The bad news: horribly racist incidents.
…at issue is the school administration’s handling of several racist incidents that occurred this fall. In September, Peyton Head, a senior and the president of Missouri Students Association, said he was called racial slurs as he walked near campus.
“I really just want to know why my simple existence is such a threat to society,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
That incident was followed by one on October 5 when members of the Legion of Black Collegians were called the N-word while rehearsing for homecoming festivities. Three weeks later, on October 24, a swastika was drawn with human feces at a university residence hall.
The good news: students and faculty reacted vigorously. Boy, did they react. Students protested; one went on a hunger strike. The student athletes refused to perform until action was taken, and the coach actually supported them, and said they were excused from practice. Faculty supported a strike and student walkout.
Somebody is finally taking the issue seriously.
And the really amazing news: it all worked, and university president Tim Wolfe has resigned. So it only takes a couple of months of strong protests and a threat to the football season to achieve victory.
The University of Iowa has some serious dissatisfaction with their recently appointed president. Maybe they need to get the support of the football team to get rid of the rascal.
We’ve been talking about this a bit in the racism thread. I, frankly, wasn’t aware of the involvement of faculty (though I’m not surprised) because I heard about it first when a bit football (handegg, not soccer) fan friend of mine wanted me to read an article on the Patriots and I noticed a link on the sports site to a story about racism at UofM in which I was a bit more interested.
So I’m glad that there’s more to this than the actions of the football team and a single graduate student (whom I misinterpreted to be on the team, at first), but really: I think the threat to the football season really was crucial. There were lots of statements and protests and actions over the years. Black football players went on strike as of Saturday night after this weekend’s game. On Sunday the coach immediately canceled all practices to prevent the black students getting in scholarship trouble for non-performance, then the whole team and all the coaches came together with the black students to support the black students’ efforts to oust Wolfe. Literally less than 24 hours after the football team announced “no more football til the university president is gone”, the university president was gone.
Go faculty. Go students. Keep kicking ass in every way you know how. But the biggest expression of anti-racist power in this story was clearly the threat to boycott football. Given how football culture is so powerful in the South and in so many locales where racism is as naked and unapologetic as it gets in the US, I cherish with glee the image of despondent, down-on-their-luck Tim Wolfes holding up signs:
You shouldn’t be surprised to hear that the black players involved in the protest are being called “thugs” in the finer web pages of the RWNJ blogsphere and that they shouldn’t have so much power.
@Larry:
No. Not surprised at all. And of course the bread bakers and circus performers shouldn’t have any power. The whole point of handing out bread and staging a circus is for the elites to control the plebes, not for the plebes to gain a lever of power to shift the elites!
There’s a long way to go from here, but it’s always good to have these tangible successes to keep a movement going.
I’m sure that the fact that the university would have been out $750,000 if they hadn’t played next Saturday had absolutely nothing to do with his decision….
But anyway, this is a good first step, but this whole situation is just another reminder of how deeply embedded racism is in the US.
The interesting part of all this for me is – why do football players feel “marginalised”? They are among the most privileged classes in all of America, and they are THE most privileged class on college campuses. They have free college tuition, fame, money (under the table of course), travel, and quite often preferential treatment in their classes as well (i.e. University of North Carolina). Jameis Winston’s privilege got him out of a rape charge, for example, and he’s now the starting quarterback for Tampa Bay. And their voices clearly are not silenced, they just sacked the University’s President after all.
Spoken like somebody who is part of the problem, and not part of the solution. Racism won’t go away if you pretend it doesn’t exist, and it is delusional to believe that. Ending racism requires its acknowledgement as a problem, and that solutions must be in place until the results are equal at the end of the day. We have a long, long way to go before that is reality.
Nerd, you’ve falsely attacked me on a couple occasions now. I did not suggest that racism doesn’t exist, I simply marvelled at the idea of exceedingly privileged people feeling like they are “marginalised.” That’s not my word, that’s how the 32 players from the Missouri football team described it. If you’d like to debate the notion that football players are the most privileged class on a university campus – the point of my comment – I’ll all ears. Until then, might I suggest you put away the keyboard until you can make a reasoned argument.
@Penny L:
Football players in major programs are greatly privileged compared to their peers.
However, the privilege exists because it serves the interests of the truly powerful. The powerful wanted FSU’s program to continue, to be successful, to entertain, to make money. Therefore, they protected JW so that he could continue to fulfill his role.
However, he certainly does have a role and is expected to know its limits: he didn’t get money from ticket sales or television revenue when he played college games. He worked his ass off in a way and on a schedule that made it **more** difficult to get an education, not less. Whether he actually got one at all, of course, is more on him than on the institution, but the quality of one, and the barriers to focusing on education imposed upon football players – that’s on the institutions.
