Wow tom1944, that’s crazy. It’s incredible to think there were people who still wanted to discipline the poor guy. Were they just having trouble admitting they were wrong?
As I remember, the first of these case was at Penn when charges were brought and upheld against a kid from S. Africa who yelled out his window that some girls were like “water buffaloes” - which is S.Africa means acting like untamable beast - and the women heard it as a racial slur. As I remember, it took a few years to clear him. But in the context of today, wouldn’t it be culturally insensitive to denigrate his culture’s use of language, to impose on it an American racial sensibility?
Sorry if this was mentioned before.
540: That happens whether we're talking about language or anything else. Consider all the controversies over the word *niggardly/i, where people refuse to believe that it has nothing at all to do with the taboo word it bears an accidental partial resemblance to—or consider the reaction of the authorities in Irving, Texas not so much to Ahmed Mohammed's clock, but rather to the controversy over their choice to arrest (for the police) and suspend (for the school) him.
@DecideSomeHow - there’s a great cartoon from the 1980’s by Roz Chast called “So-and-so’s first Ma’am”, where a woman, no longer quite young, is shopping and holding something while a sales person behind her says, “can I help you, MA’AM?”. She looks like she was hit in the back with a stun gun! But this is from the woman who gave us something like, “Herman, the human tilapia”.
The water buffalo case has nothing to do with South Africa…
I thought it was Israel, not S Africa.
The snatch story sounds like total urban legend. If I weren’t on an iphone, I’d check Snopes.
blankmind-it was more that they did not believe he said it innocently and was not using the fact the word had two meanings to say something outrageous.
PG it might be an Urban legend but I was in the meetings on this one. Maybe they were right and the kid did do it for effect and was aware of the UL.
No actual stories but similar use- some of these are really funny
Here is a related article about microaggressors.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/cocked-fist-culture_1035805.html?nopager=1#
To wit: A University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign study has concluded that black students “walking into or sitting in” a roomful of white people can be considered a microaggression. (This is destined to be a recurring problem, since blacks constitute only 13 percent of the U.S. population.) At Northeastern University, courtesy of the LGBTQA Resource Center, students can now be trained and certified as human “safe zones,” allowing them to receive “safe zone stickers.” (Is it any wonder that helicopter-parented, milk-fed millennials might regard a kindergarten-style sticker as a laudable achievement?)
At Washington State University, students were told they would be downgraded not only for using microaggressive descriptors such as “illegal alien,” as well as “male” and “female,” but also for failing to “defer” to nonwhite students. While at Brandeis University, a campus group that put up an exhibit to raise awareness about micro-aggression against Asians felt compelled to apologize, after a student protest, for triggering those Asian students who were “hurt by the content of the microaggressions in our installation.” Putting me in mind of the comedian Chris Rock—nobody’s idea of a knuckle-dragging conservative—who last year explained why he wouldn’t play college campuses anymore: “You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.”
At Wheaton College, an evangelical liberal arts school, a microaggression survey found that some students were offended that “the class worship band does not include worship styles familiar to my cultural background.” At Ithaca College, students proposed an online reporting system in which the offended could rat out classmates for “belittling” or “isolating” words and/or behavior. At the University of Missouri, despite the state declaring it unlawful to restrict free-wheeling campus speech to campus “free speech zones,” faculty were advised to correct any peer’s “noninclusive language” and were given a four-page “inclusive terminology” guide to help them along. University of Illinois faculty have been advised to “nail” microaggressions through use of helpful admonishments, such as “Watch it! Racism.”
Harvard’s dining service felt it necessary to remove SodaStream stickers from its Israeli-manufactured water-machines, so as not to microaggress Palestinian students. A University of Washington union, in its bargaining demands for academic student employees, insisted on “genderless bathrooms, and working towards bathroom equity in access to already existing gendered bathrooms.” Arizona State now offers a course on “U.S. Race Theory and the Problem of Whiteness.” Princeton students have proposed making a “privilege-examining program” mandatory during freshman orientation. The student government president and Hispanic/Latino campus club at Northwestern admonished students not to eat tacos or drink tequila on Cinco de Mayo on grounds that it “offends, marginalizes, and isolates many of our friends, classmates, and community members.”
I think the state of women’s restrooms just about everywhere is a MACRO aggression. Why are we always queued up in a long line while men simply walk in and walk out? Every time I have to use a public restroom where there is a wait and there is not a similar wait for the men’s room, it is an aggression.
I say…all women of the world unit…fight for pee equality!
I do think there’s a lot of hypersensitivity about this issue–what I mean is that people are hypersensitive about any suggestion that something THEY said could ever be considered offensive by anybody else.
This is why I really think the label “micro-aggression” diverts us from what this is really about, which is trying to be sensitive and kind to those who are different from us. You can be entirely well-meaning but still say something offensive, either because of ignorance (which is curable), or because of thoughtlessness (which may be curable, but I’m not certain).
→ official sexist micro-aggression trigger warning ←
As the comedian Bill Burr puts it, it’s one of the few benefits we, as men, have in society… Think about it, when a building is on fire, who are the first ones to leave? That’s right, women and children… When the ship is sinking and there are not enough life rafts on board, who are the ones to get priority? You guessed it, women and children.
Think of it as a small tax, lol.
@dietz199 - Most modern public buildings are designed with women’s restrooms significantly larger and with more facilities than men’s.
If restroom lines are a priority for you, attend a hockey game (advice for people who identify as female). You get to see guys queued up in long lines and can dash into a clean restroom at any time during the game or even halftime.
Similarly, working in a male dominated industry, the ladies rooms are clean and always empty.
They got rid of the “fainting” couches in the ladies rooms a few decades ago, that was really a shame. Only the lactation rooms still have comfy chairs, and entry to those is limited to a few years of your life.
In some places, there are laws requiring that men’s and women’s gang restrooms have the equal numbers of toilets (urinals count as toilets). However, some have measured that women take twice as long as men do on average, so that gang restroom arrangements designed for equal wait time in a place with equal numbers of men and women would have twice as many toilets in the women’s restroom as the men’s restroom.
I’ve been stuck in those restroom lines many, many, times. Funny, I’ve never managed to be on a sinking boat or in a burning building… I’ll choose pee equality too.
Sometimes, I just go in the men’s room if it’s a single room.
If men weren’t such pigs using the restroom (aggression :)–see other thread), I’d be all for having unisex bathrooms in places like stadiums, etc. It has been amusing visiting my D at an all girls’ college–tons of bathrooms for ladies; dad must use the one main floor bathroom.
Good point. So if a certain type of work environment is important to you, don’t go where a bunch of known burly PC uneducated people work. Don’t go to the SodaStream machine at Harvard, don’t go to a place that has gendered bathrooms if they offend you, if you don’t like the term illegal alien being directed at you, then don’t be one. If you are offended by certain religious traditions, don’t go to one of their colleges (can you hear me Ms/Cis/them Fluke,
To Post #551: Women and children first out of a burning building? Now you are just making stuff up. Haven’t you ever participated in a fire drill? I have, many of them. They don’t have the women line up first!
And women and children first in lifeboats went out with the British Edwardian era to the extent it was ever followed at all!
I apologize for getting the water buffalo story details wrong. [url=<a href=“http://www.wikipedia.com/en/Water_buffalo_incident%5DHere%5B/url”>http://www.wikipedia.com/en/Water_buffalo_incident]Here[/url] is the wikipedia page on it. Note the incident absolutely demonstrates the entire idea that “my sensitivity” is your problem.