Quote:
Originally Posted by ferrets_bueller
Thurgreed: Although I generally align with white progressives, here is where I have some serious problems: Microagressions....slights so small one must hire an expert to point them out. Trigger warnings. Safe spaces. Shouting down conservative speakers. These are used, particularly on college campuses by both white progressives, and minorities. I find these both offensive and counterproductive. So do my views on this make me worse than, to tear a page from today's truly hilarious news, Jason Spenser?
|
The serious grievances (police brutality, predatory racist laws, a racists court and justice system, etc.) should be clearly separated from the less-serious complaints (microaggressions, etc.). These things cannot be lumped together because doing so allows the latter to discredit the former. And no - the argument they are all inseparable threads of a cloth or part of a continuum of behavior that must be addressed in aggregate holds no sway.
You eat the elephant one bite at a time. Only a fool tries to address enormous issues in their entirety. It's impossible to do so, and it affords your enemy endless defenses and deflections.
Lurid, immature, and preposterous college activists should be ignored. Their nonsense should be shunned as frivolous. When a right wing pundit tries to argue, "But Charles Murray was attacked!" in response to points about police brutality in Ferguson, or Eric Garner's murder, the reply should be, "That has nothing - nothing at all - to do with what we are discussing... You may feel like mixing apples and oranges, but I'm not playing... I'm hear to talk about cops killing innocent civilians."
This is not to degrade the concept of microaggressions. People are entitled to raise those issues, and they will foster empathy and understanding, which is needed. But those things cannot be casually melded into discussions of people being killed by racist law enforcement officers.