In other words, he’s given a scholarship, but then placed in a situation where it’s very difficult to take its full advantage.
Moreover, the scholarship itself is the primary mechanism of control. At Mizzou, the black student football-players went on a football strike. Fair enough.
But under the terms of their scholarships they could be thrown off the team and had their scholarships rescinded for unexcused absences from football activities – which include not only practices, but media appearances and anything else a coach wants to require.
This is why the head coach’s actions are so important. He could have announced that he wouldn’t punish the players. However, if the school fired him, the replacement coach could still have punished the players for missing practices, etc.
So instead, the coach canceled practices, and was willing to officially forfeit any games, should the strike have lasted long enough. Thus, even if he was fired in favor of a coach cozier with the power structure, the striking students would not, actually, have missed any football activities and thus the incoming coach would have no power to inflict scholarship consequences.
This was a very savvy move by the coach, but the students were willing to face the consequences even before they knew the coach would back them.
The long and short of it: Penny L, you don’t understand confluence (or intersectionality). These people are forced to work – hard. They’re prevented from forming a union or doing other labor organizing. If they do things informally without structures like unions, the university has an incredible amount of discretion to punish discretions lightly, severely, relatively justly, or not at all, whatever will benefit the university (not the student). Some universities or coaches may not always use that discretion in horrifyingly abusive ways, but the power is always there.
At the end of the day, in exchange for their work others get ridiculously rich while they get a salary only good for spending at the company store, and the company sets conditions to make sure you don’t get full value from what you buy.
Football players are oppressed as workers. But that doesn’t mean that the people making the most money for the Company can’t get favors from the Company Man. Nor does it mean that sexism stops operating – nor racism.
Social power is multi-faceted, and the speech that has the power to bring down a university president is effectively punishable by expulsion at the merest whim of the coach to whom the students answer. It was lucky that the students’ coach wasn’t Wolfe’s sycophant, and wasn’t a racist unsympathetic to their efforts to create change. But that doesn’t mean that the coach didn’t have the power to effectively expel them for their “disruption” to the team. The coach chose not to use it is all.
Try reading up on intersectionality, and I’ll try to post something on confluence soon. I’ve written about it before, however, on pharyngula. Try googling
site:freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula "crip dyke" confluence1. Just because you are privileged does not mean you can not also be marginalized in at least some ways. You need simply to compare how white college football players are treated compared to black football players to see this.
2. These football players are not protesting entirely for their own behalf. (I do not recall if any of the racism incidents were even targeted to the football players specifically) They are protesting as members of, and on behalf of, a larger group to which they have loyalty and affiliation. They happen to be among the most privileged members of that group, but that does not mean that the group as a whole is not marginalized, and that they do not experience that marginalization as a result of being members of that group.
3. Yes, these football players have privilege and power, moreso than many others. And they have chosen to USE that privilege and power in a constructive, rather than a destructive, way. And this is a good thing which should be celebrated. Being privileged doesn’t mean one can’t have a social conscience.
On football players and privilege. In some ways, yes they are privileged but it’s privilege in so far as it helps the elites running the university. This is why a sexual assault by a student athlete will be covered up (can’t lose a player and a game over something like that) – the player on the field makes $ for the program, and the program won’t have someone *else* take a player off the field. They will, however, remove a player who is rocking the boat, and that could have happened here if the coaches had not supported the players. It’s why they don’t want to look at student athletes as employees. Once they did that, they’d have to explain how they were paid so low proportional to the overall earnings. And once student athletes are simply employees with no pretense of student status, ‘college football’ would become a farce in terms of its amateur status in an obvious way, and could lose popularity.
And on privilege, I’d be kind of interested in seeing the long term prospects of college football players. Chances are many of them aren’t getting that great an education, and that the demands of football mean they won’t likely have time for say, studying a demanding STEM field that might be a more likely ticket to higher lifetime earnings and economic security.
One question for those who have been following the situation closer than I have. Is there a bigger historical context to this? I am aware that there have been several documented incidents of racism over the past few months and that Tim Wolfe has done little about them. However, it seems to me that there is more to this story than what has happened over the past few months. Does the university have a history of such incidents going much further back?
– RM
Idjit, they are still black and not privileged like anybody white, cis, religious, etc. The fact that YOU think their privileges matches or even comes close to mine as an old white cis educated male is utterly and totally delusional. You are one asshole troll without any redeeming EVIDENCE, as you never link to support. All you have in this case is trying to blame the victims. Typical of RW fuckwits.
X-Posted from the racism thread-
Why the University of Missouri football boycott is the biggest American protest of the 21st century:
Nerd @13:
Can you dial it down a little bit? I don’t think Penny L is a troll. I think they’re displaying a good deal of ignorance about intersectionality, but that in itself does not mark them as a troll. I get where you’re coming from, but I think your approach and your type of criticism needs to be tweaked.
