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loudlytransparenttrash · 7 years

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This Week Within Our Colleges: Part 14

A Princeton student believes that the radical progressive groups Antifa and Black Lives Matter are merely “organizations that stand for equality” who “bravely face off” against Neo-Nazis. Writing in The Daily Princetonian, Cox alleges President Trump intentionally endorsed Nazis, and openly supported fascism. “Institutions like Princeton should be expected to be functioning parts of The Resistance... White silence is white support for the wrong side. If one who is white remains silent, then they give the KKK a non-vocal stamp of approval... To my fellow white students and peers, we are not forced to walk amongst statues that glorify individuals who killed our ancestors. We are in a position of privilege regardless of how we look at it and remaining complicit at times like these only puts us in a position of support. This is not the time to remain neutral.”

A woman’s studies professor at Clark University, attending a baseball game at Fenway Park declined to clap as a veteran was honored, cringed when the American flag was unfurled, and would not stand when the rest of the crowd did so to sing “America the Beautiful.” This was her personal way of protesting the patriarchy and what she calls “militarized, masculinity-heroism patriotism.” Trust me, it gets worse. Cynthia Enloe goes on to claim that these displays of honoring our service men and women, or as Enloe puts it, "militarized, masculinity-heroism patriotism,” only exists to remind women in the audience that they are inferior. “Women are popularly expected to be grateful to men and to the masculinized state for offering them militarized protection. Sentimentality, entertainment, appreciation and gratitude, each are routinely gendered to the extent that all four can be mobilized to serve masculinized militarized patriotism and patriarchy will be perpetuated.”

The University of Texas-Austin removed statues of three Confederate figures in the middle of the night as their continued presence would run “counter to the university’s core values,” UT President Greg Fenves said he was excited to show off his statue-free accomplishment to the incoming students, providing them with an “open, positive and inclusive learning environment.”

A University of Michigan fraternity announced that it canceled a “Nile”-themed party after a student from the school’s Egyptian Student Association criticized them for cultural appropriation. The event’s facebook page said students could come to the party as a mummy, Cleopatra or King Tut. ESA president Yasmeen Afifi lambasted the fraternity, repeatedly signaling them out for their skin color. “I am the president of the Egyptian student association and these whites don’t know what they got themselves into,” she said. “I will not allow my culture to be appropriated for your entertainment. White people have invaded, stolen, erased, and defaced numerous ancient Egyptian symbols and temples in attempt to claim one of the greatest civilizations as their own. This is much larger than just a party, it is the privilege that led them to think it was remotely okay.” Subsequently the fraternity released a statement apologizing, “We sincerely apologize to anyone who was hurt by the theme choice. We have learned our lesson and will take more precaution in the future when deciding themes for events.”

A group of female high school students wearing “Make America Great Again” hats were repeatedly harassed and threatened with violence while visiting Howard University. The students were on a class trip to Washington D.C, and decided to stop at Howard University for lunch along the way. Howard students quickly took to social media to shame the high schoolers and alert other students of their presence, saying, “who told these lil yt girls they could come to the HU like it was about to be some joke.” In response, another student suggested asking the visitors to “meet you behind south” so she could “beat the f*ck out of them.” The university itself released a statement warning students that “there were visitors on our campus who were wearing paraphernalia that showcased their political support.” Multiple organizations affiliated with the university eventually responded to the incident, though only to soothe and reassure students that the female high schoolers had left campus. “We will take any action necessary to ensure that HU students feel safe and comfortable. This group is no longer on campus.” Meanwhile, the university’s NAACP chapter harshly rebuked the two high schoolers, writing that “Howard University students have no time for white supremacists and neo-nazi sympathizers on campus.”

A dean at George Washington University has a clear message, “Either you challenge the president’s blatant racism, or you are an accomplice to his repugnant views and a detriment to your own sense of personal honor.” “Events in the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville have made this abundantly clear. For the first time in our history, a Nazi sympathizer occupies the Oval Office,” says dean Reuben Brigety. “If anyone continues to serve Trump without denouncing him, he or she will “have to explain why you chose to silently serve America’s first Nazi-in-chief.”

Students at the University of Pennsylvania have published an open letter calling upon the university to adopt numerous measures to combat “hate speech” on campus. “We are not satisfied that all reasonable preventative action has been taken to protect the wellbeing and physical safety of students at Penn who are not white,” reads the letter. The outrage stemmed from a op-ed co-authored by University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, who made the reasonable argument that single parenthood, antisocial habits, thug culture and anti-assimilation ideas - prevalent in all races - shouldn’t be embraced in a first world, 21st-century environment. The students replied with numerous demands for the university to censor this “hate speech,” saying if the university does not comply, they will be held responsible for “harming” and “dehumanizing” its “vulnerable students.”

Brown University has announced it will be the recipient of a $30,000 grant from the Association of American Colleges and Universities to address “racial justice.” Two of the initiatives the university is planning are discussion groups for female Muslim students and another for black students. The latter will focus on - wait for it - “issues of colorism.” Well that’s a new one. Initiative leader Janet Cooper Nelson said she hoped to create an “intimate setting” which would provide Muslim women “hospitality, healing and empathy” and holding a dinner for black females will allow participating students to “discuss issues of identity, race, gender and colorism within communities of color.”

