The whole article basically waffles on about something they've barely verified (they cite and older article on another as proof, even though half of the cited article's proof now 404s)
And does so in extremely charged, emotional language. (because fuck nuance, right?)
Also they don't seem to re-read themselves:
DC Gazette wrote:
Princeton bowed down to Michelle’s ridiculous claims, and decided to make it mandatory for students to dorm with a person of a different race. They believed it would be a positive idea to ensure the integration of different races. The TWC was LIVID!
Ok so...given that it says "and decided" right after "bowed down to Michelle's ridiculous claims" (I think they meant demands?) that means it was TWC's/Michelle's idea for the mandatory dorm mixing? And then they get angry about their own idea?
That's not at all what their original source says happened though.
The original source raises some red flags as well:
source article from the Freedom Outpost wrote:
Michelle Obama, much like her husband is closely associated with the teachings of Marxism and had attended meetings with Marxist-type people
How Marx relates to race exactly I'm not sure. But I'm getting McCarthy vibes from this, it loops right back into the whole "Obama is a communist" spiel that went on a few years ago.
All in all, these article seem geared towards one specific thing: stirring the pot and whipping up outrage. Not informing people or opening up a conversation about race and/or racism. Since it's 11 am and I'm just lazing around I guess I'll take a crack at some of these other morsels:
Quote:
When our First Lady attended Princeton, she was part of a racist group called the “Third World Center”, or TWC for short. The campus group whose board membership is exclusively reserved for minorities, often protested to promote “Black Solidarity”. The group concluded that every white person on campus was a racist, even if they didn’t know it yet.
Okay so...setting aside that this happened quite a few years ago and that nothing here is telling us the people involved in TWC kept on to their somewhat simplistic views (because we're all
exactly the same as we were ten or twenty years ago right?)
There's actually a bit of a difference between saying the student body, as a social group, might be racist, and saying every person as an individual is a racist. The article likes to present it as the latter, probably because that stings a bit more, emotionally. In and of itself that is kind of silly: nobody is saying Princeton students were monsters or anything.
Quote:
Fast forward 35 years and we see this same racist rhetoric being spewed once more.
"Spewed"? Did I take a wrong turn and end up on Reddit? Or Tumblr? Or maybe Rush Limbaugh's site? This is just unnecessarily charged language for an article, it reads like a goddamn comment. Again: this is meant to get people frothing at the mouth, not anything else.
Quote:
Quote:
“Black college students across the country have demanded that they be segregated from white peers, calling for “safe spaces” on campuses meant only for so-called students of color.
The requests for segregated spaces are found among some of the demand lists put forth by students who took part in protests this fall alleging their campuses are oppressive, discriminatory, and represent institutionalized racism.”
NYU, UC Berkeley, Oberlin University, Claremont McKenna College and several other colleges are calling for some level of segregation of black students.
Ooooh, safe space scaremongering. Watch out world! Before you know it your back yard might be a safe space!
Okay so: reserved spaces aren't anything new. People have a right to assembly and to decide who does and does not get be a part of said assembly. What people don't have a right to do is:
-deny people the use of public property or services on the basis of race, gender, beliefs etc.
-deny people business on the same basis (although we're coming back on that one, what with the whole "christian bakers shouldn't have to make cakes for gay people" argument)
A private club =/= public property or a business. So if black students create black student associations (which they have done as far back as when Michelle was in Princeton) or if white students want to create a similar association and declare it a "safe space" they can do that. Just like the association for Gay people at my university had their private room, and private meetings and everything. As long as they aren't preventing people from attending classes or denying them entrance to places they did not get any say over then it's good.
Quote:
Students are even demanding entire floors be dedicated only to students of color!
If that is true, that's ridiculous. But I have no way of knowing for sure because somebody just conveniently forgot to cite their source on this. I guess I'll just be angry then, because that's what the article seems to want me to be.
Quote:
So why is this being tolerated? In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court outlawed segregated public education facilities for blacks and whites at the state level. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended all state and local laws requiring segregation.
See above: not the same thing. Nobody is being denied the right to study at University because of their race. If the law was so all encompassing that it reaches into the private sphere then wouldn't websites like
Asian Avenue be forbidden as well?
Quote:
Could you imagine if white students demanded segregation from black students? It would be all over the news and those students would be compared to KKK members!
If they demanded literal segregation, yes. If they created a school association based on white culture then that'd raise eyebrows because why exactly does that need to be a thing, outside of getting even with the black culture associations? Otherwise no, they probably won't get any flak for not associating with people of a different race.
Quote:
I’m tired of racism like this going unpunished. We need to demand that these black student activists be expelled just like the white students who faced expulsion for their racism.
More outrage fodder. Notice how we've gone completely off-topic by the way? Apparently what Michelle did years ago is only interesting insofar it allows somebody to post their rant about how they feel black people are
the real racists nowadays. If this article had gone on any longer I'd half expect to see White Genocide being brought up.
I get that creating minority only safe spaces seems counter intuitive to addressing racism. And I get the feeling of being accused unfairly of discriminating against people based on race etc.
I don't want to argue in favor of what Michelle Obama did, but I do want to argue that this article is just a bunch of angry hullabaloo. That it's written just to get the stereotypical racist family members all worked up and yelling about how Obama is a commie and their tearing apart the very fabric of American culture etc.
But the fact that I'm trying not to give in to gut feels is probably going to be seen as "defending" or "making excuses" for discriminatory practices...
Maybe not be that person? I don't know...people are free to do what they want and if they want to write crap like this, then fine. But that doesn't mean everyone has to take it at face value and dance to their pipes.
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