Alessandro van den Brink | #FreakingOut over freaking out

Last week, I read an article by Scripps College student Sophie Mann who made the bold claim that feminists — and liberals in general — equate victimhood with status. Believe it or not, Mann makes the claim that students, particularly at her school, welcome racial, sexist or homophobic abuse simply because it gives them the attention that victims of injustice normally receive.

Her article specifically focuses on an incident that occurred recently at Scripps in which a Mexican-American student found that someone had written hashtag #Trump2016 on a whiteboard placed on the door of her room. The student in question immediately contacted the administration to inform them of what she perceived (rightfully so) as a racially-motivated attack, and proceeded to create a Facebook post informing her network about the incident. The student body president quickly sent out an email stating that the event was a “testament that racism continues to be an undeniable problem and alarming threat on our campuses,” which infuriated Mann, because apparently being upset about racism on campus is a waste of time.

Of course, the hashtag #Trump2016 is not inherently a racial slur or epithet. It is simply an endorsement of a certain presidential candidate whose name happens to be in the hashtag itself. But given how said candidate has spoken of Mexican immigrants and the anti-Mexican stance among a significant portion of his supporters, it was no coincidence that the student with the whiteboard was of Mexican heritage.

But surely whoever wrote hashtag #Trump2016 on the student’s whiteboard might have just been supporting a candidate that they are passionate about? Well, given that the student’s whiteboard was the only whiteboard in the dorm hall that was marked with this hashtag, it seems quite obvious that this was a direct message. Mann accuses the school of freaking out over “imaginary racism,” but how deeply in denial do you have to be to ignore the clear evidence that the message was meant to unsettle this student based on racial pretenses?

Mann’s brilliant solution to ending this debacle — erasing the hashtag off the whiteboard and move on. As if all racist speech will suddenly disappear from society if we simply ignore it! Mann thinks that the “overreaction” by the school — which included meetings conducted by resident advisor’s advising students what to do in the case of hateful language being found on whiteboards — constitutes “coddling of behavior,” as if the school shouldn’t care about the emotional wellbeing of its students.

Freedom of expression has been something of a hot-button topic on Penn’s campus over the past several weeks due to the protests at CIA Director John Brennan’s talk two weeks ago, but it should be quite clear that there is nothing intellectual about writing “#Trump2016” on someone’s door. This wasn’t intended to stir meaningful conversation; this was textbook bullying.

If this type of situation were to happen at Penn, I would hope that both the student body and the administration would immediately condemn this act of racism. Bullying in any form, be it through verbal or physical abuse, has no place in any community, and too often we forget that being in a university together makes us part of a community.

When one individual is harassed by another, it creates an environment in which it is much more difficult for the harassed student to fully appreciate a university. We should strive to push each other intellectually and make ourselves uncomfortable with ideology or opinions that we may not agree with or appreciate, but once those opinions are used to directly marginalize someone in our community, it simply creates unnecessary conflict.

In situations like this, the solution isn’t to punish the individual who wrote hashtag #Trump2016 or to impose restrictions on speech. This only intensifies the ire of those who may harbor discriminatory beliefs and it is fundamentally against our constitutional right to free speech. Instead, our school, and any other university that holds these beliefs, should make its voice heard on racist, sexist or homophobic incidents and start the conversations necessary to both inform ourselves about discrimination and figure out solutions for ending it.

Mann’s completely unsubstantiated claim that those in a school like Scripps would rather soak in the victimhood of being racially harassed than do anything about it is absurd and offensive to those who have been victims. They simply wish to spread awareness of discrimination in the community and they are not “coddled” if, God forbid, the school decides to stand up with them against this discrimination.

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