The Coddling Of The American Mind (Trigger Warning Article In The Atlantic...)

Edina, huh?

The town so white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant that it’s school mascot is a fucking hornet.

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/education/2018/03/09/oconomowoc-schools-impose-limits-privilege-discussions-after-parents-complain/407222002/

meanwhile in wisconsin

might be hope for the states yet

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/645/my-effing-first-amendment

Bari Weiss just won a 0,000 prize for good writing https://t.co/Q3rCrMpwA8 pic.twitter.com/nWPQXSmQZM

— Hamilton Nolan (@hamiltonnolan) July 18, 2018

Remembering this classic from the @CillizzaCNN AMA pic.twitter.com/9XXCyAGIIU

— noah ☭ (@voidsrus) July 18, 2018

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jul/26/the-free-speech-panic-censorship-how-the-right-concocted-a-crisis

https://slate.com/technology/2019/07/trigger-warnings-research-shows-they-dont-work-might-hurt.html

Feeling very triggered by those findings tbrr.

The methods are the same as the 2018 paper, but with a pool of 451 participants who had experienced trauma. (A consent form required for ethical purposes did require that participants acknowledge that they would be reading emotional material, Jones told me, which is sort of a trigger warning all on its own but a required step of the process).

hmmm, seems like that might potentially stack the pool of people involved.

Sarah Silverman aka the cancelled:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/aug/12/sarah-silverman-fired-from-film-blackface-photo

https://gen.medium.com/my-semester-with-the-snowflakes-888285f0e662

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/08/professor-suspended-saying-chinese-word-sounds-english-slur

Here's the issue:

The students said some of them had voiced their concern to Patton during his lecture, but that he’d used the word in following class sections anyway.

He wasn't fired, he was just taken off this class. Which seems entirely sensible if he's going to be so insensitive to the concerns of his students.

k

“There are over 10,000 characters in the Chinese written language and to use this phrase, a clear synonym with this derogatory N-Word term, is hurtful and unacceptable to our USC Marshall community.

what exactly is "that that that" a synonym for?

Yeah I’m kinda bothered by the fact that master’s candidates don’t understand the definition of synonym

presumably they meant "homophone"? but yeah

But to the admin this is certainly a clear case of “you know what we mean” with a fairly straightforward exit strategy

Wait till they find out the Spanish word for 'black'.

uggggggghhh when my office was also the parent center, I sat in on a lot of conversations in Chinese and that word showed up all the time, extremely repetitively, like regularly used 5 or 6 times in succession. The professor is under pressure to dance the correct steps around his students' concerns, but if they were studying or speaking Chinese they would definitely be exposed to it regularly. And then what are you going to do, tell a language speaker that their language is wrong and offensive to you? It's nonsensical.

It’s like the “like” of Chinese.

They also said they’d reached out to fellow Chinese students, who “confirmed that the pronunciation of this word is much different than what Professor Patton described in class. The word is most commonly used with a pause in between both syllables.”

Maybe to Chinese speakers the pause is more present, but I couldn't hear it.

Anyway. The fact that this was one lesson in a Communications class means he probably could have chosen other examples.

Russell Peters on the matter: https://youtu.be/BrsWp07BwVk

Anyway, just to be 100% clear: policing other languages over a coincidence is anglo-imperialist navel-gazing.

Idk this story seems like bullshit tbh.

As in it never happened or…?

Yeah I’m kinda bothered by the fact that master’s candidates don’t understand the definition of synonym

― sound of scampo talk to me (El Tomboto), Monday, October 12, 2020 10:00 AM (fifty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Seriously. Maybe learn how your own language works before you start throwing shade on other tongues, my friends.

I don’t think the students are “policing other languages,” they’re policing the professor’s choice of an example.

Same thing as far as I'm concerned. If it's not an English word, you don't treat it like English, period. Why should you leave out one of the most spoken languages in the world from the pool of relevant examples in the context of a Communications class?

As in it never happened or…?

It has been reported by BBC and CNN.

"There are over 10,000 characters in the Chinese written language"

Is the suggestion here that any other Chinese word would have been an equally suitable example?

Yes, just like you can readily replace 'like' with 'sesquipedalian'.

