About 25 graduate
students “of color” staged a sit-in in professor Val Rust’s UCLA classroom recently,
alleging that there is a “toxic” racial climate in the Graduate School of Education
& Information Studies. As partial evidence of that poisonous climate, they
complained that the grammar and spelling corrections he made on their
dissertation proposals are a form of racial “micro-aggression.”
The demonstration
stemmed from a new report stating that UCLA’s policies and procedures don’t
sufficiently address racial discrimination among the university’s faculty. The organizers
alleged several examples, unspecified in the Daily Bruin article, in which minority students faced challenges
and “micro-aggressions” from professors. Nora Cisneros, one of the sit-in
participants, said they chose to protest Rust’s class because he doesn’t
encourage “a climate where students of color can discuss issues of race
openly.”
This seems a
curious accusation, since one of his areas of teaching expertise is “ethnic issues in international perspective.” Several of Rust’s current and former students
said they thought it was unfair to target him, because he is a supporter of
intercultural learning, whatever that is, and that he was being used “as a scapegoat
for much larger issues.” Grad student Emily Le said, “It is disturbing that
students would make such unfounded accusations based on misperceptions of what
they believe as racism.” Disturbing perhaps, but unsurprising considering that
racism today exists wherever it suits anyone to see it.
Rust himself
believes that the demonstrators have legitimate concerns and that the
department should organize a town hall meeting “to begin a dialogue.” Perhaps
that dialogue could begin by addressing why graduate students at a major
university – in the Department of Education
and Information Studies, remember – need to have their grammar and spelling
corrected, and why that correction constitutes racism. Rust said, “I have attempted to be rather thorough on the
papers and am particularly concerned that they do a good job with their
bibliographies and citations, and these students apparently don’t feel that is
appropriate.” They don’t feel it’s “appropriate” because they are exploiting
their self-designated victim status as an excuse to avoid being held to the
department’s stated high academic standard.
In case you’ve been blissfully ignorant until now of this term
“micro-aggression,” the UCLA report defines it as “subtle verbal and nonverbal
insults directed toward non-whites, often done automatically and unconsciously.
They are layered insults based on one’s race, gender, class, sexuality,
language, immigration status, phenotype, accent, or surname.” It was coined in
1970 by a psychiatrist to describe acts of racism so subtle that neither the
“perpetrator” nor the “victim” is even fully conscious of what is happening. “The
invisibility of racial microaggressions may be more harmful to people of color
than hate crimes or the overt and deliberate acts of White supremacists such as
the Klan and Skinheads,” writes Dr. Derald Wing Sue, author of the influential Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life:
Race, Gender and Sexual Orientation.
So, unconscious racism that goes unnoticed by both parties
is more of a danger than actual lynching – got that? (If you want to see to
what ludicrous degree this phantom threat can be carried, check out this McGill
University op-ed
by the school paper’s Health and
Education editor, Ralph Haddad. He accuses “Movember,” the annual month-long
campaign in which men raise awareness of, and funds for, men’s health issues by
growing mustaches, of “racist, sexist, and transphobic” micro-aggression.)
Apparently such micro-aggression is a greater concern among
the race-obsessed left than the macro-aggression
of, say, the “knockout game,” currently a trend among roving gangs of black
youth who target random, unsuspecting whites or Jews with sometimes murderous
violence. But never mind that; the outrage of these racist spelling corrections
must be addressed.
Another problem with the theory of racial micro-aggression
is that it assumes whites – and only whites – are irredeemably racist even in
their most casual, unconscious words or actions. They’re racist even when
they’re consciously striving not to
be. Nothing whites can do or say or think
about race is ever good enough. They are expected to seek forgiveness for this
by humiliating themselves in “white privilege” workshops, while other races
openly express pride in their own colors and cultures. And they are not allowed
to correct the grammar or spelling of non-white graduate students who should
have mastered both before they left high school.
At the sit-in, victimized
graduate student Cisneros read a letter written collectively by several
students which described the class – and the grad school in general – as being “an
unsafe climate” for “students of color.” Students took turns sharing their
personal experiences. Alma Flores tearfully declared, “As a woman of color, I
should not have to get up every single day to have my identity questioned… I am
tired of it. I’m tired, and it hurts me so much.” (The Daily Bruin article about the protest is unclear as to how her
identity is questioned every single day, or how she is unsafe.)
This is all, of course, an extension of the cultural Marxism
of political correctness, the wielding of language as a weapon against the
established order. “Islamophobia,” “Israeli apartheid,” “micro-aggression” – the
radical left has a genius for such neologisms. The way to defuse these
linguistic weapons is simply to refuse to legitimize them, and they will cease
to have power. When Professor Rust corrects the grammar and spelling of insufficiently
literate graduate students, for example, neither he nor the department nor the
school should be cowed by trumped-up accusations of racist micro-aggression. The
intellectual standards are the same for everyone – end of story.
Once we as a society stop submitting to the tyranny of
feelings, as I call it – bullying by those who wrap themselves in a false
mantle of victimhood – then we can get on to the serious business of combating
racial macro-aggression and making our streets safe again.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 11/27/13)
