Leftists: Frail, Fragile Black Sensibilities

From Frontpage Magazine:

You can never be equal if you’re always angry and afraid.

There is a war on black people.

You hear about it from powerless black men like Barack Obama, Eric Holder and Al Sharpton. Black people can hardly leave the house without being shot by a cop for no reason at all. That’s what you hear from the activists of #BlackLivesMatter who illustrate the point by blocking traffic, harassing white people in restaurants and shoving elderly Democratic presidential candidates… without getting shot.

Black racist activists and their white leftist allies like to talk up “White Fragility” which means that white people are used to sitting down for brunch without having fat black women yell in their faces about genocide. Or as the official definition would have it, white people are so insulated from critical dialogues about race that they get upset when those women, who are actually working on their PhDs in critical race theory, loudly accuse them of white supremacy.

Or as the official definition goes, “call them out” for their white privilege.

That’s what Eric Holder meant when he accused Americans of being a “nation of cowards” when it comes to race. The former Attorney General and future drug cartel lobbyist was referencing “White Fragility.” White Americans were just fragile cowards unwilling to admit their guilty white privilege.

But if any group is fragile when it comes to racial dialogues, it isn’t white people. It certainly isn’t your average melanin-challenged cisgender heterosexual who has to dive into a safe space or demand censorship the moment that he encounters a dissenting view.

Political correctness is a culture of fragility for minority groups. Every member of a political identity group is a fragile survivor who veers from outraged protests to panic attacks. And any minority who doesn’t act like a manic-depressive twit is a traitor who is no longer a part of his “community.”

To be a true member of the political identity community is to be both angry and fragile.

The hysteria of #BlackLivesMatter embodies angry and fragile. Its members shriek that they’re being murdered on every corner while behaving in ways that would get anyone else murdered. Their racist tantrums are justified by their racial fragility. Their victimhood entitles them to victimize others.

That is black privilege which is based on false claims of black fragility.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose latest memoir sits on every good liberal’s bookshelf, takes black fragility to new lows. In his world, “black bodies” are constantly being victimized by “white supremacy.” Even the 9/11 firefighters are “not human to him” because they could “with no justification — shatter my body.”

Why would the FDNY set out to shatter Ta-Nehisi Coates’ body? The black fragility of Coates or #BlackLivesMatter isn’t rational, it’s racist. Its exaggerated sense of peril is really prejudice. When a white man suspects any random black man of being out to get him, he’s a racist. When a black man suspects any random white man of being out to get him, he’s just being #BlackLivesMatter.

White criminals go to jail. Black criminals are victims of “mass incarceration.” White criminals just get shot. But when black criminals are killed, it’s genocide.

A white man who knocks over a convenience store and then dies after getting in a fight with a cop, is a statistic. A black man inspires protests, t-shirts, riots, an Obama investigation and bad hashtags.

There’s a reason #BlackLivesMatter activists hate the rival hashtag #AllLivesMatter. If all lives matter equally, then the rationale for turning random black criminals like Michael Brown into causes comes apart. It’s only by elevating black lives above white lives that the facts of the case stop mattering and it’s only the cult of black fragility that turns the tribal emotions of its activists into a political cause.

Black fragility says that real black people are victims who are afraid all the time. Its protests are exercises in hysterical black fragility in which to be black is to constantly live on the edge of death. America is a white supremacist country out to kill black people, before electing some of them president.

And you are either a fragile angry black activist yelling in panic about the police being out to shoot you while blocking traffic on the interstate or you are one of the race traitors trying to get to work and wishing the activists would get out of the way and get a real job.

If you’re Latino, you’re supposed to spend all your time fearing that the Republicans will deport you, even if you’re not an illegal alien, but have been living in this country for generations. If you’re a female college student, you’re expected to retweet inflated campus rape statistics and treat all men as rapists. If you’re gay, you’re supposed to believe that if Ted Cruz is elected, he’ll send you to a gay labor camp.

Forget hope. Fragility is all about fear and hate. All black people are victims. All white people are oppressors. All women are victims and all men are oppressors. An oppressor can ally with the oppressed only if he recognizes his privileged role. Any space that doesn’t recognize this dynamic is a space of privilege.

And fragile minorities need a safe space to go back to after protesting those privileged spaces.

Social justice warrior activists define a space. Then they campaign to take it over while treating any criticism or opposition as a threat to their collective identities and their fragile politicized “bodies.”

The term “social justice warriors” is ironic because SJWs make a fetish of their fragility. Challenge an SJW and it immediately runs to a safe space to play victim. The SJW cyberbullies opponents when it has a numerical advantage on social media and whines about being terrorized to the press when it doesn’t.

Assertions of fragility end every discussion about SJW causes because fragility has become the cause. Every campaign is really about the fragility of the activist. The facts don’t matter and don’t even exist. Debate doesn’t happen. Criticism is something that activists “endure” on their way to achieving their goals. The focus is never on the ideas, but on the suffering of the activists as they struggle to be heard… despite enjoying a total monopoly on the news and editorial side of every mainstream media outlet.

Fragility isn’t a cause, it’s a cult. Like most cults, it fills true believers with the conviction that the outside world is evil and that they are vulnerable because of their unique sensitivity. Its safe spaces are cult spaces in which believers reinforce their programming and their fear of the outside world.

Like most cults, fragility doesn’t teach love. It programs hate and fear.

Black fragility is a racist cult that disrespects both white and black people. It tells black people that to be authentic they must be afraid. It tells white people that they are evil because of their skin color. It offers a blatantly racist narrative in which all black problems can be reduced to white people which is why it disregards the killing fields of gang violence to focus on black criminals who are shot by white cops.

Black fragility denies black equality. It says that black people can’t compete with white people for jobs or college admissions. That they can’t be expected to live by the same laws as white people. That minorities can’t even participate in dialogues on the same terms as everyone else without invoking fragility terms like “White Privilege” or demanding politically correct censorship so comprehensive that it’s indistinguishable from political repression.

We can have equality or fragility, racial progress or racial fragility, but we can’t have both.

Black people are not as fragile as #BlackLivesMatter, Eric Holder or Ta-Nehisi Coates would like white liberals to believe. It’s the cause of the leftist radical activists that is fragile because it depends on infantilizing black people and all political identity group minorities as victims who endure rather than achieve, who struggle rather than thrive, who need safe spaces even when they’re in the White House.

Black fragility is the real war on black people. It’s a war on their dignity and their self-sufficiency. It’s a war waged against their equality. You can never be equal if you’re always angry and afraid.

This mentality is very much present at Marquette, where leftist activists deemed “racist” a bunch of Tweets from Marquette students who failed to be impressed by a bunch of demonstrators who blocked traffic on Wisconsin Avenue. How dare they say things like “stop using history as an excuse and start taking responsibility for your lives and your future!” How could any black person possibly not faint hearing things like that?

Likewise, the same leftist activists complained about “discriminatory violence in the classroom.” Since nobody has been beaten up or physically attacked in a Marquette classroom recently (or even in the distant past, so far as we can remember) “violence” must mean merely racial grievance mongers hearing things with which they disagree.

Are they such wimps?

No, this is just another ploy for claiming victim status, and demanding the privileges that go with victim status on a college campus.

Academic “Safe Space:” Shutting up Ideas the Left Does Not Like

From Charlie Sykes’ show this morning: a discussion of “trigger warnings” and the supposed need for “safe space” on university campuses.

So what is a “safe space?” A place where politically correct leftists need not be exposed to ideas they don’t like.

