The N-word of the Narcissus

So, an African-American high-school security guard was fired from his job for using the “N-word”.  The school has a “zero tolerance policy”, and the principal said, “Regardless of context or circumstance, racial slurs are not acceptable in our schools.”  Therein lies the problem, of course. Context matters.

The context in this case was that the guard, Marlon Anderson, had been called to help remove a disruptive student (who is also African-American) from the property because he was threatening the life of the assistant principal. During the episode, the student called Anderson the “n-word” over and over, and Anderson finally replied, “Do not call me that name. I’m not your [N-word]. Do not call me that.”

Oops. He said it. Everyone heard him use the word. Fired. Zero tolerance.

Happily, I guess, Anderson got his job back five days later after a thousand people protested the absurd situation, including all the students at the school who staged a walk-out over it. Policy and enforcement seem to be determined by who vilifies the principal soonest and loudest. That’s just how things work in the internet age.

I don’t know why, but this article in the Harvard Crimson about a DACA protest made me think of the fired guard. I guess because they’re both examples of how “the left” makes an easy target of itself for Trump and Trumpism.

At Harvard, there was a demonstration and walk-out ahead of the Supreme Court decision on DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), the program that allows people who were brought here illegally as kids to stay and work. Trump is against it, of course, as it is an Obama-era policy. Nuf ced.

But the protest turned from the DACA issue to an attack on the several Asian American student organizations that didn’t join the 21 campus organizations co-sponsoring the walk-out.  An open letter addressed to “The Asian American Community” condemning this inaction has been signed by 400 people at Harvard and elsewhere.  In other words, the whole thing swiftly morphed into the typical kind of thought-policing and anti-free-speech posturing that the student left is often accused of, and, in doing so, overshadowed and diminished the effectiveness of the DACA protest itself.

It’s crazy. It’s more important for these kids to attack and denigrate any of their peers who might not agree with them 100% on everything than it is for them to make their points on DACA.

And the letter itself contained several phrases that just jumped out at me as perfect fuel for the Trump attack machine. The first two are new (to me) elements of the lexicon of the left.

The protest was organized, in part, by the “Harvard Asian American Womxn’s Association”.  Hmmm.  I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that we need the term “womxn” because the term “womyn” (which we needed to get out from under the “men” thing) was not trans-inclusive?  Anyway, I hadn’t received the memo about this change. Now I know.

And then there is this phrase of castigation:  “You have outed yourselves as non-safe spaces for undocu+ people within the Asian American community”.  Huh?  “Undocu+”?  I have no idea why we need this term. Could it be that we just really want to avoid actually printing out the next three letters, “men”, that would be contained in the word “undocumented”?  If so, wow.

My problem with these terms is that if you’re going to change the “correct” vocabulary every week, you really need to be careful about calling anyone racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. the following week if they mistakenly use the now-incorrect language. You have to give us a fighting chance to get “woke”.

Last, and most preposterously, there is this:  “It is literally impossible to live as a person of color on the stolen land that is the United States without either being political or being politically instrumentalized by oppressive structures.”

Holy shit. Literally impossible. I’m not sure what the proposed solution to the “stolen land” conundrum might be, though clearly Harvard will need to be relocated at some point.  And I’m wondering if the problem of land-stealing oppressors also applies to Canada? Australia?  I already know their answer for Israel.  And what if you could argue that the land-stealers themselves were People of Color, as you might in the case of Brazil or even Pakistan? Are they oppressors as well, or are we giving them a pass under the only-white-people-can-be-oppressors rule?  Complicated.

Anyway, you all know how I feel about Trump, and if you don’t, just glance at any of these 107 articles. For a long time, I was just baffled at how 60 million people could be so loyal to him, until I realized it wasn’t love of Trump but rather hatred of “liberals” that animated them.

Examples like the ones cited today bring the issue into sharper focus for me, and tend to drain the last few drops of hope that I still had that, in 2020, we might be able to correct the disastrous course we have set ourselves on with this man.

Four More Years!