While the world continues to reel from terrorist attack after terrorist attack, Americans can take comfort that our next generation of graduates, emerging from colleges and universities across the country, is fully equipped to handle adult responsibilities and mature leadership.
Uh huh.
Consider the latest examples of “microaggressions” recently posted on a University of North Carolina employee forum. The link (which has since been removed) included a helpful chart that listed various scenarios and how they could be interpreted through the lens of microaggression.
The list instructed us about “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial, gender, sexual orientation and religious slights and insults to the target person or group.”
For example, “Having an office dress code that applies to men and women differently” is wrong because it “assumes that your staff fits into one of two gender categories.” Suggesting a round of golf assumes “employees have the financial resources/exposure to a fairly expensive and inaccessible sport.” Asking an honoree to “stand and be recognized” for an award assumes “everyone is able in this way and ignores the diversity of ability in the space.”
Additionally, stating “I love your shoes!” when “said to a woman in leadership during a Q & A after a speech” is incorrect because it states, “I notice how you look and dress more than I value your intellectual contributions. How you look is really important.”
The specificity of this last example leads me to suspect this exact scenario happened to the post’s author, Katie Turner, whose qualifications purportedly include a master’s degree in Women’s Studies and a certificate in Gender and International Development from the University of Florida.
However Ms. Turner’s information appears to have been scrubbed from UNC’s website. In fact, the university has removed all mention of the forum’s post (darn those screen captures!) and – possibly because it received too many “macroaggressive” responses from alumni – hastily added a disclaimer: “The blog post you refer to was created by the Employee Forum, which does not speak for the University. The information in the post does not reflect University guidelines or policy. The Employee Forum piece was compiled from research and published scholarly works – which were annotated in the blog post – in response to Forum members’ interest about the topic of microaggressions.”
But while everyone had a good time poking fun at the post, UNC is by no means alone in its quest to sanitize everyone’s words, actions, behavior, dress and attitude. Last November Mizzou students were told to call the cops for “hurtful” words. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign claimed “walking into or sitting in a classroom full of white people is a microaggression in itself.” In January, Penn State asked students to report microaggressions to administrators. “No hurt feeling is too small, no slight too inconsequential, no unintentionally biased statement too unimportant. Administrators want to know it all,” students were assured.
I don’t know about you, but it gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling to know our nation will be safe from attack as we transition this snowflake generation into positions of leadership. I have no doubt those of certain politico-religious suasions are steeped with concern that they might cause offense with “daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities” as they mow down patrons in nightclubs or detonate explosives at airports.
Incidentally, these “safe spaces” – such as the ones provided at the prestigious Brown University – are “equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.”
Yes, really.
The question on everyone’s mind is, what happens to these snowflakes when they hit the brutal world of employment? What happens when safe spaces aren’t available and micro (and macro) aggression is everywhere?
As one example, some snowflake interns working for a professional company with a strict dress code behaved as they usually did in college, when they assume rules shouldn’t apply to them: They wrote a proposal requesting the dress code be changed to conform with the casual standards they preferred. The result? The whole group was fired by management.
“We were shocked,” wrote one of the snowflakes, seeking advice on how to handle this trauma. “The proposal was written professionally like examples I have learned about in school, and our arguments were thought out and well-reasoned. We weren’t even given a chance to discuss it. The worst part is that just before the meeting ended, one of the managers told us that the worker who was allowed to disobey the dress code was a former soldier who lost her leg and was therefore given permission to wear whatever kind of shoes she could walk in. You can’t even tell, and if we had known about this we would have factored it into our argument. … I have never had a job before (I’ve always focused on school), and I was hoping to gain some experience before I graduate next year. I feel my dismissal was unfair and would like to ask them to reconsider. …”
How a catastrophic war injury could be “factored” into the snowflake’s argument about loosening the dress code remains unspecified.
This incident could have taught those interns more than they learned during their entire college experience, but I doubt it stuck. Instead, I suspect they simply hurried back to their cookies, coloring books, bubbles and Play-Doh to recover.
Listen, all you university faculty: We’re facing a world unraveling. What we desperately need are new leaders who recognize the failure of the nanny state. Unfortunately, the youth of today can’t let go of its apron strings. A long time ago, we received some sage wisdom: “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.”
But don’t pay any attention to that advice. After all, it’s just a microaggression.
Media wishing to interview Patrice Lewis, please contact [email protected].
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