That's the message of the micro-aggression movement. The latest micro-aggression idiocy news comes from the New York Times. Dig this.
WORCESTER, Mass. — A freshman tentatively raises her hand and takes the microphone. “I’m really scared to ask this,” she begins. “When I, as a white female, listen to music that uses the N word, and I’m in the car, or, especially when I’m with all white friends, is it O.K. to sing along?”Why any self-respecting person is asking some dimwitted university administration toad if it's OK to sing along with music in their car is beyond me. My musical questions are a bit more theological, but more on that later.
The answer, from Sheree Marlowe, the new chief diversity officer at Clark University, is an unequivocal “no.”
The Bigger Issue
What's happening here is not the speech codes, it's the statement to the offendees that they lack sufficient strength to deal with 19-year-old blondes singing in their cars. The little cutie in the article wasn't being told to keep her crooning to her self for her own sake, it was for the fragile bits of humanity who might hear her and collapse in an emotional heap.
In both Jason Riley's and J. D. Vance's books on growing up and out of poverty, one black, the other white, the key epiphany for each was that they had agency over their lives. When they changed from thinking that the world around them doomed them to poverty, drugs and violence to realizing that their choices were powerful and they could shape their own futures, they went from failure to success.
It's one thing to say you're too weak to overcome growing up with a heroin-addicted mother. It's quite another thing altogether to say that hearing some petite coed laugh as she sings along with her bubblegum-chewing sorority sisters to some hip-hop hit is too much for you.
Micro-aggressions are the ultimate in teaching people that they have no power over their own lives.
My Musical Question
If you invite a bunch of crazed papists over for a party and you start with some hard-rocking Jesus music (think Building 429 and TobyMac) is it OK after a few pitchers of Blue Hawaiians to evolve into this? Asking for a friend.
2 comments:
"Micro-aggressions are the ultimate in teaching people that they have no power over their own lives."
And, perhaps ironically, that that very powerlessness over their own lives endows them with ultimate power over others' lives.
I know. It's like they're burn victims or something.
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