(Disclaimer: The following column may trigger microaggression reactions among readers. Consider yourself warned.)
The biggest and most shocking news story of the week may have been written and published by the Atlantic magazine – a lengthy investigation into how America’s college campuses have become a battleground over the offensiveness of everyday words.
“A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense,” as the article explained.
My favorite example is this one: Harvard Law students asked their professors not to teach rape law because of the distress it might cause them.
What’s this all about? What is the motivation or psychology or mental illness behind this newspeak?
Prepare yourself. It’s a war on what are being called “microaggressions” – “small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless,” as the Atlantic put it.
More examples?
- By the guidelines on some campuses, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian-American or Hispanic-American the simple question: “Where were you born?” Why? Because it implies the questionee is not a real American. But how does one determine if he or she is an American? It’s none of your business, presumably just as it is none of the government’s business these days.
- Microaggressions become a really big deal to the sensitive souls on campus when they allegedly trigger recurrences of past trauma. That’s why F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” can’t really be required reading anymore – only suggested. The “misogyny” and “physical abuse” portrayed in the novel might bring back bad memories for students who have been so victimized themselves. And that would be, well, bad.
Sometimes even those attempting to spread awareness of the extreme and dire peril of microaggressions actually become unwitting purveyors of the dread attacks.
Take, for example, what happened when the Asian American Student Association at Brandeis University produced a display on the insidiousness of microaggressions. Some of the examples used were:
- “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?”
- “I’m colorblind! I don’t see race.”
The result? Asian-American students not a part of the association took offense, saying the display itself was a microaggression. The group took down the display and apologized to anyone and everyone who was “triggered or hurt by the content of the microaggressions.”
Holy cow! (Whoops – is that phrase a microaggression against Hindus?) I don’t even know what to say. What planet are these people living on? Don’t they have anything more important to worry about? God forbid they should hear any speech given by Donald Trump! Some of these people might go into seizures.
This strikes me as some kind of mass delusion or hysteria. These poor children are being indoctrinated into a cult-like ideology that will not serve them well in the real world. Uh-uh.
And notice how the sensitivity police are only concerned about certain types of insults – affecting certain “protected” classes.
There are zero examples, for instance, of microaggressions or macroaggressions on campus against those who hold Christian or Jewish religious convictions. Muslim? Yes. Christian or Jewish? No.
Believe me, there’s a war on America’s college and university campuses being waged against biblical faith and morality. So where are the protections and sensitivities toward those victims who are flat-out instructed to check their beliefs in the Bible at the classroom door?
Trump and Dr. Ben Carson are so right when they say America is facing serious challenges – even existential ones – and that we, as a nation, don’t have time for this kind of political correctness any longer, if we ever did.
Academia is the breeding ground of this kind of insanity. It’s the national laboratory for social re-engineering. And now the lab rats are running the asylum.
Media wishing to interview Joseph Farah, please contact [email protected].
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