Clenched tentacle salute Tony.
Okay, I can go away for a day or so, and allow Penny L to make their case without hyperbole….
This is what I’ve been saying since I first read about it – though I admit I didn’t think of the Neo-in-the-hallway metaphor, which is amazingly apt. This is why I’m so emotional about the whole thing.
=====
@Tony, thanks for the comment to Nerd, and Nerd thanks for listening.
intersectionality isn’t just hard to grasp for some people, for those who’ve built their ethics on existentialism (as many 2nd wave feminists have) intersectionality challenges some of the foundations on which their ethics are built. It can take time to really integrate the idea that oppressed/privileged isn’t binary and social power is analog.
Hey now, whoa. As an alum, I am as disgusted with the selection process and appointment of the new president as anyone else. But the Hawks are currently 9-0, the players can protest after the season.
Penny L @6,
Those who attend university on scholarship are hardly getting “free college tuition.” It’s not a free handout. They have to work hard to earn that scholarship be it through academics, sports, music, etc. A tiny fraction of any of them will actually achieve any sort of fame. Only around 1.6% of college football players will make it to the NFL and among those the average length of their pro career is less than 5 years (source). So they aren’t really so privileged as you imagine.
Furthermore as others have pointed out folks can be priviledged in one respect (on one axis) while being oppressed and marginalized in other respects. That’s what intersectionality is about.
Lastly the idea that they aren’t really being silenced because they managed to get this person to resign… Well with respect that just seems like sloppy reasoning. If they legitimately had a voice the university would have responded in a positive way long ago without any hunger strikes or national headlines or football boycotts. The fact that it took so much effort and so much agitating in order to effect simple change is telling. Suggesting they aren’t silenced because they managed to effect change is kind of like suggesting that slaves weren’t really oppressed because they sometimes managed to rise up and revolt against their slave masters.
Nerd of Redhead,
One thing to keep in mind is that your wisdom and your mastery of these topics is the product of privilege. Privilege that others may not enjoy. For example you are clearly very well educated and well read. You’ve obviously been exposed to good solid information and fruitful discussions and arguments over the years. You are very well versed in the application of logic and reason and the principles of science and skepticism. Without which you almost certainly would not have the same level of understanding that you have now.
Please keep in mind that others might not have had the same benefits. Sure some of them are just trolling but some of them are probably well meaning and decent people who just haven’t had the opportunity to acquire the kind of deep knowledge and wisdom you have.
To automatically assume they are trolling or they are idjit fuckwits is to fail to recognize the potential power and privilege differential here. Maybe try thinking of yourself as the teacher and new commenters your students. That’s how we see you anyway. There’s no way a student could be expected to understand the topics as well as the teacher. Not without opportunity for proper instruction at least.
Just our two cents FWIW.
We Are Plethora @20:
Case in point: I am a black, gay, atheist, cisgender, able-bodied, neurotypical male. So I am privileged along 4 axes at the same time that I lack privilege along 3 others.
Nerd – take a note, this is how to argue.
I don’t agree with your reasoning – let me explain.
First of all, it is not possible for football players to be simultaneously “controlled” by the “truly powerful” and be “Neo-in-the-hallway.” It’s either one or the other, and I agree that based on today’s developments it appears to be the latter.
Secondly, an argument can be made that football players are paid. The University of Missouri for 2015-2016 costs, for a non-resident, over $40,000 (http://admissions.missouri.edu/costs-and-aid/costs/index.php). That is just $10,000 per year less than the median household income in the United States (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States#Median_inflation-adjusted_.28.22real.22.29_household_income). By this standard, football players are being paid handsomely. By another standard – how much the football program brings in to the university, for example – some of them might be underpaid. But make no mistake, they are compensated for their work.
There is no “control” in this arrangement. The university does not compel them to accept a football scholarship, nor could they. They are free not to accept the scholarship or to drop it at any time. Any “control”, in the form of practices or media appearances can be seen as simply terms of employment, and there are a million high school football players who would jump at the chance earn a scholarship to play for a Division I program despite these forms of “control”.
I do agree that modern football programs place less of an emphasis on academics, but given the economic advantages of a college degree (compared to those without a degree) it is in a players best interest to complete their coursework and every major football program in the country, as I understand it, tries to instil this idea in their players.
You appear to be arguing for an end to college sports – or at the very least college football. And I don’t disagree with you. The NFL is very deliberately using college football programs as their own unpaid farm teams (http://operations.nfl.com/the-players/the-nfl-draft/the-rules-of-the-draft/).
I wouldn’t mind seeing a farm system that is set up like Major League Baseball or even the NBA where players can be drafted out of high school and their value/potential value is market based. There would be much less of an opportunity for “control” as you describe it.
