Claremont, Ca.
Several days ago I awoke to a mass email from Minjoo Kim, the student body president at Scripps College, condemning a “racist incident” that had taken place the night before. The incident in question? A Mexican-American Scripps student had awoken to find the words “#trump2016” written on the whiteboard on her door. (For context, all Scripps students have whiteboards on their doors so friends can leave messages.)
Kim’s email claimed that the student was targeted because of her race and described the Trump presidential slogan — nay, hashtag — as an act of violence, and a “testament that racism continues to be an undeniable problem and alarming threat on our campuses.” This email was followed shortly by a message from our Dean of Students, Charlotte Johnson, chastising those students who believed that Kim’s email had been an overreaction to the incident. Johnson pointed out that Scripps respects the First Amendment (er, in theory) of its students and community members, but in this case the “circumstances are unique.”
Scripps students’ constant need to respond to hurt feelings and real or imaginary racism meant that residents of the dorm where this happened had to go to a mandatory meeting in which RAs gave out instructions on how to behave if you see something offensive written on a student’s whiteboard. Because words = violence, you see.
If a student sees something potentially offensive, they are not supposed to erase it; that would be like pretending it never happened. Instead, they are to take a piece of paper towel and tape it over the offensive message (not very green) so that others walking down the hall need not be affected (read: “triggered”) by the message, then report it. Indeed, the student who experienced this “act of racism” did not simply erase the whiteboard drawing and move on with her day. She wrote a notice calling attention to her status as a victim, hung it next to the #trump2016 message, and posted it on Facebook. From this we learn that at a college for independent women, victimhood equals status.
For the past few evenings I have been taking part in an immensely detailed congressional simulation, for a government class at neighboring Claremont McKenna College. For this exercise we are simulating a congressional session taking place during the first year of a Donald J. Trump presidency. The simulation has been labor intensive, extremely informative for the students participating, and lots of fun. It plagues me to think that at my home campus there are students who would not only be uncomfortable with the simulation, but deeply offended, or maybe they would even feel targeted. How is it possible to teach politics and government in an atmosphere like this? How will my classmates survive the upcoming California primary?
Now, I’m no Donald Trump supporter. But Trump is a legitimate candidate. Seeing his name or a dopey political slogan simply cannot be enough to send an intelligent college student running for her safe space, in tears. Scripps, like most women’s colleges, prides itself on educating and shaping women to bravely go out and face a tough world. Does official coddling of behavior like this not devalue the Scripps brand? Surely I cannot be alone in believing this event is an embarrassment and hopefully not representative of the institution as a whole. Why are so many embracing this bizarrely, victimhood-embracing feminism?
Furthermore, when real people hear about this coddled, bizarre reaction to the secret ‘violence’ apparently embedded in ‘#Trump2016,’ it legitimizes Donald Trump’s candidacy, which is based significantly on general disgust with political correctness, as well as cultivated fragility in the face of speech one doesn’t agree with. My fainting-couch fellow students have given The Donald a gift.
In any event, I am hoping that this dies down before finals, because last semester, in the face of radical student agitation over minority victimization here, the student-run coffee shop was declared a ‘safe space’ for minority students. That was hard on those of us who need caffeine to study.
Sophie Mann is a sophomore at Scripps College.