Sam Houston State University will offer a course this semester called “Understanding Whiteness” to help students understand “white privilege” and develop “white racial literacy.” “How might white people better understand white privilege and their potential role in dismantling systemic racism?” the description asks. “What is white privilege and how does it apply to you?” ... Let me guess, if you’re white, it applies to you? The many topics the course aims to cover includes “the role of race in one’s life; examination of white racial identity; how whiteness operates within institutional structures; systemic privilege and oppression; key historic events advancing white privilege (global colonization, holocaust); and current dialogues about whiteness in the US.” The course pledges to students that by the end, they will be better white allies, having “developed white racial literacy in acting upon systemic racism.”

Yale University censored a stone work of art on campus depicting an armed Native American and Puritan side by side. The stone carving was edited to cover up the Puritan’s musket, while the Native American’s bow was left as is to spare the students from being exposed to a “hostile environment.” The censorship of the school’s historic stone carving marks one of the first major accomplishments of the newly elected art committee and a win for their “A More Inclusive Yale” campaign. It is unclear why officials decided to cover the musket while leaving the bow untouched, or why they deemed the artwork inappropriate in the first place as there’s been no recorded student complaints.

A Clemson University professor went on quite a rant to voice his contempt for Trump supporters and Republicans. “All trump supporters, nay, all Republicans, are racist scum,” Assistant Professor of Human-Centered Computing Bart Knijnenburg wrote. “This society is aggressively structured to make cis white males succeed, at the expense of minorities.” Additionally, Knijnenburg explicitly endorses the Antifa slogan of ‘punching Nazis,’ “I admire anyone who stands up against white supremacy. Violent or non-violent. This needs to stop, by any means necessary. #PunchNazis”

Students at Stanford University can join a “Disrupting Whiteness” club in an effort to end the “white liberal apathy” and “white privilege” of their peers. “White students must step up to educate themselves and those around them,” the club description states, adding that “white students can and should do a lot more than we currently do in when it comes to race education and anti-racist action.” The group recently attracted attention after they published a document following the Charlottesville riots in which they sought to teach white people how they can “step up,” and to give money “to actual black, brown, and Jewish people.” Micaela Suminski, the group’s leader, says that “every white person can do things to disrupt whiteness and work against these skewed systems,” such as “talking with coworkers, relatives, and friends about implicit bias or the dangers of white supremacy; buying from POC-owned businesses; or donating money.”

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Tuesday protested against a confederate statue on campus known as Silent Sam, chanting “tear it down” and holding signs reading “White People-We Must Own Our Racism.” At one point the event became heated when a male protester was detained by police, prompting the crowd to chant “cops and Klan go hand in hand.” Protesters then surrounded the police van the man was held in, chanting “let him go” repeatedly. As the protest continued into the night, it migrated to streets near campus, and the loonies chanted: “Hey hey, ho ho, this racist statue has got to go.” They finally gave up, not before vandalizing the statue first, of course.

San Francisco State University plans to launch a “Black Unity Center” this fall to provide black students with an “intersectional, afrocentric environment.” The creation of the center stemmed from student protesters who “were feeling unsupported on campus,” according to the director of the center. Black students protested and accused the school of “failing to address their needs” and ultimately listed a set of demands, one of them was creating a Black Student Center. As a result the administration along with faculty did as they were told, now the demands have been met, the university’s president, Les Wong, proudly affirms a “commitment to diversity and social justice.”

Two professors, one from Purdue University and the other from Stanford University, are assembling a "Campus Antifascist Network" (CAN) to serve as a “big tent” for “anyone committed to fighting fascism” with the goal of confronting groups it considers fascist and “driving racists off campuses.” “Since Trump’s election, fascists, neo-fascists, and their allies have used blatantly Islamophobic, anti-semitic, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, and ableist messaging and iconography to recruit to their ranks and intimidate students, faculty, and staff,” the professors write, adding that CAN will “build large, unified demonstrations against fascists on campuses.” “The time to take action is now.”

A professor at the University of Massachusetts-Boston wants business professors to engage in more “intellectual activism” to promote “social justice.” Alessia Contu urges business professors to join the fight by adopting an activist stance in the classroom, which she calls a “form of political work” inspired by “black, feminist, critical race scholars.” This activism, she explains, calls upon professors to fight against “white supremacy, hetero-normative patriarchy and environmental exploitation.” While she acknowledges that business schools aren’t exactly known as a hotbed of progressive politics, Contu argues that there are still opportunities for professors to engage in this activism while on the job, such as infusing “intersectionality” into syllabi and asking “radical questions.”

A professor at the University of Minnesota states the concerns of people over illegal immigration’s impact on the U.S are rooted in “racist nativism.” According to Bic Ngo, “As these immigrants are positioned as outsiders and scapegoats for the disorders of US society, whites are constructed as the native population with a legitimate place in the country.” Ngo then takes her argument a step further, claiming Trump’s proposal to build a wall along America’s southern border and improved vetting of visitors from terror-riddled countries, apparently shows Trump “aims to revive the American Dream through an instantiation of whiteness and global isolation.”

