“Certain people seem to want racism and discussions of racism to be so simple that they don’t have to think”
I think plenty fine; I just happen to disagree with you.
It strikes me that the person who assumes that I as a white woman must think “black peopke are good for athletics and nothing else” - that person is the racist, since they didn’t wait for me to actually express any such views but rather assumed what they were by the color of my skin. That’s what I find the most down-the-rabbit-hole of this whole thing. I want to be treated for who I am and not the color of my skin but I’ll preemptively assume the worst about you based on the color of your skin.
Am I microaggressing my Jewish husband when I tell him thanks, honey, for getting a great deal on a new car? What if he really did get a great deal on a new car? How is that different from telling the young black boy who just did something athletic that wow, I was really impressed by that athletic thing he did? Again, this is a serious question. Why are these scenarios different? You’re complimenting someone on something they genuinely did.
Sorry, all this stuff seems mostly stupid to me but I just can’t resist …
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I don’t think any culture has a patent on games where people kick a ball (unless you count the cavemen). But if the modern game of soccer originated anywhere, it originated in England. Just who is mis-appropriating from whom?
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Isn’t “futbol” the usual Spanish word for soccer? Since the entire Spanish language originated as a white European language, how is a white person of European descent using a Spanish word mis-appropriating Latin American culture? Again, just who is mis-appropriating from whom? (Pardon me while I avoid the lecture about colonialism).
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Is every culture supposed to “own” their inventions? This seems like a recipe for stupidity, hatred, and divisiveness. I don’t know what this student considers the home country of her culture, but it’s doubtful that the tools the student is using to communicate her irrational blowup (i.e. email, the internet, computers, electricity, or even a widely used written language) were invented there.
I think the ideal is for us to respect each other and treat each other well. All this stuff seems 1 step forward and 10 steps backwards to me.
Anyway, I think the authors of the paper that the original article is referencing were interested in a very different question than most of the discussion here.
I like this video http://cinema.littlethings.com/movie-theater-biker-prank/?utm_source=sungazing&utm_medium=Facebook&utm_campaign=tt
^^ Yes, THIS!! At it’s core, the original story is about someone taking a perceived “injustice” and instead of expressing her feelings rationally and in an intellectually prodding manner (as one would assume those at a good LAC would be prone to do) to express her issue, she decided to NOT be nice, and NOT respect the other person. Instead, she comes off as somewhat of a street thug (oh no, I think I just micro aggressed!!) who is the self-imposed gatekeeper of Latino culture, and gets all up in his face.
Had she just treated him respectfully, but aired her grievances in a more mature manner, the whole thing wouldn’t be worth being studied by sociologists. So, as @al2simon said, we just need to treat each other respectfully, even if we have differences. Why is that so difficult for people?
They do?
Where? Can you quote a post?
I’ve certainly seen posts where people have opined that someone’s chances were better at a certain school or type of school because they were an URM. I’ve also seen posts, in fact I’m sure I’ve made them myself, in which I’ve said that an unhooked kid with scores in the bottom 25% at certain schools need to be realistic that many if not most of the accepted students in that range are hooked: recruited athletes (especially in "helmet sports), URMs, legacies, or otherwise hooked applicants. (Note that this does mean that there are not recruited athletes, legacies, and URMs who are also Presidential Scholar candidates. I’ve known at least one, personally.)
But I really have never seen anyone on CC say that URMs get football scholarships, not academic scholarships. That’s extremely obnoxious. Of course, I do not generally participate in the forums of schools that give athletic scholarships at all. Maybe it happens there.
My comments about this article are below and are written so not to offend anyone:
Comments Complete.
If we hold back on articulating that certain people who happen to be black are articulate for fear of inadvertently insulting them, aren’t we doing them a disservice by not acknowledging that the stereotype is wrong? It feels counterintuitive to silence ourselves in this manner. Even for the fat girl with the pretty face. Shouldn’t it be a good thing to state that she is still pretty even if she is fat?
I have been active on CC for nearly 10 years and I have never seen this, even tho I have participated in many athletic threads. Scholarship athletes in general are maligned; I’ve never seen URM athletes get called out in a negative way. Some have defended athletic scholarships as a way to keep AA numbers and diversity up. Perhaps that is insulting/a microagression? Maybe.