I am proud that my daughter has been involved in the protests on the Iowa campus. If I had time I would go downtown and join in too. But I agree with Electric #19. At 9 and 0 I will excuse the football players for now.
Class is weird, b/c class is supposed to be a combo of where you came from and where you are. I’ve very much middle to upper-middle class in where I came from & childhood cultural opportunities. Likewise with speaking style and education. But disability, citizenship/work permit and other factors have kept me poor for a decade or longer.
I would always say I do have middle class privilege, and I certainly have an opportunity to make good money after school. But currently I’m both poor AND debt laden – a horrifying situation, just not one that directly implicates class oppression.
As an atheist in SW Canada, I face no particular immediate consequences of oppression – though I am conscious it constrains my choices (such as, in moving elsewhere). But to be perfectly honest, since people would notice that I’m trans or queer before noticing that I’m atheistic, and since the restraints are not any more limiting than those imposed by queer oppression or trans oppression or ableism, religious oppression effectively disappears for me (this is one possible outcome of intersectionality, and in my case a welcome relief – I don’t need yet another cause for concern).
My Jewish background is somewhat similar in net effect to atheism…but not quite. I actually really would like to do some things that commemorate holidays or events, and that’s made more complicated by the privilege given to Christianity and Christians in Canada. I don’t really want to talk about that much, but religious oppression does have effects on me here – not the effects it might if I were an Orthodox Jew living in liberal SW BC, but it still affects me in ways I wish it didn’t.
====
Other aspects of my identity in relationship to axes of social power and oppression have effects more similar to what one might expect, but even these, I think, should show something about how a binary view of social power is a tad bit ridiculous.
@#19, Electric Shaman
Because nothing spells “effective protest” like waiting until the protestors have no leverage and no way to get media attention, amirite?
Of course you can. In fact the whole point of the next two movies in that trilogy of movies was that Neo still WAS controlled by the truly powerful even after his “in-the-hallway” moment.
@ rgmani
9 November 2015 at 4:34 pm
Yes. Were I to be snide I’d say it went back to prior the US civil war, but I won’t do that. In the more recent past several years there have been a number of events. The one that primarily come to mind was vandalism of the Black Culture Center (which was handled seriously by the police from what I recall). I think more the problem in general recently has been the administration’s flippant and indifferent stance towards not only the racism, but the general well being and desires of the students and academic community in general. It should also be pointed out that while two individuals have resigned, the problems that they signified haven’t be solved, nor is there any reason to think the board of curators are going to solve them anytime soon.
And when you consider what has been happening in the long run health-wise to so many former NFL players, they are really not that privileged at all….
Just to clarify, I don’t think MU has any more racism or racist incidents in general than many other college campuses. And these protests aren’t just about racism, though that does play a central role.
@Penny L:
Wow, you really do think in a nearly binary way, don’t you? They aren’t marginalized because you’ve found a situation in which they have power.
Do you get that the black football players are still black?
Moreover, do you even understand the Neo-in-the-hallway metaphor? Neo was completely subject to the laws of the Matrix – it’s a programmed environment, and a software agent cannot do anything the code does not allow the software agent to do. It’s a total control we can’t even imagine properly in a human context.
Then, in a moment, Neo discovers he can break the fucking laws. The long arm of the law loses its grip on Neo. While before it was impossible for him to win, in the hallway moment he doesn’t achieve a total victory, but by escaping the totality of the control over him, it become possible to win. He gains enough power to be a threat to the system – but that doesn’t mean he rules the system or the system is no longer a threat to him. Moreover, the long arm of Matrix law still entirely controls those Neo loves, and he can’t ignore the consequences to those others on his own quest. Indeed, it becomes clear later that he can only give himself fully to the quest when it’s clear that the lives of his loved ones are just as much threatened by contrite submission as by outright rebellion.
To say you can’t have power and be marginalized is to say that a slave cannot come to the realization that the whip is unguarded during dinner, and it might just be possible to grab the thing and whip the master for a change.
Sure that’s possible. And, as in this case, you might even do it. The realization that you can break the laws, that power over you is no longer absolute, is a prerequisite for trying something as dangerous as stealing the whip, but it’s not an instant reversal of all social power such that all slaves are now masters and all former masters are now slaves.
Honestly, I don’t know how you can know the reference, know that there are 2 more movies and that in them people fucking die, and still think that my endorsement of that metaphor makes it logically impossible for me to argue that the people confined to Zion and threatened with robotic death are not marginalized.
Do you think about what you write? Really?
meant to say, “I don’t know how my endorsement of that metaphor makes it logically impossible for me to argue that the people confined to Zion and threatened with robotic death are marginalized.”
The “are not” was something bizarre and unintentional. Sorry for the confusion.
And, yes, Neo was confined to Zion: he could make excursions to the Matrix, but he had to live in Zion.
