The Coddling of the American Mind

Jeff Cha

ASA 2 (A02)

Blog 4

           The Atlantic article, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” discusses how college students have become too sensitive to every little situation. The article best describes it as mental filtering, which means to point out a negative detail in any situation and only focusing on that. The authors disagree with this sensitive mentality and provide many examples to show the overreactions to innocent situations. A similar situation that came to my mind as I was reading this article was the flag situation at UC Irvine. Six undergraduates on the UCI student council approved of banning all flags, even the American flag, from the lobby of student government offices. The students argued that flags were “weapons for nationalism” and that it created a “culturally exclusive space.” Similar to the authors of this article, I agree that situations like this are a bit ridiculous. I can understand how putting up flags of only a few nations can be culturally exclusive but not how the American flag would offend anyone. This is like an American student studying abroad in France and being offended that there are only French flags. Of course there are issues that deserve attention but overprotecting students from any situation that might be offensive are bad for the students.

            Are Asian Americans just being too sensitive in regards to issues like being called the model minority?