But then, the campus leftists want to prevent other students from hearing ideas that the leftists don’t like. In other words, it’s another tactic of campus authoritarians wanting to shut up ideas. Add it to “harassment” and “micro-aggressions” and “incivility” and “offensiveness” and “hate speech.”

The campus left has many, many excuses for their censorship.  Some of the examples Sykes cites are bizarre, “beyond parody” as he puts it.

And of course, it ties the whole phenomenon to Marquette’s attack on this blogger.

Sources Syles cites:

• The deranged campus left reacts to campus speeches by Christina Hoff Sommers.
• Marquette English Professor Tom Jeffers on Marquette’s attack on this blogger.
• An article in the New Criterion, which notes that “The treatment of John McAdams at Marquette University reveals the newest level of intolerance in the world of higher education.”

Mainstream Protestant Denominations: Triggering Ideas Banned

Major news about Mainline Protestant Christianity, from the Babylon Bee:

LOUISVILLE, KY—While some college campuses have established safe spaces where the disenfranchised can avoid the pressures, biases, and judgement of the world, mainline Protestant denominations are taking it one step further. The entire umbrella group has now been designated a safe space for those who would otherwise be offended by the gospel, sources confirmed Wednesday.

Speaking on behalf of a plethora of denominations including the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the United Methodist Church, a spokesperson issued the following statement: “We are in agreement that there is a great need for churches to rise up and create spaces that are safe for questioning and accepting our identities, doubts, fears, failures, and blatant sins. Effective immediately, we are declaring all mainline Protestant churches safe spaces, where there are no judgments, conviction, repentance, or gospel presentations whatsoever.”

The statement listed elements that safe space churches should remove from their premises, including “crosses, Bibles, pulpits, organs, hymnals, systematic theologies, and sermons exhibiting any form of triggering micro-aggression. Be considerate.” Words like “sin,” “hell,” “death,” “wrath,” “propitiation,” and “substitutionary atonement” are also on the ban list.

On behalf of all of mainline Protestantism, the spokesperson expressed heartfelt joy that they were able to make such a major step toward accepting—and not judging—anyone who may be on a path toward God’s judgment. “Our congregations are now spaces that are safe from the power of God in the gospel, where each person is free to construct their own narrative. That’s worthy of celebration.”

This, of course, is not a sudden shock, but rather the culmination of longstanding trends in these denominations.

Fascist Bullying at Brown University

From National Review online: an article about how, at Brown University, a secret Facebook group is required to allow students to discuss political issues without fear of bullying. Some excerpts:

At Brown University, in Providence, R.I., there is a secret forum in which students may discuss potentially controversial issues freely. Let me say that again: At Brown, there is a secret forum in which students may discuss potentially controversial issues — or anything they want — freely.

Yes, there is an underground group whose purpose is to allow kids to say what they ought to be free to say above ground.

As David Frum remarked on Twitter, when he read the magazine piece, What is this? Warsaw 1983 or America 2015?

The group came about in this way: Last year, Brown was to host a debate on the issue of campus rape. In one corner was Jessica Valenti, a radical feminist, and in the other was Wendy McElroy, a radical libertarian. It was suspected that McElroy would deny there was a “culture of rape.” And this was intolerable to some students, who protested mightily — in advance, mind you.

The debate came off, to Brown’s credit. Not so the speech attempted the year before by Ray Kelly, who was New York’s police commissioner. At Brown, he was to give a lecture called “Proactive Policing in America’s Biggest City.” The kids at Brown, or some of them, were not interested in what he had to say — so they forced him off the stage, denying everyone else the right to hear him.

Needless to say, the protesters and censors accused Kelly of racism. His policing practices were racist, they charged. Of course, those practices — especially “stop and frisk” — saved countless lives. And most of those lives were black or brown. But this sort of thing is trivial to the “social justice warrior.”

Anyway, Kelly was not permitted to speak, but this Valenti-McElroy debate came off. Brown had taken some mollifying steps, however.

The university’s president announced that she opposed McElroy’s view — and scheduled a lecture for the same time as the debate. The lecture, by a Brown psychiatry professor, was called “The Research on Rape Culture.” Evidently, it was not enough that the debate would be just that: a debate, a clash of views. There had to be a separate event, without a debate, without a clash, without a disagreement.

Also, students set up a safe space for those who might attend the debate and be shaken by something they heard. A “safe space”? Yes. This space, in the words of Judith Shulevitz, writing in the New York Times, was a room “equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.”

. . .

In October, the [Brown Daily] Herald published a couple of controversial columns by a student writing under a pseudonym. These had to do with race, ethnicity, and that most radioactive of holidays: Columbus Day. The editors removed one of the columns from the paper’s website. And they apologized abjectly for the publication of both of them. I believe the apology resembles a Mao-era self-criticism. Is that going too far? Here’s a swatch:

We as The Herald are part of a history of Brown that is founded on inequality and that is too often slow to change. Brown itself is built on land that belonged to the Narragansett and Wampanoag nations, and yet the University has no formal relationships with them. … By failing to be more inclusive of marginalized voices, The Herald does not fully live up to its potential or our community’s expectations. We must continue to make active efforts to recruit and retain a diverse staff. Without this, we will continue to fall short and repeat our mistakes. To those who have been most deeply hurt, we ask you to share your voice with us and with the Brown community at large. Understandably, this is an unequal burden, but we cannot progress without help.

(To read the apology, or self-criticism, or editors’ note, in full, go here.)

Read the entire thing, especially the parts about the rationalizations the intolerant leftists use to shut up speech they don’t like. The key concepts are “violence” and “invalidating” and “marginalizing” or “erasing” the “experiences” of people deemed to be victims. All of these things reduce merely to disagreeing with the politically correct orthodoxy.

Update

An article about one of the examples of politically correct bullying at Brown, engagingly titled “White People Are Good With Cows, Brown University People Are Bad With Free Speech.”

Feminist Harpies at Oxford (and on Facebook)

Surfing around The Spectator (U.K.) we happened on any article titled “Oxford’s new feminist hit squad.” It’s a group of bullies on Facebook whose reach extends into the Oxford student body, having the ability to marginalize those with even mildly politically incorrect attitudes.

The Spectator euphemistically calls the group “Country Living,” and it can indeed be found on Facebook.

It’s a closed group, but one need not be able to see the posts to see how intolerant the people running it are. From the group description:

Welcome to the Facebook group loosely affiliated with the Oxford University-based feminist zine (also online here http://cuntrylivingmagazine.tumblr.com/)! smile emoticon Anyone is free to join and contribute, but please take some time to read the guidelines first.

This is intended to be an intersectional, sex positive online space in which we can challenge patriarchy and share our experiences of oppression.

When commenting please bear in mind that in this space the voices of those who are typically marginalised and oppressed in wider society are prioritised. New members of the group, especially cis men: please take some time to read the posts and conversations here before participating.

This group is intended to be as safe a space as possible. Healthy debate is welcomed, but we do not want members of the group to feel threatened and/or marginalised and/or shouted down by people who do not have an understanding of oppression. No one is under any obligation to educate anyone else, especially if their experiences are being attacked or questioned. Just taking some time to read the threads is an educational experience in itself.

Please listen to accounts of lived experiences, reassess your view in light of responses from oppressed and/or marginalised people, and apologise if you offend/upset people with your views. If you are ignoring/talking over individuals with first hand experience of oppression, you will be warned about it. If you ignore that warning, you will be removed from the group. Derailing threads with #notallmen and so on is counterproductive and will result in a warning. Hateful and oppressive language will result in immediate removal from the group. Because this is a safe space, it’s also important that members don’t question the validity of an account of abuse and/or harassment.

