do about addiction etc., the underlying stuff? This is only somewhat a real question because "staying home with my kids but thinking about other stuff" is probably going to be the only thing I do anyway. But I'm not everyone and other people might be more actively involved and/or maybe I'll be inspired or something.
75, 77: They're claiming he was 'cuffed and executed. He beat a woman, came back to the scene, tried to keep the medics from putting her in the ambulance before fighting the cops. So really, you think the odds favor a bad shoot here? Fuck it, maybe someone can talk Bill Cosby into making a furtive movement and then we can get an even shittier guy to rally around.
'for example, Christiakis was an HR director the email would have been totally inappropriate"
This is why I am dumbstruck by the common comment that "those protesters are in for a rude shock when they get into the real world"
The discussion moved on while I was carefully watering this comment down to homeopathic levels, but let me harmlessly post it. I don't know what to do about addiction.
I have relatively rarely seen these complaints about infantilized college student activists directed at young men as such (although I'm sure it happens), and I do vaguely remember one of the Laura Kipnis pieces -- badly argued as it was -- about forms of feminism that don't let young women grow up and assume adult responsibility. But the narrative of becoming a grown woman is less straightforward than the one for men, and telling young women to turn into some gender-neutral variant of grown men is probably not the answer either. And it seems disingenuous to talk about the Oedipal complex and present-day parent-child relations without talking about gender, although that may be addressed elsewhere in the article linked in 56.
68 echoes a lot of my thoughts.
I am not sure where this story of infantilized or self-infantilizing college women comes from; the caricature can't be real, but I can't adjudicate possible grains of truth to it. It's true IME that students at elite colleges are deferential to instructors, and that a majority of mine were women. But I imagine a lot of young women at Yale in particular are pretty pissed that this student calling her resident master a bad mommy is presumed to speak for them all, if they even have time to pay attention to all this bullshit.
67: Quit being a fool. Neither one of us can tell what is clearly happening in that pic other than Ellison's kid is not having anything aimed at his head.
Really? Because I can see multiple cops standing calmly behind their bicycles, while a whole bunch more mill about behind the line doing other things and not watching the crowd. I can see how every other cop except for that guy and one in the background isn't wearing anything looking at all like riot gear or armor. I can see how the cops at the barricade are standing calmly and not reaching for weapons of any kind or acting defensively. And I can definitely see no projectiles or protestors looking like their throwing anything. That all seems pretty clear right there and if you're able to make out relative distance and where the objects stand in relation to each other clearly enough to tell where the gun is pointed then you can probably stretch to seeing anything else in the picture at all.
78: Honestly? Nothing. What needs to happen is not going to happen. Take care of your own and do what you can to keep them far from the drug scene and the justice system. CA did the prop 47 thing and violent crime is up in all ten of the largest cities. LA county auto theft is up like 20 percent. Auto theft here is up even higher. Drug court diversions in LA County are down 50 percent. The young guy with little history but a current prolific auto theft and car burg habit I went to court on yesterday? He turned down the drug court offer and took a felony plea instead because he knows he's not going to do any real time.
Things are just going to go to hell for a while until people get fed up with it to do something different. Maybe it won't just be another reflex to lock everyone up, but I wouldn't count on it.
It's become really tedious following discussions of student activism this last year or so because it's hard to hear anything over all of the incessant trolling and counter-trolling. It feels like Jonathan Chait and Laurie Penny have both been publishing the same article every 2 weeks for over a year now.
It does bother me a little bit that disdain for freedom of speech has become such a big rallying point for some activists lately. From what I'm seeing, this seems to be unmoored from any particular subject (racial slurs or whatever) and become a value in itself. You signal you membership in the tribe and gain status by sneering at any concerns over free expression more loudly than the next person. I know that part of this is because ga/me/rga/ters and racist asshats wrap themselves in the mantle of free speech and so there's some element of knee jerk "Well if they're for it then I'm against it!". Also, I suppose it's fun to troll the sort of polite liberals who are most likely to care about these issues.
It bothers me that a lot of people seem to be growing up on the idea that "Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" is a completely adequate response to any issue regarding how to balance freedom of expression against other concerns.
Also, on a purely petty level, the default personal style among the people I'm talking about is a sort of belligerent twee smugness that I find completely revolting.
CA did the prop 47 thing and violent crime is up in all ten of the largest cities.
