The latest movement sweeping across universities is the call for “safe spaces,” or areas devoid of discrimination against racial and gender minorities. There is no doubt that setting up these institutions are important, but how will they effectively deal with a bigoted asshole like me?
For example, safe spaces are great places for women to get mutual support and safely discuss the biases, cat-calling, and abuse they see in the world every day. Few would argue against the benefits of such an environment. But here’s the problem: can these women actually find the safety they desire when I, a chauvinist pig who my own mother calls a “misogynist piece of human excrement,” constantly offends and insults woman on campus at all hours of the day? I’m positive that feminist safe-space supporters find it nearly impossible to resolve the issues that this jerkoff shithead (again, myself) propose.
People of color in this country face terrible inequality, whether it relates to job opportunities, treatment from law enforcement, or outcomes in the judicial process. But I wonder, how can they ever achieve their goals while sharing the world with an ignorant douchebag such as myself? I constantly post #AllLivesMatter on my Facebook wall in a personal vendetta to keep myself as uninvolved as possible in issues of inequality. Considering the fact that my whiteness and male privilege will award me unprecedented power in the western world, how can minorities hope to topple a system controlled by a backward bag of dicks like me?
I really do find it important for all diverse groups at Cornell, and in this country, to have a safe haven against the offensive rhetoric their people encounter. But, I can only imagine the difficulty of counteracting the damage I cause when I run across Ho Plaza yelling homophobic slurs into a megaphone, wearing a shirt with anti-Semitic propaganda, and carrying posters with outrageously hateful depictions of the prophet Mohammed. I guess only time will tell how the university resolves the innumerable damages my bigoted, shameful, asswipe of a personality has inflicted.
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