If anyone here feels unsafe or threatened on here, please tag one of the admins (Georgiana Jackson-Callen, Nicole Antoinette, Alyson Cruise or Shaina Yang) in the relevant post or message one of us — we will do everything we can to rectify the situation.

If you believe that material you are posting may be triggering, please use a trigger warning (you can find advice on how and when to use those here: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Trigger_warning) For sensitive material that is not triggering, please provide a brief content note (you can find advice on those here:

http://trigger-warning-guide.tumblr.com/triggers) If you’re not sure whether something needs a content/trigger warning, it’s best to err on the side of caution.

Helpful guides on privilege: http://blog.shrub.com/archives/tekanji/2006-03-08_146, http://www.robot-hugs.com/privilege/, http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2014/02/4-ways-push-back-privilege/

How to respond when you’re called out on something: http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/09/called-out-acknowledging-oppression/

Privilege list: http://privilege101.tumblr.com/post/5988512297/list-of-privileges-permanently-in-progress

The message to people who don’t agree with the extreme views here: shut up. This being a Facebook group, the administrators do have the power to shut up opinions they don’t like.  But they are working to extend that power over all of society.

Attempted Pro-Abortion Censorship on Carleton Campus

From Carleton University in Canada, an attempt to stiffle anti-abortion speech on campus.

Ottawa, Canada (LifeNews.com) -- Carleton University is coming under fire from pro-life advocates in Canada because the student government there is considering a proposal that would prohibit pro-life organizations on campus. Pro-life advocates are upset saying it would restrict free speech at the college.

Katy McIntyre, vice-president of services for the Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA), proposed a motion last week that would amend the student society’s discrimination policy.

Her proposal would state that “no CUSA resources, space, recognition or funding be allocated for anti-choice purposes.”

Shawn Menard, president of the association, told the CBC the motion came in response to complaints from the pro-abortion group on campus about a debate the campus pro-life group Lifeline organized about whether abortion should be legal.

“It’s discriminatory to not provide a female with a choice surrounding her body,” Menard said.

Sarah Fletcher, the president of Lifeline Carleton, told the CBC the motion discriminates against the pro-life group and threatens the existence of religious clubs on campus that oppose abortion as well.

“There are students at Carleton who do have a pro-life point of view, and those students need to be represented,” she said. “We feel it’s an infringement on our basic rights.”

Menard said students are free to debate but shouldn’t use CUSA space or money.

The council is expected to take a vote on the pro-abortion proposal on December 5.

Another source gives some more detail about the “reasoning” of the very politically correct Ms. McIntyre.

According to McIntyre, anti-choice groups are gender-discriminatory and violate CUSA’s safe space practices.

The motion focuses on anti-choice groups because they aim to abolish freedom of choice by criminalizing abortion. McIntyre said this discriminates against women, and that it violates the Canadian Constitution by removing a woman’s right to “life, liberty and security” of person.

McIntyre said she received complaints after Lifeline organized an academic debate on whether or not elective abortion should be made illegal.

“[These women] were upset the debate was happening on campus in a space that they thought they were safe and protected, and that respected their rights and freedoms,” said McIntyre.

You read that right. Some feminists were “upset” because there was a debate on campus.

Such is the sort of argument that the leftist authoritarians use to try to shut up ideas that they don’t like.

It’s quite similar to that of Marquette Gay/Straight Alliance President, who said that no speaker opposing gay marriage should be allowed on campus because any such opposition would be “hate speech.”

And indeed it’s reminiscent of Philosophy Department Chair James South, who tore down, from the door of a gradute student, a quote from humorist Dave Barry claiming it was “patently offensive.”

The campus left, in other words, has a rapidly proliferating battery of arguments for silencing viewpoints they don’t like.

The Plight of the Campus Religious Believer

From the Intercollegiate Review:

If you’re an orthodox believer at a mainstream college, you don’t need me to tell you that you feel like an oddball, maybe even besieged. Your professors and most of your peers would treat your most deeply held beliefs with condescension and probably horror, if they knew about them.

So what should you do about it?

If you had asked my advice even a few years ago, I would have told you to be the turd in the ­liberals’ punchbowl. When I was an undergraduate in the 1980s, I did everything in my power to challenge leftist orthodoxies. I saw offending liberals as a key public service, which I dubbed “insensitivity training.” I relied on, and fought for, the principle of free speech.

That’s long gone on campuses now.

My advice today? Grit your teeth, do your reading, make some friends, get your degree, and then make like Lot fleeing Sodom: never look back.

Sounds depressing, right? Well, I do have some good news, as you’ll see.

Big Mother Is Watching You

Colleges are much less tolerant than they were even back when I was in school. Instead of welcoming free, vigorous debate designed to prepare people for adulthood, many campuses are turning the classroom into a “safe space” where infantilized pseudo-victims can wallow in their phantom pains for four long, pricey years before the college dumps them into the real world and sends the bill. The tenets of your faith, if you stood up for them, might count as “microaggressions,” “trigger words,” or even “harassment.” Citing free speech won’t get you far on most campuses nowadays.

If your creed is anything like mine, it is by any contemporary secular standard “homophobic,” “transphobic,” “patriarchal,” “sexually repressive,” and opposed to “abortion rights.” There is no way to airbrush any orthodox mono­theist religion, especially biblical or ecclesial Christianity, to make it acceptable to secular progressives. It would take full-on plastic surgery, and you saw what that did to the Episcopal Church, Bruce Jenner, and every Jesuit college.

As someone who delighted in debating professors and students in and out of the classroom, it pains me to recommend a “covert-ops” approach. But the battlefield has shifted, and you are now deep behind enemy lines.

And what to do about this?

So keep your head down, and keep your faith. That last part can be difficult when peers and professors attack your religious beliefs as “retrograde” or “reactionary.” But you can do it. You can do it even if your campus ministry soft-pedals any supernatural aspect of your religion, privileging instead some social justice activism. If that’s the case, go find a local church and pray with the grown-ups at a faithful congregation. You may spot fellow students there. Befriend them.

You can also find like-minded students in organizations like the ISI-affiliated group on campus, Young Americans for Liberty, College Republicans, or your campus pro-life club. Maybe even a Greek organization, if those haven’t been banned from your campus. Their meetings could be a “safe space” for you.

It’s not quite as bad as this essay makes out, although anti-religious (or at least anti-Christian) intolerance can be pretty bad.

But:

Some institutions are better than others. A useful (but perhaps a bit dated) ranking of schools by religious commitment can be found here.

Sometimes the students are not as biased as the professors. At Marquette, for example, students apparently split about equally in voting for Republican Scott Walker and Democrat Mary Burke.

Some majors are better than others. Expect a lot of leftist indoctrination in the humanities, the social sciences (except economics and perhaps political science), communications and education. Other majors are better, although you will have to take some courses in those most biased departments.

Plot out your path carefully. You will indeed be in enemy territory.

Susannah Bartlow: Doubling Down on Assata Shakur

When we first discovered that a wall of Marquette’s Gender and Sexuality Resource Center was decorated with a large mural of convicted cop killer Assata Shakur, we thought that perhaps somebody simply didn’t know who she really was. Maybe somebody found some quote from her that they liked without bothering to learn anything about her. Otherwise, who would honor a cop killer?

We quickly discovered that the Director of the Center, one Susannah Bartlow, knew exactly who Shakur was, having signed a petition demanding that she be taken off the FBI’s list of the Ten Most Wanted Terrorists.

Bartlow was sacked, but she has a blog, and she has not backed down at all from her support for Shakur.