I honestly find it gross to consider people destroying themselves for scraps from the hands of the people they make rich to be “privileged” in the first place.
@Nate Carr:
I get that, but we’re also talking about systems of power and things that are relative. Yes, they’re destroying their own brains for Company Store Scrip usable only for an education which they don’t have time and energy to fully pursue, but there are still distinctions that can be made in terms of men in a sexist society, etc.
Yes, the emotional reaction is real, but i can fight through it and acknowledge that I gain middle class privilege simply by the way I present (regardless of what my income might be) and a large part of that is how I talk. Given the racialization of class, what’s the likelihood that I have class privileges that most of these men don’t? Yeah. Exactly.
Penny L @23
And if they choose not to accept that scholorship or to give it back, are they likely to be able to stay in college without incurring huge debts? Or even afford to stay in college at all?
@ The Vicar #26
I do agree with you and certainly have never argued otherwise. But what I don’t understand is how is Iowa going to beat Minnesota* this Saturday if the players are busy protesting?
*-Let’s go Hawkeyes 10-0!
@#33, Nate Carr
So… by your definition everyone in America who works for a corporation, given that American work environments are pretty undeniably unhealthy, is automatically not privileged? A lot of cis-het white males would certainly love to hear that.
@#36 Electric Shaman
All the more reason for them to do it now, while the sort of person who seriously believes the inanities you are pretending to believe here will demand that the administration come to terms immediately because otherwise it might harm the football program.
Penny L:
What level of familiarity do you have with the concept of intersectionality? I ask because (as Crip Dyke mentioned) you seem to be viewing power in a very binary sense. As if you have it or you don’t have it. Maybe a different example would help illuminate the concept. As mentioned above, I’m a gay man (I mentioned other aspects of my identity, but these two will serve for the purpose of my point). As a man, I have privilege that women lack because our society privileges men over women. I have social power that women don’t have.
•Barring imprisonment on my part, I don’t really have to worry about being sexually assaulted or raped.
•I don’t have to worry about whether or not I’m going to be sexually harassed at my job.
•I don’t have to consider whether or not it is because of my gender that I got a job.
•My gender is not synonymous with the lesser or the inferior.
•My gender is
wellover represented in politics, entertainment, and high ranking corporate roles.•I don’t have to worry about the gender wage gap affecting my pay.
That’s all part of the power of having male privilege.
•But I’m also gay. Which means I *lack* the power of privilege in various ways, including:
•I can be fired from a job in 29 states in the United States bc of my sexuality.
•Unlike heterosexual people, I face a greater risk of facing violence bc of my sexuality.
•In many states, I cannot adopt a child bc I’m gay.
•I cannot give blood bc I am gay.
•Unlike heterosexual people, my sexuality is routinely linked to bestiality and pedophilia as a means of demonizing and othering gay people.
•Because of the heteronormative nature of society, I never learned anything about sex education for gay people in high school.
•When I first came out to someone-my best friend in high school-I was so afraid he’d kick me out of the car while we were driving to a movie that I decided to drive and come out to him. That way, he couldn’t kick me out. Though he was fine with it, that wasn’t the most common reaction when I came out in 1993. Hell, while it’s been more common today, it is by no means universal.
Comparing and contrasting these examples, I hope you can see how an individual can be empowered along some axes of their identity, but lack power because of other aspects of their identity. Perhaps this can help you understand how the UoM players could have some privilege, but be underprivilged at the same time.
****
University of Missouri’s chancellor has also stepped down.
“Football players can’t be marginalized” almost nearly falls under “not even wrong”, but it seems to come from a position of ignorance rather than calculated malice so what the hey.
I’m white passing, upper middle class, trans, bisexual, and physically disabled.
The fact that, for example, I have less shit on my plate in terms of class and race than many other people do doesn’t erase the fact that I do face prejudice on the other grounds.
I’ve been assaulted in public, threatened by cops, and have to operate in a system that treats the occasional inability to walk quickly/over large distances as laziness.
The fact that my family doesn’t have much in the way of financial problems, or that I’m not generally profiled based on race doesn’t get rid of the other ways in which I am disadvantaged.
When my (significantly less white-passing) father gets a brick thrown at him and called a slur, did the goon stop to ask how much money he makes or how much money he spent on college? No, he acted based on racial prejudice, and short of buying a helmet, there was not really much of a way my family’s savings could have prevented that.
Except it didn’t take months of protest, only strike by the football players. Don’t kid yourself. The contract for this Saturday’s game against BYU specifies a cancellation/forfeiture penalty of $1M. If the players forced the cancellation of the game, Mizzou would be forced to pay BYU a million dollars. The university admin was happy to ignore the protesters until significant money was at stake.
