To understand the lengths liberal college students will go to feign offense, look at Yale undergrad Emma Keyes, a white woman, who would appreciate it if her classmates stop referring to their campus student center by its acronym “GPSCY.”
Keyes, a senior, wrote in an op-ed for the Yale Daily News that the Graduate and Professional Student Center at Yale, commonly shortened to its acronym and pronounced by students as “gypsy,” is an affront to the Romani people.
“The word is a slur,” wrote Keyes in the Nov. 30 column. “Specifically, it’s a slur against the Roma, a historically marginalized itinerant ethnic group. Not every member of the Roma considers the word to be offensive, but enough do that non-Roma people should not be using the word at all.”
So offended on behalf of the Romani, Keyes couldn’t bring herself to type out the word “gypsy,” instead using hyphens. And even though Keyes admitted she doesn’t know any Roma, isn’t aware of any on campus and acknowledges that the word isn’t necessarily offensive to real Roma, the student center acronym has taken an emotional toll.
“I’m not Roma, and as far as I know, no one I know identifies as Roma,” she wrote. “I don’t even know if there are any Roma at Yale — but just because there may not be members of the community on campus does not mean that we should sit back, rest easy and continue to refer to an institutionalized part of Yale using an ethnic slur.”
Keyes said in the piece that the issue has weighed heavily on her mind since her freshman year at Yale, but that she never addressed it because she had hoped “someone else would take up this cause for me.”
Profiles in courage: Identify an injustice against a group of people you have no relation to and then hope that someone else rights the wrong.
It’s as if these kids wake up each day and instantly think up ways to make everyone else miserable by airing out their internal weirdness. And then they think of it as an act of personal bravery.
“I’m doing my best before I leave this place,” wrote Keyes. “Names matter, and people at this university have recognized that fact.”
Despite the tremendous call to action, however, the students center, has yet to change its name.
The Romani will no doubt continue to suffer.