Here is one of her posts on the issue, and here is the other.

The posts are a window into the insular bubble that is political correctness at contemporary universities. It’s not just Bartlow. It’s at least several dozen professors at Marquette, and a fair number of administrators too.

Some examples:

This disrespect for the work of women of color is another astonishing example of how racism works. It is hard to imagine another mural, whatever its subject, being removed without even an attempt to understand the subject or the students’ perspective.

So it is hard to imagine that a mural of a Klansman would be removed without even an attempt to understand the subject or the students’ perspective?

No, if such a mural appeared, it would be summarily painted over, and the “students’ perspective” would be roundly condemned with no “discussion” necessary. But in the world of the politically correct, violent black terrorists are somehow heroes.

Further, the official statement of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the black sorority whose members painted the mural, claims that the members simply did not know who Shakur was, and if they had, they would not have painted the mural.

Assuming that’s true, what we have here is what happens so often on college campuses: white leftists using minorities as human shields.

. . . right now, a national movement is mobilizing in support of black and brown people who have been unfairly targeted by law enforcement! It should be more clear than ever that something is wrong with our system and how people of color fare within it.

In the first place, Bartlow doesn’t seem to notice that the “hands up don’t shoot” nonsense from Ferguson, MO has been thoroughly debunked, and debunked by the Eric Holder Justice Department. And the six officers changed in the Baltimore case of Freddie Gray include three blacks, making the simple racial narrative difficult to sustain.

Racial Grievance

Worse, just how is it that honoring a cop killer addresses any legitimate grievance about policing in the black community? In fact, it only poisons the atmosphere, and does so to the detriment of black citizens. Is the assumption here that black people approve of cop killers? A few do, but they should not be appeased or pandered to.

Although it feels good, “appropriate” doesn’t have much to do with the discomfort it takes to learn new things, especially about volatile political issues. It usually backfires, making people who are already threatened feel less safe, and enabling people who typically feel pretty safe in any environment to keep on keeping on. Educationally, this is counterproductive.

So, in the politically correct bubble, the world is divided into people who feel “safe” and need to be made to feel less safe, and those who feel “unsafe” and need to be made to feel safe.

This is typical of campus political correctness, where favored and petted victim groups are allowed to shut up speech they claim makes them feel “unsafe” (no matter how ridiculous such claims are) but whites, males, Christians, conservatives and so on must put up with whatever demeaning comments anybody chooses to make.

More importantly, though, Marquette students were protesting all year, mostly related to racism on campus. Many of the students I worked with were tired, sad, angry, energized, inspired, and motivated to claim some space where they could feel like their experiences and histories were affirmed.

Very few Marquette students (indeed the number is vanishingly small) are racists, that is unless any politically incorrect opinion on racial matters, or any innocent “microaggression” somehow counts as racism.

But students in the orbit of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center have been taught to collect and nurse grievances.

Exploration?

. . . why is Assata Shakur “inappropriate for a mural”? Because her story is more contemporary? Because she lives in Cuba? Because she is still alive? Who decides what is appropriate? What is a university for if not to explore these questions?

Unfortunately, the mural was not “exploration,” it was glorification. Had Bartlow’s center sponsored a debate on Shakur, that would have been exploration. Instead, debate was summarily bypassed and a mural painted.

It’s odd for Bartlow, who didn’t feel discussion was needed before the mural was painted, to now tout “exploration.”

In my first post, I used the phrase “regardless of the mural’s content” to argue that the GSRC (and all campus educational/resource centers) should be able to support students’ interests and expressions without censorship or controlling influence.

Of course, this is flatly disingenuous. If some bunch of students wanted to honor a Klansman, Bartlow would not think of making this sort of argument. Indeed, a mural honoring a prominent opponent of gay marriage would be doubtless denounced by campus leftists.

I supported the student-led mural project because my job as an educator is to provide space, resources, and opportunities without censorship or condescension. In an environment of daily racism, the students wanted to research and offer up images of powerful black women leaders—both as a way to brighten up the GSRC as a hangout space and as a way to support identities and experiences that were on the margins at Marquette.

Of course, Shakur is not a “powerful black woman leader.” Condoleezza Rice is.

Again, either Bartlow is a white woman using black women as human shields, or the national spokeswoman for Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority is lying (or at least badly mistaken) about what happened.

The argument seems to be that since black women deserve a “voice,” whatever they choose to say must be supinely accepted, since they are, after all, an oppressed minority group. Ironically, Bartlow adds:

Effective learning happens with healthy discomfort and sometimes with controversy.

But somehow, pampered minority groups should be spared discomfort and controversy. All the while, less favored groups should be made to feel uncomfortable about their “white privilege” in a “racist society” and have their political and social views challenged.

Somebody should have asked the women of Alpha Kappa Alpha “do you know who this woman is?” And if the answer was “yes,” “why in the world do you think she is some sort of role model?”

As is usually the case, politically correct people end up demeaning the victim groups they claim to champion. The implication here is that blacks and other minorities have fragile egos that cannot stand an intellectual challenge. Further, if having one’s views challenged is part of a good education, what does it say if one wants to dispense with that for minority students?

Conclusion

Bartlow’s essays are important as a window into the world of politically correct thinking in academia. It’s the sort of thinking that is increasingly dominant in academia, and part of the general corruption of college life.

FemSex at Marquette

Now happening at Marquette, according to a flyer posted around the campus two weeks ago:

The Female Sexuality Workshop (FemSex) is a 12 week co-facilitated, student-led workshop that aims to create a mindful, safe, respectful, and open environment for participants to validate their experiences, challenge their ideas, and learn with and from others. Evolving from long-running courses at UC Berkeley and Brown University, FemSex seeks to bring values of empowerment, diversity, and collective learning to Marquette University and the Milwaukee community.

Mission: To provide a safe space for exploration, encourage honest dialogue, facilitate collective learning, engage and grapple with the social forces that inform individual experiences, and build allyship. The workshop is free and open to the community.

Workshop topics: health, gender, identity, body image, sexuality, desire, power and privilege, spirituality, pleasure, communication, consent, relationship, empowerment, and more!

Workshop Activities: large and small group discussions, speakers, readings, in-class activities, and take-home exercises

When: Monday evenings, 6 p.m.-9 p.m. the first session is Monday, February 4th. The last session is Monday, April 29th.

Who: We welcome people of all genders, sexualities and sexual orientation, ethnicities, religious affiliations, political inclination, and abilities. All participants must complete an application and sign a participant contract.

Interested in Learning More? Attend an Information Session.

Dates: Tuesday, January 22nd or Thursday, January 24th

Time: 8 pm. – 9 p.m.

Location: The Gender and Sexuality Resource Center, AMU 425

Come to learn more about the workshop, complete the application, review the workshop syllabus, and ask questions. All are welcome!

If you have any questions, please contact Rachel Bruns at Rachel.bruns@marquette.edu or Claire Van Fossen at clairevanfossen@gmail.com .

*FemSex is sponsored by the Marquette Gender and Sexuality Resource Center*

So just what is FemSex? Since it started at Berkeley, an article in the Berkeley student newspaper may be a good place to begin.

According to facilitator Amelia von Gerer, two queer women started FemSex in the spring of 1993, after taking a class called Feminism and Pornography. Inspired, they spent the semester learning to orgasm and later sought to teach a Decal course on the matter, initially titled “The Orgasm Class.”

The pair ended up broadening the curriculum to include additional topics in female sexuality, and the DeCal has continued to evolve since then. Today, FemSex is a space for free discussion of power and privilege related to gender, women’s health and sexual practices, among other things.

