Unless you are scheduled to appear on a college campus, that is, for example, at Berkeley, to deliver a culinary-themed lecture on the best way to prepare an egg and ham quiche, Antifa thugs and Social Justice Warriors (thugs-in-training) are not likely to appear to riot, destroy or damage property, and physically assault anyone in protest of your presence. But then who knows what mildewed nihilism, undigested grunge, and ideological sewage pass for thought in the minds of “activists” anymore?
Also, remember that the original “triggered minds” also include Muslim minds, who are the paramount “victims” of micro-aggressions by Western culture, such as freedom of speech, imaginative images of Mohammad, hijab-less women and women in alluring garb, and blasphemous talk about Islam and Allah. Jihadists and Islamic activists are also nihilists, whether they wear $1,000 suits or jeans and T-shirts and flash knives or machetes.
The poster boy victims of micro-aggression:
Triggered Muslims, brothers in
Spirit of Antifa
Heather McDonald of the Manhattan Insitute, in her Wall Street Journal article of April, wrote:
Student thuggery against non-leftist viewpoints is in the news again. Agitators at Claremont McKenna College, Middlebury College, and the University of California’s Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses have used threats, brute force and sometimes criminal violence over the past two months in efforts to prevent Milo Yiannopoulos, Charles Murray, Ann Coulter and me from speaking. As commencement season approaches, expect “traumatized” students to try to disinvite any remotely conservative speaker, an effort already under way at Notre Dame with regard to Vice President Mike Pence.
And then there is Pomana College, whose sociology students are demanding the firing of a white professor who teaches “black communities.” Addressed to the school’s sociology department, the dean, and the college president, it complained – nay – demanded the immediate firing (or not hiring) of Alice Goffman. The brave students ended their demand:
(128 names redacted for individual safety in recognition of the violence inflicted on communities of color by various publications, namely [and apparently solely] by the Claremont Independent) (square brackets mine)
Reviewing her subject of “black communities,” one is at a loss to understand why the students would object to her Pomana appointment. She is of the Left, as “her PhD dissertation on the impact of mass incarceration and policing on low-income African-American urban communities… when she immersed herself in a disadvantaged neighborhood of Philadelphia with African-American young men who were subject to a high level of surveillance and police activity….” She is a product of that bastion of Progressive causes, the University of Wisconsin.
Jonathan Marks agrees with my assessment of Goffman his Commentary article of April 24th, “New Rule: White Women Should Not Study Black Communities.”
Alice Goffman, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, is a controversial scholar. Her book, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City is based on Goffman’s six year immersion in a black neighborhood in West Philadelphia.
The book was published in 2014 to wide acclaim. But it soon attracted critics, including the estimable Steven Lubet, who thinks that Goffman embellished her experiences, repeated as fact things she had heard from her subjects though they were unlikely to have been true, and, most sensationally, became so caught up in the lives of the people she was writing about that she could have been charged with conspiracy to commit murder under Pennsylvania law. Goffman replies here, and Lubet takes up part of Goffman’s reply here. Suffice it to say that there is enough to the controversy to make it unsurprising that when Goffman’s hire as McConnell Visiting Professor of Sociology at Pomona College was announced, some people were disappointed.