Where are you getting this? The state AG's website says that at least for Alameda, Los Angeles, Santa Clara, and San Diego counties violent crime in 2014 is down by about a third since 2005, and property crime down by about a quarter.
85: 2014 might be down from 2005, but 2015 is shaping up much different. We're seeing it here too. Some of this is stuff I hear from Cali guys at trainings but there's some discussion of it here.
http://www.latimes.com/local/crime/la-me-prop47-anniversary-20151106-story.html
I am not sure where this story of infantilized or self-infantilizing college women comes from..
I think it's just standard sexism/condescension/shut-up-people-less-powerful stuff, isn't it? "Those aren't real concerns you baby get over it in the real world things will actually be hard and what will you do then it's just selfish and childish to complain about stuff like this (etc.)" is stuff I've seen for years before any of the current millenials-are-whiny stuff started showing up.
On the topic of an African-American student navigating the path from a tough childhood to a predominantly white institution, this photo essay is pretty extraordinary storytelling.
I could just start off with the bad part. I was in jail for six months -- not jail, juvenile. I was 14. And I got out and I went to high school and I told myself, I'm gonna rise above what I was doing, which was fighting, gangbanging, the works. I started getting good grades, straight A's, and ended up having a 4.2 GPA. I was in National Honor Society, student council. I just felt good about myself. And while I was in high school, I was living in a group home because I had no place to go.
That's how I met my mentor, Kim Michelson, and she told me, I see potential in you. You should go to college. So I start applying to colleges.[...] I went to Connecticut College for two days.
When I came [to Connecticut], they had a lot of things going on, so, like, you really didn't know what was going on, 'cause it was only two days. I decided to do early decision. They gave me an interview, and I told them my story, and they said, OK, we're accepting you, and they gave me a great scholarship, like almost the full amount.
And I got here and I was just devastated. The two days I was here was nothing like the first week. I'm from Chicago, so like, where I come from we speak slang. The way we speak is not as proper as theirs. So when I talked, they never understood what I was saying. It irritated me. I know I can't speak proper English right now, but I'm trying. It's more like they was making fun of me, you know? Coming here, like, people study for hours, and they have all this advanced grammar and big words and I'm like, Yo, we did not learn this in high school. Whoa, the transition was so hard. And like, yeah, we're gonna do a five-page paper. What? We never did a five-page paper in our high school. It was more like a one-page paper.
It gets a little better:
This is my Afro-Caribbean dance class. This is like a way for me to express myself, learning new dances, and to feel more comfortable with myself and why I'm here. It was an outbreak from being around that crowd of people who don't see what I see. I'm able to talk more about dance than any other subject.
My professor, Rosemarie Roberts, she's a great teacher. I was very into it, I loved it, even though it was a dance I never did a day in my life. I felt like her explaining the aesthetics of cool and the aesthetics of juxtaposition -- learning all that, you can see what dancing can do. It's sorta like a second language. You're able to talk to people just by dancing. I loved this class. I felt like I knew everybody and what they did and what they loved, and we became close friends, just by dancing. And it was a way of me to open my mind, like I can show people how I really am.
Some of this is stuff I hear from Cali guys at trainings
You would fucking laugh at anyone who tried to pass this one off on you.
89: Laugh away, we're the ones seeing it play out in real time. Think what you wish.
It's a fairly nice day here and I'm going to go hang out with my daughter and her cousins rather than endlessly talk about how things are terrible.
90.2: Wait, do Mormons* take Fridays off?
*not that swift is a Mormon, but that the school schedule would cater to them
91: My oldest is graduated and her class today got canceled. I work 4 tens with Thur-Sat off.
Anyways, I need to go meet her at the gym for lifting. She feels she needs more strength in the clinch for Muay Thai.
I think there's a big, and super-loaded, jump from "we want to learn in a safe space" to "self-infantilizing." And of course, what privileged white males (myself included) have always demanded from colleges is an extremely infantile college experience, one in which they're allowed to break the rules (including actual crimes), be shitty to (weaker) others, and slack off with zero consequences.
Furthermore, the shift in what students are expecting from college is of a piece with Millennials' general approach ISTM. For instance, we tend to cluck at college students who talk to their parents on cell phones every day, but ISTR that part of the problem with teens in the Bad Old Days was that they were alienated from their parents, and that's why they were broken. It's almost as if whatever Kids Today do is automatically defined as wrong.