FemSex students (fondly called “FemSexies”) are instructed to be open-minded, non-judgmental and respectful when discussing the controversial issues put forth by facilitators. Discussions range from views on pornography and sex work to gender-based violence and having healthy relationships.

Of course, if women have trouble having organisms, it would seem that a licensed sex therapist would be the person to see, and hard to see how the undergraduates who typically lead these discussions would be much help.

At Berkeley, the students leading the class all seem to major in Sociology, Psychology, Ethnic Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, with minors in related fields. In other words, they know all about how to talk about how women are victims, but actually know little about sex.

So it’s not surprising that the description goes on to add an explicitly political dimension:

The pair ended up broadening the curriculum to include additional topics in female sexuality, and the DeCal has continued to evolve since then. Today, FemSex is a space for free discussion of power and privilege related to gender, women’s health and sexual practices, among other things.

How you help women have better sex by telling them that men are evil exploiters isn’t clear, at least if we are talking about women who aren’t lesbians.

A more complete account of what the typical course involves can be found on a syllabus used at Carleton University, and on a syllabus from the FemSex website a Berkeley.

Some of the entries seem innocuous enough, for example “Communication in Relationships” (Carleton) and “Women’s Health and Menstruation” (Harvard). But most involve hot-button moral and even political issues. For example:

Carleton:

• Porn and Erotica
• Reproductive Choices (including abortion)
• Exploration of sexual practices and lifestyle
• Orientation of sexuality and gender
• Power and Privilege

Berkeley:

• Pornography, Erotica, and Sex Work
• Self-Love, Pleasure, and Orgasm
• Sexual Practices and Orientation
• Contraception and Sexually Transmitted Infections
• Power & Privilege
• Womyn’s [sic] Empowerment & Final Projects

A syllabus for Femsex at the University of Nevada-Reno is quite similar.

At Cornell an even wider variety of subjects is discussed:

Topics include: anatomy and physiology, cultural influences on sexuality, body image, STIs and safer sex, reproductive choices, solo sex, partner sex and relationships, gender identity, orgasms and inhibitors to orgasms, pornography, kink sex practices, BDSM, and more ...

If the syllabi of these course suggest some rather provocative topics, the actual activities are far more provocative. The student newspaper at Berkeley gives some examples:

In 2002, Female Sexuality-as well as the male version of the course-faced scrutiny by administrators after a Daily Californian article cited illicit sexual behavior in class. The incident sparked new guidelines for faculty oversight of student-run courses, but both DE-Cals have endured.

“Some people have a negative impression, but it’s not like that at all,” said senior Christie Santos, who took the course last semester. “The total goal is empowerment.”

For one project, students were asked to pen their own erotic story. Facilitators have also aired pornography clips in class to counter negative preconceptions about the industry’s treatment of women, Raymond said.

“Before the class, I would be really hesitant to use porn,” Santos said. “I think as women, we have a lot of hang-ups about porn and self-pleasuring ... I think it’s really interesting, because it’s exciting, it’s arousing-there is a lot of porn out there that isn’t degrading.”

Speakers in the DE-Cal have included sexologist Carol Queen-co-founder of the Center for Sex and Culture-as well as midwives, porn performers and members of the transsexual community.

The course has also held optional field trips to bondage clubs to allow students to explore alternative sexualities, Santos said.

The version of the course at Harvard was hardly less outrageous. As described by a woman blogger who was not at all sympathetic to the project:

Some of the topics being discussed don’t seem that outrageous to me and instead are worthy of discussion: portrayals of women in popular media, body image, women’s health, motherhood, and communication and relationships. But another glance at the syllabus and my jaw dropped. Assignments include coloring an anatomical diagram from the C*** Coloring Book, doing an erogenous exploration exercise, and let’s not forget the creative writing exercise—writing your sexual fantasy (don’t worry, it’s anonymous).

Each of the speakers will bring something valuable to the table: a midwife, someone from the BDSM community, a professional dominatrix named Princess Kali, a speaker on open relationships, the two leaders of Harvard’s Office of Sexual Assault and Prevention Response (an organization whose existence I’ve lamented in other posts) and sexologist Carol Queen. If that’s not enough fun, there is a writing workshop on pornography and erotica, a guided tour of Good Vibrations of Boston (a women-owned sex shop), and other field trips involving a porn night and a strip club visit.

Of course, one could quite plausibly argue that all these things are worth discussing. And indeed, they are. But the strong emphasis is that any discussion must be “nonjudgmental.” Indeed, an email sent out to advertise the event at Harvard said participation required the “suspension of judgment.”

In the first place, one can’t imagine a workshop that takes a nonjudgmental attitude toward things the organizers really believe to be evil. One can’t imagine a workshop on rape, or drug abuse, or racism that would be taught in a “nonjudgmental” way.

But far worse is the fact that FemSex is not nonjudgmental at all. It is littered with strong moral judgments. For example, Carleton students “discuss ways in which we learn about sex in sexist and heteronormative terms. Personal stories as well as media portrayals will be welcome.”

What about prostitution? What about pornography? The Berkeley syllabus promises to discuss “. . . the taboos that surround pornography and sex work.” Taboos, of course, are a bad thing.

Abortion? What would one expect when a speaker is from Planned Parenthood? Of course, no version of FemSex that we can find ever invited a speaker from a pro-life group.

Promiscuity? A look at the Berkeley website shows featured readings titled “Slut! Growing up Female with a Bad Reputation,” and “He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know.” Of course, from a Catholic, or indeed any Christian perspective, a double standard is a bad thing. But the proper response is not to encourage women to be promiscuous.

It’s odd that feminists think you can stick it to the patriarchy by making it easier for guys to get laid!

Indeed, when guys respond to female promiscuity in the predictable way, the feminists get huffy about it. An article in the Columbia Spectator gripes:

May we remind you that the joke “Columbia girls to wed, Barnard girls to bed” is still not funny? Barnard women have been immortalized as sluts and sex objects that aren’t worth a guy’s attention for a serious relationship, and the tradition is passed on every year to the next generation of students.

Moralism on Steroids

FemSex, in sum, is not nonjudgmental. It’s intensely moralistic. But the morality is a secular morality that says “if it feels good do it,” and “any sex act one wishes to engage in is OK.” Harsh moral judgment is reserved for anybody who says differently.

A woman blogger at Harvard saw this quite clearly. Contemplating enrolling, she observed:

I thought, perhaps naively, that I would be able to participate. That I could go in each time, listen to other women’s stories without judging, and then give my own perspective. That abstinence until marriage is the best way to avoid STD’s and is in fact a pretty liberating thing (I won’t have to compare myself to my husband’s previous partners, I don’t have to listen to society telling me what to do, I don’t have to deal with the emotional baggage of premarital sex). That sex work and pornography objectify women. That women wouldn’t need to be empowered if they stopped calling themselves victims and instead worked alongside men.

I’m not sure what their reactions to my opinions would be. I’m not sure if my views would be tolerated. I wonder if I’d inadvertently violate the contract I’d have to sign, which requires that I contribute to making the space safe and comfortable. But I do know that as long as we’re watching a film entitled “When Abortion Was Illegal,” being told how great polyamory is, and discussing self-love and masturbation, it can never be a safe, comfortable space for me.

And of course, a questionnaire that women wanting to lead sessions at Carleton have to submit makes clear the rigid political correctness of the enterprise. The women are required to explain:

What can you do to make sure issues of privilege are addressed in class? Have you had experience working with diverse communities or dealing with issues of diversity/privilege?