It feels to me that the two might be related.
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/553662#Comment_553662
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parent-cafe/110221-cnn-presents-the-gap-btwn-black-and-white-students.html
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/62815-people-get-mad-over-urms-legacies-what-about-athletes.html
There are more threads, but it is late.
If one reads the Oberlin blog and the Atlantic article, it becomes apparent that the article’s author omits a key fact: that the “aggrieved” student is the one who actually organized the talk that the soccer game conflicted with. It goes a long way toward explaining her anger toward & frustration with the emailer, but because this fact doesn’t suit the author’s purpose of portraying the young woman as a poster person for the “victim culture,” it is conveniently omitted.
@MidwestDad3: Why does it matter? That she organized the speech doesn’t explain why she was mad about “fútbol.” If she’d said “I worked really hard to organize this and I don’t like you being flippant” then this would be a non-story. That’s not what happened though and I don’t see any basis for us to reinterpret her words for her. Presumably she was able to say what she meant, and she talked about “fútbol.”
Honestly the part of this students blog that bothers me most, her repeated spelling and grammar errors!
Which of these 4 statements (if any) are microaggressions?
A) URMs have an advantage in college admissions at elite schools.
B) Legacies have an advantage in college admissions at elite schools.
C) that person over there probably got in because he’s a URM.
D) that person over there probably got in because he’s a legacy.
@Pizzagirl—Can I pick (e), none of the above?
A microagression would be something like “You’re smarter than I expected” or “It must have been nice to have a built-in ‘hook’ for your application”.
MidwestDad3 - I disagree with this. Here’s an excerpt from the 2nd paragraph of the “aggrieved” student’s post, with one change and one expletive deleted:
The change I made was that I replaced “white people” with “Latinos”. Please read her words. I don’t see how anyone could defend this bigoted garbage.
The point isn’t that she vented when she was angry; the point is what she vented. The fact that she was the organizer may explain why she was angry but doesn’t excuse her spewing racist crap. That this racist stuff came pouring out when she was angry says a lot about the “aggrieved” student and what she probably truly thinks.
I just told the organizer of the urban service program that I will not be volunteering at this time. Frankly, the schedule does not work for me, but also the training had enough elements of this micro-aggression business to really turn me off. For example, we are supposed to simultaneously accept the idea that there are many urban people who truly need our help, yet we are not to behave as if they do since that would offend their dignity. We are to be moved enough by the severity of the problems they face to want to donate our time and resources, yet we were told it is wrong for us to associate the urban environment with those problems, since “urban” just means “city”–it doesn’t mean poor or uneducated or anything else. Our goal is to bring them hope through education and practical helps, but we must understand that they are victims of “systemic oppression” which means it will be nearly impossible to ever diminish their plight. We are supposed to try to relate and find common ground with the people we help despite our differences in background, but we are not supposed to assume they are really any different from us. We are supposed to try to meet them more than halfway and connect, but we should not “front” in our efforts to relate. We are supposed to feel sympathy for the ills of the city dwellers as represented to us via the life stories of several minority individuals who spoke, yet we are also supposed to swallow the accusation that the rape, the drug use, the murder, the teen pregnancy etc. is all our fault.
It’s not that I am too stupid get that there can be some legitimate middle ground between these extremes, but I guess after a while I just wanted to interrupt them and ask “Do you only want help from perfectly culturally sensitive people, or will the rest of us be acceptable too?” It just seemed way too controlling and a little ungrateful to be looking so many gift horses in the mouth.
A 6 year old boy of any color on earth, having been observed doing well at his first attempt at skating, and complimented by a stranger that he is a “great athlete”, will beam happily and take no offense at all.
And I agree with Tom’s post #15. If having a friend who is a minority means a white kid is opening himself up to a charge of tokenism, then it will be much safer to self-segregate. Who wants to deal with some aggrieved student maligning you in front of the whole college community? Oh wait, that will also mean he’s a racist. So does he have to have all minority friends, as opposed to just one or two? No, because then he’d be trying to hone in on their culture and act like he is one of them and he most definitely is not. There is now no acceptable way for white people to behave that is aporoved by the self-proclaimed victims.