I’ve only skimmed the comments, but to those claiming student athletes are privileged because “free college tuition”: please read stories about those same athletes having to go hungry some nights because they can’t afford food. Most of the major sports scholarships cover only tuition. Not non-tuition fees (here at LSU, that’s $1,500/semester), not housing, not food. With their 80-hr week practice/training schedule, they barely have time to study, much less hold an actual job.
Yes they’re still men, still cis, still (mostly) straight. But I don’t feel their status as college football players confers them any significant privilege.
As a graduate of Mizzou and still a resident of Columbia, I can say: This was a long time coming.
Wolfe has been terrible for years. His entire administration has been a series of stripping of “nonessential” departments and funds. His first act upon arriving was to strip the university press so far down to bare bones that the non-product they were able to produce was embarrassing enough for the university they had to rebuild it. He’s been responsible for hiring freezes and wage freezes which have crippled whole departments, including important ones like “the entire library system.” He never took responsibility for anything and would pass the buck at every opportunity, and his handling of the racial issues is perfectly reflective of that. Setting aside his absolute inaction, his response to tell protesters at the Homecoming parade that “Racism still exists because you don’t believe you have the same ability to achieve” is tone deaf, patronizing, insulting, and the exact opposite of him doing his fucking job.
I’ve been dismayed seeing comments from people outside the University area who have said truly brainless things about “BLM ruined an innocent man’s career.” He’s not innocent, and in any world of meritocracy, he would have been fired years ago. And idiots like him will continue to be placed in positions of power in academia because some asshole decided that “I have business experience, therefore I can run a non-business like a government or university” is a serious proposition.
The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs) @ 37:
Compared to the people running the companies?
No, they’re not. Would you argue otherwise? If corporate workers don’t comparatively lack power, what the hell are labor unions?
Privilege is relative.
. . .
Nate Carr @ 42:
Ok, I’ll ask: what other student group, of similar size and demographics, could have gotten the university president out in less than a week with a protest that involved simply doing nothing? I’m seriously asking here.
Being privileged is not binary. You can be marginalized and still comparatively privileged.
My intent in my statement was to articulate that I felt Penny L.’s dismissive statement felt gross to me. I’ve clearly failed to do so and I’m not sure how to do better. It was not my intent to imply that privilege was not binary. For now I’ll just lurk until I can organise my thoughts better.
I’m sorry.
Some not so good news from the Missouri campus about reporters being physically abused trying to cover the protest:
Mizzou students deal blow to racism, then 1st Amendment
Electric Shaman, are you seriously hoping people standing up to racism doesn’t affect your football?!?!
Frig, every time I think (some) Americans’ obsession with college sports couldn’t surprise and disgust me further…
Electric Shaman’s comments look to me like they’re mocking those people, but I’m often generous.
The press about this is woefully inadequate; thanks to commenters here for filling in the details.
I wasn’t trying to critically examine the Matrix trilogy vis a vis the Missouri football team, I was simply trying to point out that far from being marginalised, black football players have an enormous amount of privilege on campus even relative to their white non-football playing peers. Back to Jameis Winston for a moment – a black man. His position of privilege on the Florida State campus meant that the University (a) provided him with a lawyer to defend him against a sexual assault charge and (b) stonewalled a campus investigation into his conduct, among a myriad other things. With his Heisman Trophy and his National Championship he was, arguably, the most privileged student on the Florida State campus.
Your analysis appears to suggest that no person of colour can ever be more privileged than their white peers, which is clearly false. Look at Bill Cosby. His stratospheric privilege as perhaps the most popular television entertainer several decades running allowed him to sexually assault dozens of women, most of whom tell a similar story about why they didn’t go to the police – they were worried about what his privilege and power could do to their lives. In a more macabre example, OJ Simpson’s privilege allowed him to literally get away with murder.
Tony –
I understand the concept of intersectionality, I just believe its usefulness is very limited. I could tally up my list of privileged/non-privileged traits can come up with a similar result to Crip, but I choose not to live my life searching for offence at every turn. This is not meant to be dismissive of your struggles, I just choose not to dwell on mine. Reason, for me, is the great equaliser – I don’t really care what you think of my outer shell, I’m going to out-think you.
Cathy – I was speaking specifically of college football players. Given the level of conditioning and muscle mass these players have to maintain, they not missing any meals. Missouri’s offensive line, for example, is the lightest in the SEC at an average of 290lbs (http://www.saturdaydownsouth.com/sec-football/sec-heaviest-lightest-offensive-lines-2015/). You’ll have to produce some evidence that Division I football players are going hungry – I find it hard to believe there is a coach or a booster in the country who would allow that to happen.
A little education about the First Amendment does seem to be in order for some of those involved with the protests taking place in Columbia.
Why journalists have the right to cover the University of Missouri protests
It is only possible for it to appear that way because you photoshopped it.