Students at the University of Virginia have issued a list of demands that includes racial quotas and mandatory “education” about Thomas Jefferson’s connection to white supremacy. The ultimatum was issued Monday during a rally to “send a message to the university that we demand more from them.” The list begins with a demand that UVA remove Confederate plaques and change the plaque on a Jefferson statue to refer to him as an emblem of white supremacy. They also insist that buildings “named after prominent white supremacists or slaveholders should be renamed after people of marginalized groups.” Other items on the list demand explicit racial quotas for both the faculty and the student body and here’s the funniest one of them all: They demand that the school spends $13,000 on minority students, because - wait for it - one hundred years ago, the KKK gave the school $1000, which would be $13,000 today, so to prove that the school is sorry for its racist history, it must spend the KKK money on its non-white students.

#college

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el-gordo-grande · 7 years

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Yesterday, Sunday March 19, at city hall the far right, decidedly islamophobic group Canadian Coalition of Concerned Citizens held a rally against a motion seeking to condemn Islamophobia and all forms of racial and religious discrimination (motion M103, if you'd like to search for more info). In attendance to 'protect free speech' were the Soldiers of Odin, listed as a hate group by the ADL, and the Canadian Jewish Defense League, a far right Zionist group whose original American counterpart has been described by the FBI as an extremist group and has been connected to multiple terror attacks within the US. They also held a rally on March 4, with soldiers of Odin in attendance of this event as well. The March 4 event was wonderful, antifascists and anti racists outnumbered them considerably. The Soldiers of Odin were too afraid to be physically aggressive with protestors, and the CCCC had to cancel their planned march through downtown Toronto. All of the right wing protesters were forced to leave with police protection. Yesterday, however, was a different story. For one, the right wing extremists seemed to be larger in number, and the counter demonstration was considerably smaller than the last one. I'd estimate that we either had the same amount of people as them at our peak. However, there were not enough of us to stop them from marching to the CBC, and many on our side decided not to follow the march, leaving us who did more vulnerable to physical assault. Emboldened by a lack of resistance, JDL and SOO members were happy to incite or attempt to incite violence. During the marching portion, a Soldier of Odin shoved me against a wall and ripped my sign, but thankfully his peers pulled him away before he could do more. An older woman attempted to hit me from behind with her sign, attached to a wooden handle of sorts, but thankfully one of the antifascist protesters blocked it and I was only grazed. Ironically this woman called me a coward for concealing my identity, but that's beside the point. If our white so called allies had turned out, we could have prevented a parade of fascists and white supremacists from waltzing through downtown Toronto. Where were all the liberals and self proclaimed progressives who live in this allegedly progressive city? Where were those posting "Make Racists Afraid Again" or "I stand with ____" following the inauguration of trump? I know I invited everyone I knew to come out but only two of my friends showed for any of it and both had to leave early, one for medical issues and the other for prior commitments. Everyone else, people who claimed to stand in solidarity with marginalized groups, people who claimed to oppose fascism and and white supremacy, either ignored my facebook messages or had a convenient and vague excuse to stay home. When you, white allies, choose to stay home, you put other protesters at a higher risk than had you shown. There is safety in numbers, as demonstrated by the fear and lower rates of aggression at the first rally. When you, moderate liberals, choose to actively ignore the growing threat that is right wing extremism, you allow a movement that should have no platform to grow almost unobstructed, which further normalizes far right extremist views in mainstream conservative political circles. Your inaction makes you complicit in the spread of fascism. Before you argue that you can oppose fascism without attending protests or doing more than making a few facebook posts, I agree that you can be ideologically opposed to fascism, but you are not doing anything to actually oppose fascism and bigotry. Paying lip service to a cause is insulting and irritating at best, and to see white allies pat themselves on the back for literally just sharing a post is just disrespectful to the people actually out there, who you have put in danger with your lack of attendance. Again, there is safety in numbers and when you and all the other moderates sit at home you put protesters at risk of violence If all you do is pay lip service to a cause you aren't an ally If you constantly come up with excuses to miss counter demonstrations you're probably not an ally, and if you are, you're a really shitty one. If you run the minute things get bad and leave the people you claim to stand in solidarity with in actual physical danger you're not an ally, you're a white person who went to a demo for a photo op. Don't preach to me about how you're such a great ally if you can't even stand in solidarity with a group. And don't post shit like "make racists afraid again" because you're a hypocrite and your inaction gives them confidence. So don't fucking call yourself an ally unless you're willing to fucking prove it. Tl;Dr: white allies are shit. Paying lip service to a cause isn't supporting that cause. Being absent from physical protest puts both marginalized groups and those who protest at risk while you have the privilege of sitting home. ** I know not everyone can attend every rally, and some people can't attend due to disability or economic situations. But so many people who can, don't. And that's not okay.

#antifa #antifascist action #toronto #allyship #islamophobia #white supremacy #racism #soldiers of odin #white ally #white allies #white allyship #antifainternational

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