Most importantly, we have all sorts of measures by which The Kids Today are better than any of their (lead-addled, malnutreated) predecessors: lower crime, lower dropout rate, more likely to volunteer, etc. So these kids clearly have different mores from us and our parents, and they seem to act better. So why are we presuming that their demands, when they come into conflict with a system that all of us agree is fucked up and bullshit, must be prima facie ridiculous?
I have a feeling that we'll be spending the rest of our lives sneering at Millennials for the same reason people still sneer at hippies: because they were right when we were wrong (or ineffectual), and that's infuriating, so we need to attack them for their clothes or music or tone while ignoring their righteousness.
92: Wow, I knew you had kids early, but that's still amazing to hear.
I figured you were on a schedule roughly like that.
Witt, the link in 88 is incredible. Thank you.
Witt, the link in 88 is incredible. Thank you.
It is indeed, and thank you for saying something. I trust Witt to provide interesting links, but I hadn't clicked through yet, and your comment motivated me to do so.
Even without reading the text the photos are amazing.
I think there's a big, and super-loaded, jump from "we want to learn in a safe space" to "self-infantilizing."
I'm always puzzled by people who say that safe-spaces are inherently infantilizing. People live on college campuses, usually with roommates that they didn't know before moving in and often that they don't even like very much. As an adult, I have a safe space, and it's called my fucking residence. It's not unreasonable at all for college students to reserve a classroom and agree to not talk about things that might stress each other out.
college students who talk to their parents on cell phones every day
Keegan and I text at least a few days out of every week, but it's almost entirely about sports and music.
(written by a Harvard Law Professor, via Leiter)
Leiter, who has always been a shit of the first water, is being even more shitty about a number of things lately, so I would encourage people to wean themselves off his blog, which will likely improve their lives anyway.
Don't worry, ago, no one's questioning your manhood.
Iris is now reading the Diary of Anne Frank, and was mentioning how Anne directly addresses her diary like a friend, but Iris doesn't think of journals that way, and has never been able to keep up with one. I noted that Anne, even before the annex days, wouldn't have had anyone to talk to the way Iris talks with us, and the diary was a substitute for that. Iris, 11, is still incredibly frank and ingenuous with us, which is lovely and sweet. AB & I keep waiting for that to end, but it's occurred to me that kids these days don't necessarily give that up the way we did.
Also, this just occurred to me: I think I've mentioned how much Iris loves her new school, but I think it's the case that, since she started there, fraught tween interactions along the lines of, "You just don't understand!" have gone down in frequency. It had been getting to the point where there'd be some sort of tension every few days at least, but I can't even recall the most recent one. And if you take away ones driven by sibling friction, they're super rare. There was a lot of social drama at her old school, but she hardly sees those girls anymore, and even though there's the whole new school, new peers stuff, she seems to be handling it really well, with low stress.
There goes neb, silencing Leiter's free speech.
88 isn't just about race but about how difficult things are for teens who've been in foster care and don't have strong familial support.
He's my foster brother, like, the other half of my heart. This is like blood to me, 100 percent. I don't even consider him my foster brother. He knows everything I do, he know how I feel. We always do everything together. If he could come to college with me, I would be so happy, like, I would never drop out.
She knows how to talk to me, and I love it because that's not even my momma. I have a lot of mothers that I call Mom, and she's the main one that can actually talk to me.
I'm not saying this because I think foster care or adoption is the solution to a lot of these problems, but congregate care/group homes are not something we do well in the US and foster care varies widely. These mentor/fictive kin relationships he's forged for himself are IME even more common in the black community than in similar poor white communities.
96: Kids Today are better than we are/were, and the brightest hope for the world is that all of us old fucks die off as expeditiously as possible.
Yay for fictive kin! (I'm not sure I like fictive there at all. But I can't think of a better term right now.)
96 last: Depends on which hippies. Some were admirable, some deserved to be sneered at.
108: I used it because that's the term that gets used in official/legal language but I know what you mean. I mean, "paramour" is still the standard term people writing case files have to use, etc.
I mean, "paramour" is still the standard term people writing case files have to use, etc.
My favorite spell-checker error of all time: Newspaper gossip column that referred to someone's "powermower."
(A close second: "There are no amethysts in foxholes.")