Femsex at Marquette

The program at Marquette is similar to those elsewhere. This is, after all, “monkey see, monkey do,” and administrators and activists on college campuses ape each other. And of course, those folks at Marquette ape what is done on secular campuses (or on “Catholic” campuses which, like Marquette, are not really Catholic).

Here is the syllabus for the Marquette program.

It has a few concessions to the supposed Catholic nature of Marquette. For example, among the “models of sexual behavior” to be discussed alongside “fantasy, kink, fetish, and more” are “asexuality” and “abstinence.” And it promises “both negative and positive views of masturbation.” And they have stuck in a discussion of “Sexuality and Spirituality.”

But then, projects at the end of the syllabus include:

• Cunt Coloring: Color an anatomical picture from The Cunt Coloring Book.
• Affirmation Assignment: Affirm someone in a manner of your choosing.
• Birth/Adoption Assignment: Talk to your parent(s)/guardian(s) about the experience of your birth, adoption, or how they came to have you.
• Erotica: Create an anonymous piece of erotica exploring fantasy and desire.
• Pleasure Point: Find a new pleasure point or pleasurable activity, and write about (or express in another medium) the experience

Then finally, probably the most interesting:

• Empowerment Object: Bring in something that you find empowering to share with the group.

The last one is particularly interesting. Do they want a sex toy, perhaps? We’re guessing that no woman in the group will bring a pistol for which she has a concealed carry permit!

Quite obviously, a program that endorses implicitly (and often explicitly) abortion, sadomasochism, prostitution, homosexuality, masturbation and promiscuity is way beyond questionable at a Catholic university — and even at a university that pretends to be Catholic.

But even from a secular liberal standpoint, the program is questionable. As a woman writing in the Harvard Crimson put it:

Oddly, the focus of FemSex is purely sexual liberation. Despite the numerous other issues confronting the modern woman, the class focuses eight out of 10 sessions on sexual and/or anatomical exploration. The syllabus seems to suggest that sexual liberation is a woman’s only path to empowerment—funny, I thought that was law school. Where are the seminars focused on women in corporate America, or women in the military? By diversifying its syllabus, FemSex might lose its shock value, but it would be able to address a broader range of concerns and appeal to more students.

Even worse, in its attempt to force its members into an archetype of what liberation should be, FemSex’s approach overpowers the individual instead of empowering her. Empowerment is about making your own choices, not about adhering to the FemSex agenda. I wonder how a class member who made the liberated choice to abstain from sex would be received in this group.

According to its information e-mail; “this class requires dedication, openness, willingness to communicate, suspension of judgment, and BRAVERY.” Bravery? It is difficult to understand what bravery has to do with attending field trips to porn shops or listening to a dominatrix give a lecture, both of which are potential offerings of a FemSex curriculum. Bravery would be having these conversations and trips out of your own curiosity, not as some sort of misguided attempt at finding a pre-determined “liberated” identity.

At the information session earlier this month, one FemSex alum recounted her favorite assignment from last term: taking a speculum and a light and getting intimate with her own private parts. Nothing could serve as a better example of FemSex’s misguided philosophy: while its participants are searching their own insides, they’re missing what’s going on outside. We live in a world with those other people — you remember them, the men — and until we can stop judging our liberation as women (sexual or otherwise) by how separate we are from men, we will never be truly empowered.

The image of college women one gets from FemSex is that of whining neurotics. Really, which would be better for the cause of women’s equality: studying to make a good grade on a Physics exam, or attending a feminist hen party to obsess on sex? FemSex, in reality, is the ultimate way of treating women as sex objects.

Universities as “Safe Spaces:” Fluffy-Bunny Totalitarianism

Yes, the politically correct campus left considers anything “unsafe” if any ideas are expressed with which they disagree. Or if it violates the sense of proper expression of the most politically correct.

How much of this is there at Marquette? It’s pretty common in the most politically correct quarters. A candidate for the current Academic Senate ran on a platform of making Marquette a “safe space” for women and minorities and LGBT people. Happily, this candidate did not win.

Fundraising Support for Susannah Bartlow

For those who have not been following this blog, Susannah Bartlow is the former director of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center at Marquette, who was summarily fired when it was found that she had approved a large mural on the wall of the Center honoring cop killer and terrorist Assata Shakur.

A fund raising effort on her behalf can be found here:

http://www.gofundme.com/susannahbartlow

The appeal starts with some silly statements:

On Monday, May 18th, Dr. Susannah Bartlow was fired as Director of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center at Marquette University. She was fired suddenly and swiftly, without input from the GSRC Advisory Committee, after pouring her heart and soul into bringing excellent programming to Marquette over the last three years. She was fired seemingly for doing her job: providing a safe space for students to express themselves and engage in thoughtful dialogue (more information below).

No, the purpose of the Center was to promote a gay lifestyle, and push leftist political causes, as its Facebook page shows.

But then, we get some new and rather disturbing information:

When she was fired, Susannah was not offered any severance. She was paid only through her last day of work on May 18th, and was not expecting, at that moment in her professional life, to face the job market. Additionally, when she was terminated on May 18th, Susannah had already missed the 2015-2016 hiring cycle for positions in higher education. She continues to contribute to her community by accepting a temporary position at Pathfinders in Milwaukee, which pays a modest hourly income, but it is going to be hard to make ends meet and cover some of the basics, including health insurance. Her friends, colleagues and well-wishers ask that you consider donating to a fund to support Susannah as she transitions into a new (permanent) professional role. We want to give her the time to find the right placement for herself. Please consider donating; even a small amount helps. Funds will be used to cover her living expenses, health insurance, and any legal fees associated with an unemployment claim. Susannah has also pledged to donate any funds above our goal to Pathfinders and plans to blog about what’s going on in her life, especially related to job searches, work at Pathfinders, and writing projects on a weekly Wednesday blog called Work in Progress.

So how do we feel about this?

We are actually hoping that the campaign raises the target amount ($3,800) for Bartlow. Yes, she is a leftist extremist (as her blog posts about Shakur show) and should never have been hired as a director of any program at Marquette.

But we have seen no evidence that she ever concealed or misrepresented her political views when interviewing for the position. And indeed, Marquette seems to have approved (if only through inattention) of her leftist activism in the position (with Femsex being a large exception).

That being the case, Marquette owed her a reasonable severance package. We won’t contribute, although only because we would accused of some nefarious purpose if we did so. But we think certain Marquette administrators should step up and see that this campaign reaches the goal.

Dan Maguire Comments

Among those who commented and gave a relatively generous gift ($200) was Dan Maguire, who said:

Another example of heavy-handed non-collegial authoritarianism in the Lovell administration. Another example of the lack of appropriate faculty participation in university governance as recommended by the AAUP and other academic agencies.

Maguire is making a principled argument here, although it’s one to which we have never been sympathetic. It has always sounded to us a bit like wanting the inmates to run the asylum. This has been especially true given that the “faculty” who want to participate in “governance” have been a highly self-selected bunch of activists.

But then, what about the case where the people supposed to be running the asylum are corrupt?

Marquette has not had a president whom we could respect since John Raynor, who served from 1965 until 1990.

In this case, however, we don’t think Marquette had any choice but to take the mural down, and to fire Bartlow. Had the issue of the mural been opened up for “discussion” with some faculty defending it, and others (probably many fewer, since conservative professors keep their heads down) opposing it, the public relations fallout would have been monumental. Unlike in academia, in American society as a whole murdering cops is not only viewed as evil, it’s not even viewed as something that can be defended.