I specifically said that social power was analog. I specifically made a distinction between the “peers” of black student athletes and the people who run the university system and its football industry. “Peers” were quite obviously not the people “in control”.
Don’t lie about what I said: your thinking here is looking pretty dreadful, Penny.
@starfleetdude, some faculty members screwed up. That’s not the story. The organizers have made clear that they understand the media’s first amendment rights.
@ConcernedStudent1950
Some of us actually pay attention to evidence when we write, Penny. The NCAA, in order to “ensure the amateur character” of its sports has for a very long time placed limits on how much free food the students can get. The change to that rule has only come in the last year. it hasn’t yet been implemented in every program.
How does that work (well, how did the rule work until this past year and how do the lingering policies work where they haven’t caught up with the new rule)? In many places athletes get breakfast and lunch, but no dinner. You could try reading the news, if you could read it more carefully than you read what’s been written in this thread it might even help you understand:
http://www.cbssports.com/collegefootball/writer/jeremy-fowler/24625209/ole-miss-bo-wallace-shabazz-napier-was-right-players-go-hungry-at-night
You’ll note that this change only came about as a result of media attention to a famous athlete who actually had gone hungry:
http://www.sbnation.com/college-football/2014/4/15/5618236/new-ncaa-rules-meals-snacks-SNACKS
Nonetheless, I don’t believe you’re actually going to think very deeply about any of this. Your statement that:
gives me quite a lot of confidence that you don’t understand intersectionality at all. Listing one’s privileges isn’t “searching for offence at every turn”. Frankly, I don’t know how it could be. Logical or not, it’s the place you’ve decided to stand. I hope it’s a really, really comfortable place, given that you’re resolved that nothing should move you from it.
qwints, it wasn’t just the faculty members involved who weren’t clear on First Amendment rights. @ConcernedStudent1950 tweeted this earlier:
http://publicradio1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/newscut/files/2015/11/cs1950.jpg
So it’s a teachable moment for the movement.
@#44, Anri
My point — which you might have gotten if you had looked at what I was responding to — is that a cis-het white man working in a corporation is still privileged, even if they are a wage slave in a relatively powerless position. The person I was arguing with had posited that since college athletes are acting as amusement for the very rich, they can’t possibly be privileged, essentially at all. Speaking as someone who had to pay every penny of tuition and housing at a school where the football team was getting an almost embarrassing amount of free stuff and adulation, that’s really quite an insulting stance. I have no doubt that there are unfortunate college athletes who suffer for their performance. There weren’t any at my school, though — the athletes got royal treatment and every sort of consideration.
Penny L, going back to your very first post – do you think that the football players shouldn’t have protested at all because they aren’t marginalized enough? Or just that they shouldn’t have talked about being marginalized? I don’t understand the point of your comment.
The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs) @ 56:
Actually, I did read what you responded to, as well as what you posted. That’s one of the reasons I (attempted to – apparently not very well) set my response in such specific terms. In terms of their role within their company, wage slaves are not privileged – they may, of course, be heavily privileged in other respects – including other aspects of their employment.
Nate Carr is clearly wrong about student athletes lacking privilege – and is clearly right with regards to them being (often) marginalized and heavily taken advantage of by the people running the sports departments.
I don’t actually think we’re disagreeing here.
Penny L @50:
This reads to me like you think you (or anyone) has any control over the privilege accorded them by society or that you (or anyone) can overcome their lack of privilege. Using your example of Bill Cosby-even though he has amassed quite a lot of money and has quite a lot of fame (unfortunately-given his status as a serial rapist), if you put him up against a white peer of his, that white person is *still* going to be more privileged that Cosby. And were you to compare Cosby to a white man who didn’t have his fortune or fame, Cosby still would be underprivileged vis a vis his race. Having privilege along one axis doesn’t negate being underprivileged on others. It’s how I can be privileged as a man, and also be underprivileged as a gay person.
Also, I wasn’t dwelling on my struggles. I was mentioning some of them and acknowledging that they exist and that I cannot do anything about them. I’m not in control of how society perceives me as a gay or black person. That’s the thing about privilege. Neither I, you, nor anyone else has control over it.
starfleetdude @55:
I’m not sure what the point is with that Tweet. That person isn’t saying that media cannot cover the story. They’re saying the media isn’t *welcome*. That doesn’t mean they don’t understand the 1st Amendment. So your comment and link @51 are unnecessary. Here’s what you might be missing about this-
http://www.vox.com/2015/11/9/9701376/missouri-protests-media
The protesters are saying “we don’t want you here” and “we don’t need you here”. They’re not denying that the media has the right TO be there.
None of them are unclear about First Amendment rights. You conflating a lack of enthusiasm for the presence of the media with not understanding the rights of people involved in the media. Just as the media has the right to cover stories, so too do people have the right to say “we don’t want you here”.
