I'm only a paragraph in, and barely at that, but it's already so fucking ironic to read an article about Oberlin proclaiming "Class and race mattered." If you're a student at Oberlin, you got miles of privilege above the kids who actually feel the reality of that statement, any day. Two bold section headers in and I posit discussions of privilege are inherently tied into an emotional Maslow's hierarchy: it is those who are fulfilled in most every other basic sense who can afford to make the most fuss about privilege. Not those who find themselves afforded the least. Are you kidding me what the fuck. Do you think your employers are going to just let you skip out on work for a quarter because you are engaged in political protests? You think you should be excused failing grades because your political activism prevented you from doing your classwork? HAVE YOU TRIED SWITCHING TO A POLISCI MAJOR MAYBE THAT WILL HELP . Ugh I can't even, this article is full of first world problems that are richer than double chocolate cheesecake. Talk to me when you are eating rice and beans . I will add one more comment. My parents raised me in an environment which they attempted to control and keep 'safe' every way they could. The result was that when I went to college I was completely naive and unprepared for the realities of life without hovering, protective guardians. That meant I got to make all the delicious awful mistakes for myself, a lot, alone. I do not support the idea of keeping children safe, or college students, for that matter. I believe that people who are "safe" do not grow. They do not learn how to deal with trouble because it is kept apart from them. When they finally encounter trouble, they are spectacularly fucked in knowing how to deal with it. My cat likes to bat at candle flames. I let him. If he doesn't learn that the flame will burn his paw first hand, he will not learn. Nothing I can do will stop him from liking the flame. You can tell a kid the stove is hot as often as you want to but the kid is only going to really take it to heart once they touch it for themselves.More than thirteen hundred students signed a petition calling for the college to eliminate any grade lower than a C for the semester
Fuck Maszlow, the author went for fuckin' de Toqueville: But he plants it: But then here's the tricky part: What do you do when your black professor posts antisemitic shit to Facebook?Two bold section headers in and I posit discussions of privilege are inherently tied into an emotional Maslow's hierarchy: it is those who are fulfilled in most every other basic sense who can afford to make the most fuss about privilege.
In “The Old Regime and the Revolution,” a study of political ferment in late-eighteenth-century France, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that, in the decades leading up to the Revolution, France had been notably prosperous and progressive. We hear a lot about the hunger and the song of angry men, and yet the truth is that, objectively, the French at the start of the seventeen-eighties had less cause for anger than they’d had in years. Tocqueville thought it wasn’t a coincidence. “Evils which are patiently endured when they seem inevitable, become intolerable when once the idea of escape from them is suggested,” he wrote. His claim helped give rise to the idea of the revolution of rising expectations: an observation that radical movements appear not when expectations are low but when they’re high, and vulnerable to disappointment.
A quad-size version of this drama is unfolding. “This is the generation of kids that grew up being told that the nation was basically over race,” Renee Romano, a professor of history at Oberlin, says. When they were eleven or twelve, Barack Obama was elected President, and people hailed this as a national-historic moment that changed everything. “That’s the bill of goods they’ve been sold,” Romano explains. “And, as they get older, they go, ‘This is crap! It’s not true!’ ” They saw the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice. And, at schools like Oberlin, they noticed that the warm abstractions of liberalism weren’t connecting with the way things operated on the ground.
There have been an awful lot of people who aren't right wing nutjobs taking up the right wing nutjob antisemitic and masonic conspiracy theories lately, and it's really weird because it's not like the Internet doesn't give you the means to look into where they come from.