Week 7 - Eric Gip

Eric Gip

Week 7

11/5/17

Trigger warnings

            While I do believe that some words are just completely off limits and we should try our best to avoid triggering someone, I also believe we are taking trigger warnings too seriously and allowing the term “microaggression” to have such a broad description and therefore power.

To make sure no one is getting triggered is to be politically correct – to essentially use euphemisms and hide the fact that the world has its ugly parts. In this politically correct movement, more and more of us angsty young adults are overly trying to avoid these trigger warnings to mostly feed their own self-consciousness and feel like they’re actually doing something progressive.

The truth is you can’t tell someone what they are and aren’t offended by, it’s up to the individual. By being overly protective and trying to make our campuses into extreme “safe spaces” we are unintentionally negatively affecting our education among many, many other things. During my senior year of high school my literature class was assigned a reading of Black Boy, a memoir of Richard Wright telling his story of being an African American growing up in the Jim Crow south of 1920. Most of the clsss was Asian American and only one African American student, the Asian American parents were uncomfortable with the amount of times the N word was used while the African American had no issues with it at all.

Ultimately, the book was pulled from our curriculum. Instead of reading and understanding the mind of an African American at the height of racism, we just called it a victory for acting like the N word never existed. 

Question: Is it possible to challenge the idea of being overly sensitive with politcally correctness without seeming like a jerk?