Wanting a Safe Space

Claiming “Free Speech” as an Excuse to Censor

From the Wall Street Journal:

Higher education’s suppression of speech is well-publicized. But in an odder and less well-known twist, campuses are increasingly co-opting the language of free speech and using it to justify censorship. One example: The designated “free speech zones” that exist on roughly 1 in 10 U.S. college campuses, according to a report released last month by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

The very existence of a “free speech zone” suggests that students’ expression is limited elsewhere on campus. And even in the “free” zones, administrators often restrict who can speak, when and for how long.

Dozens of universities have also used the language of free speech to justify trendy “Language Matters” or “Inclusive Language” campaigns. The point of these programs is to condition students to wince away from words and phrases deemed offensive, instead using politically correct substitutes.

Among the campaigns’ common targets are “hey guys” and “man up” (too gendered), as well as “crazy” (inconsiderate of people with mental illness) and “lame” (disrespectful to the disabled). Ironically—and insidiously—these “inclusive” language campaigns seek to exclude opposing political or cultural viewpoints. It’s an attempt to ban not only words but also thoughts.

The University of Northern Colorado’s “Language Matters” campaign last year warned students not to say “All lives matter.” The dean of students, Katrina Rodriguez, defended the program in an email last June to Heat Street, where I am political editor, saying it was “about being mindful about how words can affect others and the conversations provide an opportunity for individuals to understand why particular language may be hurtful to someone else in our community of learners.”

She continued: “We believe that fostering dialogue on a college campus so that multiple perspectives are explored and debated is the essence of free speech.”

The inclusive-language campaigns at the University of Wisconsin’s campuses in Milwaukee and River Falls have also discouraged students from saying “illegal immigrant” or “illegal alien,” because either term “fixates on legal status instead of people as individuals” and “asserts that only certain groups belong in the U.S.”

UW-Milwaukee even included “politically correct” on its list of disfavored terms, arguing that it “has become a way to deflect, say that people are being too ‘sensitive’ and police language.”

Which brings us to the warped idea that by suppressing “dominant” voices, universities actually further free speech. Katherine Kvellestad, a University of Pennsylvania student, recently used a version of this argument to defend students who wanted a portrait of Shakespeare removed from the English department. The students also pushed for an English curriculum with fewer white, male writers.

“I think, in a way, the whole PC culture idea can almost promote free speech because there are a lot of people who have been marginalized in the past,” Ms. Kvellestad told Heat Street during a phone interview in December. “So it’s kind of free speech in a different sense, that we’re giving credence and voices to voices that we were not hearing.”

One of Ms. Kvellestad’s fellow Penn students made a related argument in a Jan. 11 op-ed in the student newspaper, claiming that his white professors’ refusal to censor class content had hindered his ability to learn. Sophomore James Fisher described how one Penn professor showed depictions of slavery and let students make comments Mr. Fisher considered “ignorant.” He told the professor that “what he was doing was traumatic to me . . . [so] I would not allow him to continue.”

The professor, Mr. Fisher wrote, “then used the argument that, in order to make the class a ‘safe space,’ he had to protect the voice of all students in class. . . . So, because my professor wanted to protect the voices of the white students who benefit from black oppression, the oppression unfortunately continued.”

In “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell describes how the misuse of language can lead to messy thinking—and how, even worse, intentionally imprecise language can soften or obscure abhorrent ideas. He anticipated a world in which administrators, professors and students demand the right to act as censors even as they claim to venerate the right to unrestricted expression.

The writer, Jillian Kay Melchior, is an Political Editor at Heat Street, which does an excellent job of reporting on censorship on college campuses.

Former Director of the Gender And Sexuality Resource Center Moans and Complains About Removal of Mural of Terrorist

This blog broke the story, and it went national: a mural of cop killer and domestic terrorist Assata Shakur in the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center at Marquette. Quickly, the mural was painted over, and the Director of the Center, Susannah Bartlow, was fired.

She has now published an article on the issue in Feminist Studies, Vol. 41, No. 3, “Gendering Bodies, Institutional Hegemonies” (2015), pp. 689-697.

The mere title gives away the fact that this is going to be an example of the arcane and stilted rhetoric common among academic feminists. And indeed it is.

As the founding director of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center (GSRC), my job was to build an academic support office for women’s, gender, and LGBTQ+ education and empowerment. In the center’s third year, Amanda Smith (a Marquette senior) and Jeanette Martín (a community artist and program assistant at the center) envisioned, planned, and executed the Assata Shakur mural project as a way to invite greater community interest. In my role as director of the center, I supported the project, communicated it to senior leaders, and spread the word about the community-painting day in late March 2015.

So it wasn’t Bartlow’s idea. But she knew perfectly well who Shakur was, having signed a petition requesting that President Obama take Shakur off the Most Wanted Terrorists List. And she approved the project anyway.

Her claim to have “communicated it [plans for the mural] to senior leaders” is interesting, since if she informed “senior leaders” about who Shakur is, and they approved the mural, they are responsible and Bartlow was a mere sacrificial lamb.

Faced with a similar claim months ago, we wrote Bartlow, asking for details of what was communicated to higher-level officials, and she did not respond.

Defense of the Mural

Bartlow continues:

Over the six weeks it was on display at the center, the mural invited people into a quiet space off a hallway, and it had sparked discussion among staff, faculty, and students who used the space. The mural was one of very few images of a black woman anywhere on Marquette’s campus, and it contributed to a sense among many students of color that the GSRC was a space in which they were welcomed and safe and where they could be comfortable.

Yet in the distortions of white supremacy, the mural looked like a threat, rather than an intellectual and community representation central to the university itself.

So it’s “white supremacy” to object to object to a mural of a cop killer?

Did the mural “invite” people into the Center? If so, why was a mural of a cop killer particularly “inviting?” Does the clientele of the Center think killing cops is fine?

If one wants an image of a black woman, we can think of a lot of black women who have not killed any cop, and are not on the FBI’s list of Most Wanted Terrorists.

As for the mural looking like a “threat,” this is what psychologists call “projection.” Politically correct feminists and other leftists are always claiming to feel “unsafe” when they face arguments and facts they find inconvenient. So they assume that other people feel “threatened” (rather than merely appalled) by an image of a black militant cop killer.

Bartlow goes on:

What happened specifically to this mural and to my job is also connected to the charged context of contemporary racialized violence. What happened to the mural is really a minor symptom of the full-on assault against poor people, people of color, queer people, and others who cannot access or play by the rules of twenty-first-century social dominance. No words fit the loss of life and the daily violations against black, brown, and poor people: in Milwaukee, where Marquette is located, more than 100 of the 105 homicides reported so far in 2015 involve black or Hispanic victims.

The chutzpah here is astounding.

Painting over a mural is part of the same phenomenon of black people getting killed?

Worse still is the assertion that 100 of the 105 homicides thus far this year had black or Hispanic victims. Is she implying that cops killed all these people? Klansmen?

No breakdown of victims by race of offender for Milwaukee is available at the moment, but national statistics pretty much tell the story. In 2012 (the last year for which tabulations are available), of 2648 blacks murdered, 2412 were murdered by other blacks. That’s 91 percent.

And the map of the locations of murders in the city of Milwaukee, published by the Journal-Sentinel, also tells the story.



It shows murders concentrated in black neighborhoods on the north side, and Hispanic neighborhoods on the near south side.

More Arcane Verbiage

Bartlow continues:

Our choice of Assata Shakur—a powerful, controversial black leader, an uncompromising woman, for better and worse—came out of a year-long process of supportive, consensus-based, power sharing between students and staff at our center. The mural was visible evidence that our feminist collaborations were working.

So she thought the process was great. But the outcome of the process was odious.

