October 15, 2021 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian
It gets harder and harder to be an independent thinker in the midst of one of those indoctrination and groupthink factories known as a university. Step out of line, and at any moment someone can claim to be offended or “triggered” by something completely bland that you may have said. Next thing you know, someone will have tattled on you to the administration. And you know exactly what the administration will do: They will simultaneously mouth platitudes about “free speech” while making every kind of threat, veiled or not, to bring you into line.
Is there any way for you to come out ahead? Within the last few days, a small number of students — one at Yale and two at Arizona State — have given tutorials on how to win at this game. To be fair, these students got a big assist from the fact that the crazy leftists who run these places have gotten so confident of never facing any pushback that they no longer hesitate to engage in conduct that is completely indefensible.
Example number one for today comes from perhaps the looniest of all the loony left schools, the Yale Law School. It all started with plans by the Native American Law Students Association to co-sponsor a Constitution Day (September 17) get-together with the Federalist Society. On the 15th, a second-year law student named Trent Colbert — who is a member of both organizations and, unlike Elizabeth Warren, is actually part Cherokee — sent out this email inviting NALSA members to the event:
Within minutes, the lighthearted invite had been screenshotted and shared to an online forum for all second-year law students, several of whom alleged that the term "trap house" indicated a blackface party. "I guess celebrating whiteness wasn’t enough," the president of the Black Law Students Association wrote in the forum. "Y’all had to upgrade to cosplay/black face." She also objected to the mixer’s affiliation with the Federalist Society, which she said "has historically supported anti-Black rhetoric."
Have you ever heard the term “trap house” before? I have not. Here is the first definition from the Urban Dictionary:
Originally used to describe a crack house in a shady neighborhood, the word has since been abused by high school students who like to pretend they're cool by drinking their mom's beer together and saying they're part of a "traphouse".
There are multiple other definitions, none of which mentions anything about blackface. Silbarum notes that the term was popularized starting about 2016 by a podcast called Chapo Trap House:
"Trap house" has been a term used in progressive pop culture since at least 2016, when the socialist podcast "Chapo Trap House" burst onto the scene. Hosted by three white men, the podcast has received sympathetic profiles in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Guardian, none of which suggest that there is anything racial about its name.
None of that stopped some eight or nine complaints promptly being made to the Yale administration to do something about Colbert. (Likely, what really set the complainers off is that one of the ethnic group associations — supposed to be reliable foot-soldiers of the left — would have the chutzpah to co-sponsor an event with the Federalist Society.). Anyway, the very next day, Colbert found himself called into a meeting with Yale Law School associate dean Ellen Cosgrove and diversity director Yaseen Eldik.
Colbert had the presence of mind to record the meeting. Good move! The Free Beacon includes the recording here, along with summaries and transcriptions of several portions. A good adjective would be “Kafkaesque.” A few notable excerpts:
5:32: Eldik says that the student's affiliation with the Federalist Society was "very triggering" for students who "already feel" that the conservative group is "oppressive to certain communities."
7:15: Eldik says his office has received complaints that the student's email was a "form of discrimination" and "psychically harmful."
14:05: Eldik says his office has received "eight or nine student complaints about this" and tells the student that the best way to make this "go away" would be an apology.
15:10: Eldik says he worries about the email affecting the student's reputation, "not just here but when you leave. You know the legal community is a small one."
16:20: Eldik volunteers to help draft the email.
The rest of it is just as bad. Basically, it’s threats, some veiled and some less so, to destroy the guy’s reputation and undermine his legal career unless he agrees to send around an apology, which of course will helpfully be drafted by the administrators.
Well, too bad, guys. He got you on tape. In his next move, Colbert declined to issue any sort of apology, and got out his story not only to the Free Beacon, but also to FIRE. Plenty of others have now also picked it up. Yale, you have been exposed as the thuggish totalitarians that you are. As to Mr. Colbert, if I were still in the big law game, I would be doing everything I could to try to recruit him. But something tells me that a Supreme Court clerkship may be in his near future.
Example number two comes from Arizona State University. There, sometime in late September, two white male students decided to go to study in something called the “Multicultural Space.” One was wearing a tee shirt that said “DID NOT VOTE FOR BIDEN”, and the other had a sticker on the back of his laptop reading “Police Lives Matter.” They were promptly confronted by several female students (not visible on camera, but from their voice inflections they would appear to be black). The following video has received more than 5 million views on Twitter: (For some reason that does not appear to embed the Tweet here, but you can go here to view the video.)
Note that although one of the male students looks to be recording at least part of the event, the video in question appears to have been made by one of the female confronters.
A few choice excerpts:
“You’re offensive. Police Lives Matter? . . . You’re making this space uncomfortable.”
“This is our space.”
“You’re white. Do you understand what a multicultural space is? It means you’re not being centered.”
“This is the violence that ASU does, and this is the type of people that they protect.”
“This white man thinks he can take up our space. And this is why we need a multicultural space, because they think they can get away with this shit.”
“We’re asking you to leave if you have any consideration for people of color and who are marginalized.”
The two male students remain seated and never raise their voices during the whole confrontation. One of the them at one point responds simply (and very calmly), “I’m going to sit here the whole time and you can find somebody to kick me out.”
The video went viral, and had exactly the opposite effect from what was intended by the person who took it. A representative in the Arizona legislature, after viewing the video, put together a statement on the situation that has since been signed by at least 20 other legislators. Excerpt:
It has come to light following the racially-motivated harassment of two students and their subsequent removal from one of the campus’ study facilities that ASU has allowed a culture of institutionalized racism and neo-segregation to take hold on its campus. . . . The racially-charged removal of these students from the multicultural center begs the question of why Arizonans are being forced to spend tens, potentially hundreds, of millions of their hard-earned tax dollars on a building at a public university that some of our citizens are not allowed to use? . . . As a member of Arizona’s House Committee on Appropriations, I will be fighting alongside the undersigned Legislators to get to the bottom of this and take the appropriate action in the upcoming budget.
The threat of repercussions via the budget ought to get their attention. Not that Republican-dominated state legislatures have been notably effective up to now in policing ultra-leftism at public university campuses. But maybe that will now begin. And kudos to these two young men for going where they were clearly allowed but not wanted, remaining calm, standing their ground, and publicizing the event to shame the loony left.
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