Anna De Villa
Anika Troeger
Jennifer Zhang
ASA 002 / A03
Academic Freedom and Its Threats—Ethnic Cover, “Diversity,” and Political Correctness (PCness)
In Robby Cohen’s “Berkeley Free Speech Movement: Paving the way for campus activism,” Cohen outlines the history and beginning of free speech movements, using the free speech movement at the University of California, Berkeley as an example. In 1964, the president and deans of Berkeley were opposed to students attracting campus support for civil rights movements aimed to end racial discrimination and segregation in America; this movement led by students was named the “Berkeley Free Speech Movement,” inducing waves of faculty sympathy through mass protests. The Berkeley activists borrowed from the non-violent protests tactics of the civil rights movement and executed them on campus, sending a message, loud and clear, that their methods could be “as effective in fighting political censorship in the North as they had been in combatting racism in the South.” Those students showed a drastic difference from the “silent generation,” a generation of students in the 1950s so affected by McCarthyism that they were afraid to demonstrate, sign petitions, or even speak out on controversial issues. The Free Speech Movement approached protest movements as completely moral and of the students’ political rights to face the university as an institution, attacking the university’s political regulations. Just as protesting were the students’ political rights in 1964, it was still their right to protest tuition hikes at the University of California, Davis in 2011. However, rather than treating the movements as a form political freedom, the university chose oppression by force, resulting in the infamous “pepper spray incident,” where campus police openly sprayed the peaceful student activists with pepper spray in close-range. The incident showed retrogression rather than progression for attitudes toward campus activism, and has since then tainted UC Davis’s reputation. However, the incident sparked more demands for transparency and both academic and political freedom on campus, which are still in the process of being improved today.
In The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt discuss the censorship of words and ideas on college campuses. Trigger warnings, microaggressions, and “safe spaces” are now commonly used terms but according to this piece, are starting to become used to an extreme extent. These three terms were created out of good intent; trigger warnings were meant to warn those with past traumas that the content they were about to consume could potentially remind them of that trauma, while labelling something as a microaggression allowed people to see how an action or phrase could be offensive. The misuse of these terms, however, can lead people to disbelieve the authenticity of them.
Using trigger warnings for every word possible would be ridiculous, but if someone with PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) from sexual abuse had to read a novel where the abuse is graphically depicted, it would be reasonable to give them a warning. The authors of this piece suggest that allowing people to avoid what makes them anxious is counterproductive, citing exposure (behavioral) therapy as evidence. The idea of exposure therapy is to slowly expose those with a trauma to that trauma over time so they can become desensitized to it, and is a commonly used form of therapy. While exposure therapy can be helpful, it is futile someone with trauma to be reminded of it while going about their everyday lives, or when he/she does not expect it. While the authors did have an interesting point about how exposure can be helpful at times, exposure therapy is a slow and personal process—not a sudden reminder of trauma every now and then.
However, this movement for “emotional well-being,” originally good-natured, has led to people censoring things in the name of protection. Conservative speakers complain about their fear to speak at liberal campuses, and that complaint should not be completely ignored. If the speaker is promoting hate speech and violence, then it would be an issue. But if a guest speaker is sharing his/her ideas and a majority of the campus disagrees with those ideas, the speaker should still be allowed to speak, as it is a constitutional right. Those with disagreeing opinions should be debating with those who have opposing ideas, not shutting them down. Closing our eyes and ears only makes us close-minded.
Disagreement is not a microaggression, and it is not an attack. It is also not right for a person to label another as racist, sexist, classist, or homophobic, and use that as reasoning to not listen. If anything, educating the other and having a debate—an actual conversation—about the topic in question is more important. Although it is not our responsibility to “educate” other people on social issues and impose our own views upon them, shutting them out is not the correct way to handle the situation; instead, it paints the side doing the “shutting out” as the oppressor.
Darrell Hamamoto’s “Ethnic Cover: Inquiry Into Norman Yoshio Mineta and Post-Racial Profiling” examines the effect of being politically correct after tragedy in US history and its repercussions. Through the use of guilt and an appearance of diversity, the United States government was able to convince the public to support the same path toward war acts. Due to the need to reassure citizens after the September 11th attacks, the government hired Norman Mineta to reassure the public that the government was not racially profiling people. Hamamoto also briefly brings figures like Colin Powell and Barack Obama into discussion to point out the fact that the “race card” is often used to put those who are more advantaged into positions of even higher power.
The idea of ethnic cover is that focus is put on a person’s ethnicity and not their credentials. In Colin Powell’s case, he was protected from more severe punishment of his actions by using the country’s guilty history of slavery to his advantage in inflammatory language. He essentially used his race as a way to protect himself by implying that his accusers were racist to call him to justice, despite his actual crime being that of sexual harassment. For Barack Obama, his rise to presidency is supposedly credited to his race and the need for the United States to not appear racist as a country. The main point is that our need as a society to reflect the diversity of this country outweighs anything else. The emphasis on the story of someone rising up despite adversity is so strong that it does not accurately reflect who he/she is as a person, or what he/she is actually doing in that position. There is also the implication that these people are the obligatory ethnic members in a given group. Mineta’s story showed how he fulfilled his role as a Japanese man with a connection to internment camps—a prime example of racial profiling—put in a position to prevent racial profiling. His history with insurance companies and his access to personal information that can assist in racial profiling were ignored because, as an ethnic person, how could he be on the wrong side?
This “protection” that guilt and ethnic cover offer does not benefit minority groups at all. Race, while used as a part of a person’s identity, does not define that person or his/her alliances. People of different ethnicities need to be examined on an equal ground and be held to the same standards. There is a false sense of reassurance that the addition of an ethnic character creates, and it merely hides the fact that the wrong people are in power. People should not be afraid to look past race and judge a person based on actions, and separate race from character.
Works Cited:
Cohen, R. (1985). Berkeley Free Speech Movement: Paving the way for campus activism. OAH
Magazine of History, 1(1), 16-18.
Lukianoff, G. & Haidt, J. (2015). “The Coddling of the American Mind.” The Atlantic.
Singal, J. (2015). Is There Any Evidence Trigger Warnings Are Actually a Big Deal? Retrieved May 13,
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