Why could not a “supportive, consensus-based, power sharing” process have produced a mural of a black woman that almost everybody on the campus could admire, and a mural that the Administration could have supported (rather than having to distance itself from). Quite simply: Bartlow and her collaborators were political extremists who didn’t particularly mind black militants killing cops.

Thus the hiring of Bartlow stands as a major fiasco. Perhaps the Administration will be more careful in the future. If so, this débâcle has served a useful purpose. But given the current administration’s habit of pandering to the activists, we have our doubts.

Marquette Threatens to Cancel Acceptance of Conservative Student / Panders to Leftist Mob

What happens to you if you are a recent high school graduate, just admitted to Marquette, and you go on Tik Toc to boldly affirm that you are a supporter of Donald Trump?

The answer is: some leftist Marquette students demand your offer of admission be rescinded.

And how does Marquette respond to such demands? It calls in the student for an Inquisition about her political beliefs, and tells her she may be kicked out of the Freshman class.

As usual, Marquette panders to the leftist mob.

The Beginning

This particular student, whose identity we will not reveal, is quite outspoken in her support of Donald Trump. She posted on TikTok a video of herself over a hip-hop song with the letters on the screen saying “when people see that I support Trump, they start hating on me.” And further: “Then try to hate on me, and think I’ll change my views.”

The TikTok video was apparently noticed by one Erin Cook, who reposted it on Instagram, with the notation “Shits tacky. Pls watch out for this one, MU.” Yes, you really have to watch out for those Trump supporters.

We can tell how much Cook hates Trump from a meme she posted on Instagram:

The Campaign Begins

But Cook was not content with this. She wrote to Marquette’s Dean of Admissions, apparently demanding the student’s admissions be cancelled. We say “apparently,” since she did not post her message to Bryan Troyer. But she did post his response:

Cook also began a campaign to get fellow leftists to write Marquette. Her Instagram profile has a notation “Email Marquette Admin.” A down arrow leads to a PDF document that is supposed to be slightly customized and sent to a long list of Marquette officials. It outlines the supposed offenses of the student.

Click on Image to Enlarge

The Supposed Offenses

The document attacks the student for “posting her explicit political views.” Heaven help us if somebody should be “explicit” about their political views.

Further: “she is defending President Trump’s stance on immigration” — something that clearly should not be allowed — and “arguing that undocumented immigrants are ‘illegals’ and ‘only here to commit crime.’” Of course, they are here illegally,  and it’s dishonest to use “undocumented.”

And she in fact never said immigrants are “only here to commit crime.”  She did say that immigrants increase crime, but didn’t say they are more crime prone than other groups.

The student is further accused to mocking transgender individuals in a YouTube video where she is wondering around a thrift store. She points to a pair of of shoes that are a woman’s style, but a very large size. She says “those are cross-dressing shoes.”

This is supposedly an outrage, not withstanding that biological males who cross-dress do, in fact, have feet way larger than the typical woman.

Cook takes offense at another post by the student on transgenderism.

The irony here, of course, is that the student’s position is essentially that of the Catholic Church. Not that Marquette bureaucrats care about that in the least.

Feeling Unsafe

The document ends with the usual claim of the politically correct:  people will feel “unsafe” if allowed to hear political arguments they don’t like.

These comments create and perpetuate an unsafe space for the LGBTQ+ community, first generation students, and Dreamers at Marquette. . . . The University can and should make it their priority to ensure students (specifically LGBTQ+, immigrants, first gen [sic], and POC) feel safe, valued and appreciated on campus.

In the first place, anybody who is too cowardly to hear political arguments they don’t like doesn’t belong on a college campus.

But in the second place, it’s a lie. These leftist students simply don’t feel unsafe. But claiming to be  offended hearing arguments they don’t like, and feeling “unsafe” are claims used to bully into silence people with whom they disagree.

Student Harassed

The student began getting nasty messages and e-mail from leftists. We have included a sampling below.

There are a lot more.

Marquette Responds

Such messages are relatively minor, obviously from idiots, but much worse is what Marquette could do.

The student was subjected to an inquisition by officials from the Admissions Office. The point: was she really the evil conservative that the leftist students claimed.

According to the student:

It did not appear that they were placated. If anything the hostility with which they spoke was made apparent in their questioning as if nothing I said could liberate me from their judgments, only convict me further.

Of course, this being an Inquisition, there is no way to prove your innocence to the Inquisitors. If you are accused, you are guilty.

We will see what they will do. But given Marquette’s pandering to leftist students claiming to represent some victim group, we are not optimistic.

We queried Brian Troyer, Dean of Admissions, and he simply responded that “I cannot discuss matters under review involving future and/or continuing MU students.” We didn’t expect him to.

And we have pretty much given up expecting Marquette to care about free speech, a diversity of opinion, and Catholic thinking.

Or challenging students to consider ideas they might dislike. Unless they are conservative students. But there are going to be many fewer of those.

Update

New, recent messages posted about the student:

All of these, of course, show the deranged hatred leftist students at Marquette have for people who don’t share their political views.

Yet these are the sort of people to whom Marquette panders.

Undate: 7/11/2020

The nasty messages keep coming:

Vandalized Pro-Life Display: Student Group Speaks Out

Reacting to the defacing of an anti-abortion display on campus, a campus student group (Young Americans for Freedom) has issued this statement:

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Self-proclaimed Feminist Students Deface Pro-Life Memorial at Marquette

College Democrats of Marquette condone act, Conservative students respond

Milwaukee, WI - Self-proclaimed feminist students sabotaged a display on Marquette University’s campus memorializing the millions of babies killed through abortion. The culprits placed several signs covering the information about the memorial. The signs stated things such as: “My Body, My Freedom”, “Stop the hypocrisy, care for women’s reproductive rights”, “68,000 women die from unsafe abortions every year”, and other variations of pro-choice arguments. Coat hangers were also scattered around the memorial.

The Young Americans for Freedom chapter at Marquette responded with the following statement: Young Americans for Freedom at Marquette University is extremely saddened that the Students for Life memorial was defaced by certain students intolerant of an opinion that they do not agree with. It is extremely hypocritical to claim that you are exercising your free speech rights through defacement while simultaneously trying to shut down the free speech of a student organization.

The act was so egregious, Vice President of Student Affairs, Dr. Xavier Cole, sent an email to the Marquette community condemning the defacement. He wrote, “Let me be extremely clear. Defacement is not dialogue.” He then goes on to say that Marquette values all opinions on specific matters, but that there needs to be dialogue and productive discussion on such differences.

For its part, the Catholic university refused to defend the pro-life students and the dignity of the unborn. As Dr. Cole wrote, Marquette’s mission requires the respect and dignity of all individuals. The Young Americans for Freedom – Marquette call on President Michael Lovell and the University to stand up to both the vandalism and the unborn. With this act, liberals made clear: conservatives and the unborn are not safe in the space of a university.

While many students are upset over the defacement of the memorial and infringement of Marquette for Life’s freedom of speech, a student organization took to social media to praise the vandalism committed by the students. Marquette University College Democrats tweeted and posted on their Facebook page that they were proud of the feminists. “We love and support you!” they wrote.

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About the pro-life memorial:

Every year, Marquette for Life celebrates “pro-life week” by creating a memorial for the millions of the unborn killed in America each year. Flags are planted in the ground to represent the lives lost through abortion every year (1 flag = 1,000 babies aborted). The memorial was approved by the school. On Thursday, students defaced the memorial by vandalizing the sign which explains what the flags represent.

Contact:

Young Americans for Freedom at Marquette University
Youngamericans4freedom@gmail.com