109: Well sure, but that's true of any group of anything, ever, anywhere. But if you wrote down the top things that hippies stood for/believed in, you'd have to go pretty far down the list before you reached anything truly risible (even if you want to say that hippie drug culture was risible, I think you'd get pushback from a goodly chunk of bien pensant modern day liberals).
They were in some ways deeply flawed--e.g., famously bad at feminism--but the flaws were rarely the main point. Like, they weren't out there protesting that mainstream society was too feminist, they were just too mired in American misogyny to get feminism.
But anyway, my point is that the ridicule and sneering hippies get is completely unrelated to any objective assessment of their values vis a vis ours.
Newspaper gossip column that referred to someone's "powermower."
Motion to adopt this term in all current and future discussion of extramarital affairs here.
86: I have no opinion on whether or not crime is up in California, but I think the central discovery of all research on human behavior is that the opinions of some guys, even some guys right there on the ground, is totally worthless. For example, it's turned out that football head coaches, who makes millions of dollars, have big staffs, and watch hours of film every day, have no idea of when they should go for it on fourth down.
Numbers I've seen for crime in LA show 2015 very substantially up over 2014, though 2014 was still way down from 2005m, which in turn was way down from the horror days of the late 80s early 90s. Certainly there's been a perceived rash of robberies and burglaries in my neighborhood, though of course those are all soft numbers as well.
For months, the LAPD has been sending more officers onto the streets in an effort to quell the violence that's risen across the city this year, particularly the gang-related activity that Beck said fueled most of the weekend's attacks. But the number of killings continues to creep higher -- homicides are up nearly 11% this year compared with 2014, Beck said.
113: If additional specificity is needed, we can make a distinction between push mowers and riding mowers.
On "safe spaces," I don't think the idea that there should be no safe spaces on a college campus holds any water -- expand mental health services! People can be in private rooms and don't have to always be confronted by assholes! It's the expectation that the notion be extended to what was traditionally thought of as a much more public or broadly shared space that seems somewhat disturbing.
117: Right. The issue isn't with the entire idea of safe spaces, but with the details. Which spaces? Safe for whom, and from what? That might sound like nit picking to someone who doesn't teach classes, but the issue of how to make a classroom "safe" and how safe it should be is real. There are obvious cases, like Dr. Asshat philosopher who constantly uses sex and sexual assault as the examples for whatever abstract point about ethics or whatever that he's making. But there are plenty of other situations that are less clear.
Even the dreaded trigger warnings have their place. But inevitable some one (like the guy who wanted The Great Gatsby to have a trigger warning) will take it to absurd lengths and you have to say "no".
The pattern I'm getting sick of is:
Chait: "Today's students are a bunch of crybabies and trigger warnings will end civilization as we know it!"
Penny: "Anyone who thinks that freedom of speech has any value at all is just a big poopyhead racist and privilegeprivilegeprivilege!"
Not even pretending to be related to the topic, but has anyone else been watching Jessica Jones on Netflix? Because, holy hell. I think Netflix has, by now, managed to beat out the Marvel movies for best comic book film in existence. I would absolutely just give them money in exchange for more stuff at this point.
Also they have Luke Cage say "Holy Christmas" in a non-ironic sense and have it work. I don't care what their plan is I want the Luke Cage and Iron Fist series right now.
113: motion carried.
120: that's exciting to hear because the comics are amazing. in issue one page one someone was worried about giving up anal to luke cage on a first date, and I was like, "?!"
to my fellow humans generally: STOP MAKING CHAIT LOOK REASONABLE.
But students are supposed to be adults, or at least in the final stage of preparing to be adults. Why should it therefore be incumbent on colleges to give them a family environment?. They won't get one at the office.
If HR sends out an email about costumes for the Halloween party, I'm sure they're just trying to create a space for open dialogue, and whatever you choose to wear will be fine.
More seriously, depending on the workplace culture, I bet you'll find some places where people object to racist costumes and get told to suck it up and deal and be a team player and not oversensitive, and other places where a racist costume and an HR complaint about it will get the costume wearer a reprimand or possibly even fired. So maybe not that different from variations across colleges after all.
I see I was pwned hours ago, but at least I didn't add any value.
You added plenty of value in my book.
Not that there was a whole lot of value in this ongoing discussion to begin with, of course.
120: I watched the first five, but now I have to spend time with my family. Stupid family.
(A close second: "There are no amethysts in foxholes.")
Because it's actually quite good to be slightly drunk if you're in a foxhole.