It's reasonable to think, based on this report, that the black students were kind of silly for taking offence - while at the same time thinking that this white "communications expert" was a dickhead for ignoring them, and that the students of that class deserve to have someone else teach them who isn't going to minimize, belittle, or ignore them, or even indeed call them navel-gazing anglo-imperialists.

No, it isn't reasonable, it's racist towards Chinese people.

still mostly bothered that students at one of the top 20 business schools in the world are taking a graduate level communications course and can’t use “synonym” correctly in a letter that apparently several of them all read and agreed on

Where are you getting the idea he minimized or belittled the students? The timeline is very unclear from the article, but given how short the course was, it seems like they went this route pretty quickly:

"So they wrote a letter to the dean of the Marshall School of Business, Geoffrey Garrett, among others, describing Patton as insensitive and incapable of teaching the three-week intensive communications course."

I expect we'll see more of this kind of miscommunication/misunderstanding escalating rapidly up the upper admin with universities being online. Or at least I'd like to think this wouldn't have happened in the exact same way if the students were with in the classroom with the professor. It feels like some of the paranoia and distrust of being online leaking into new formats (e.g., the "edited lectures" speculation).

Patton said he emailed the entire program to apologize and apologized again the next morning.

Too many (Western) native English speakers don't quite understand how overbearing their linguistic and cultural domination can be sometimes, which I suppose is normal. I'm just gonna bail out of this conversation.

Pom, to be fair, the homophone in question has an incredibly awful history, especially in the US, where the class was being taught.

It's reasonable to think, based on this report, that the black students were kind of silly for taking offence - while at the same time thinking that this white "communications expert" was a dickhead for ignoring them, and that the students of that class deserve to have someone else teach them who isn't going to minimize, belittle, or ignore them, or even indeed call them navel-gazing anglo-imperialists.

Have you ever been to China? It is startling how much they say ne ga all the time in conversation.

please pretend they don't

From the CNN report fwiw:

"All I can say is, the professor's pronunciation of the Chinese phrase "neige" was accurate, and his use of it as an example of filler language was linguistically appropriate. It's a *very* common phrase," tweeted Yale law professor Taisu Zhang, who has previously taught in Hong Kong and China.

The Black China Caucus, an American organization that describes itself as "amplifying Black voices in the China space," also defended Patton on Twitter.
"The BCC is shocked by how USC mishandled this situation," the organization posted. "Not only would a quick Mandarin lesson reveal that "nèi ge" is a common pronoun, but USC's reaction cheapens and degrades substantive conversations surrounding real (diversity, equity and inclusion) challenges on college campuses!"

A petition sent to Dean Garrett and other USC leadership, which was shared with CNN, was signed by nearly 100 alumni of USC Marshall expressing support for Patton -- the majority of whom are from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other Chinese-speaking regions.
"We represent more than a dozen nationalities and ethnicities and support the global inclusiveness Professor Patton brings to the classroom," said the alumni petition.
"Most of us are Chinese, some ethnically, some by nationality, and many others have spent extensive time in China. Most of us live in China. We unanimously recognize Prof Patton's use of 'na ge' as an accurate rendition of common Chinese use, and an entirely appropriate and quite effective illustration of the use of pauses."

tbh I think my main issue here is tactical as this story is what the wet dreams of extremely selective right-wing free speech warriors are made of, while in the meantime this pitched effort to protect and encourage racism moves forward: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/10/07/colleges-cancel-diversity-programs-response-trump-order

Everyone giggling about this and showing themselves really didn’t read the original piece now did they?

They also said they’d reached out to fellow Chinese students, who “confirmed that the pronunciation of this word is much different than what Professor Patton described in class. The word is most commonly used with a pause in between both syllables.”

The Yale law professor in article Sund4r shared disputes that it was pronounced wrong, though I don't know if he or the others cited actually heard him speak or is basing it on how it was written in the article.

a professor has shot them down condescendingly in front of their peers

this isn't in the article either...

I did read that piece, but I've seen some inconsistent reporting, because other sources seem to be saying that his pronunciation was not incorrect.

also it doesn't seem like the professor is trying to make himself a martyr over this? He's apologised repeatedly