I see what Nate was trying to say: being a football player does not convey privilege as most of us understand the sociological concept. There is no football player axis of privilege. He’s grossed out by Penny L’s dismissiveness of the lack of privilege on the part of the football players. And I agree with him, bc Penny L does seem to think that being a football player confers some sociological level of privilege upon players. Penny L is conflating the perks of being a football player (not privilege as most of us here understand the concept) with the unearned benefits and advantages granted by society to people who belong to a particular group-class, race, age, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, ability, religion, gender identity, etc.-that enable members of that group to move through life with fewer obstacles than those that lack access to such benefits (privilege as most of us here understand the concept).
I still think the example with my father more or less works to demonstrate that fact. Sure, my Dad is financially well off, and as a cisgender straight male has a fair amount of privilege in all of those regards.
None of said privilege prevented him from being the target of violent racism, nor does it seem to protect him from being “randomly selected for additional screening” literally every time we’ve ever gone through an airport security line.
One time, airport security attempted to forcibly remove him from the “American Citizen” line when we were returning from a trip to Turkey, despite him clearly being with the rest of my family and having his US Passport in his hand.
So yeah. The presence of a shitton of privilege in some areas (Gender/Sexuality/Class/etc) doesn’t create a magic bubble to protect him from racism, and the same can be said for the football players.
African-American students at the University of Missouri dealing with racist threats in the wake of protests:
****
Here’s a re Tweet from #BLM activist Shaun King about the racist bullshit blacks on the campus are dealing with from white pissants.
Vivec @62:
I think that’s a great example. I’d like to think that would be enough to get through to Penny L, but I don’t have much confidence at this point.
Apparently there are white people running amok on campus at this moment, according to Shaun King’s twitter.
https://twitter.com/ShaunKing
maybe don’t have anything to eat before you start scrolling.
To burst the all about Penny L bubble a bit, black students are currently evacuating campus while groups of white students hurl racist abuse and scream “White POwer
I guess the privileged black football players are exempt or something.
This is disgusting and very disheartening. One step forward (president and chancellor stepping down) followed immediately by two steps back (vile racists emboldened to the point where their victims have to evacuate). With any luck the riot police will be called or the National Guard will be brought in to get these white supremacist assholes under control post haste.
Maybe the students should launch a class action lawsuit against the university as well. For the lawyers here would that be a possibility?
I’m having trouble parsing the social media links. Was Shaun King on campus or was he just relaying what he was reading from people there?
qwints – Shaun King was just relaying.
Quick Rawstory links:
Missouri University police arrest suspect who threatened to “shoot every black person I see”
Black students terrified by racist backlash on Missouri campus
PLease beware that White supremacists are spreading bogus information
Why, why, why the fuck can’T fucking Richard Dawkins not simply sit on his fibgers for once?
Oh, and apparently the poor man was missunderstood, as usually
More from a writer at Daily Kos: Mizzou Students Evacuating Campus Tonight Due To Death Threats
Updated during the night with tweets from University of Missouri’s MU Alert: (my transcript of screenshots)
Reply from screenshotter:
Updated again this morning, about that non-threat and calling MU police: (Statement from MU in a screenshot transcribed by me)
Back to the Kos article author:
As a reminder, three white supremacists in Virginia were just arrested this weekend for planning to start a race war: Rawstory link
Shaun King’s statement on Facebook last night, transcribed by Greta Christina this morning:
Giliell, #71
The dishonest shithead is choosing to ignore the word “hateful” and only looking at “hurtful”. Also, his mind is apparently impervious to context.
Another tweet:
Great analogy there, Richard. White supremacy threatening minorities at their own schools is just like
scientists telling creationists they’re wrong. What an idiot.
Also, check out the dozen or so retweets of like “Wahhh I’m triggered so I’ll call the cops” “”””””humor”””””” he has. Dawkins is really smart in his fields of expertise, but holy shit do I dislike him as a person.
Twitter has truly enabled him to broadcast every last little vicious thought to the whole world, hasn’t it?
@23 : Penny L
You are aware that these “scholarships” are *not* guaranteed? The scholarships can be taken away for any reason. Say a new coach comes in and wants to go a different direction and your skills do not fit the new direction. Boom. Your scholarship is gone, and if you haven’t finished your degree, you are responsible for ALL COSTS of your education.
Oh, you blew out your knee first game of your first year and you can no longer play? sorry, we will be taking back that scholarship after the season ends. Go find your own financing.
Your point would be more valid, if, and only if, the scholarships were guaranteed for 4 years and could never be yanked. Unless, they are unpaid professionals making money for the schools with little guarantee or benefits towards their efforts (6+ hours a day in practice, training, films, off field and off clock workouts, travel) with little time for education.
““I’m sure it scares the living shit out of them” – Salon
Great interview with the sports editor at the Nation on the unrealized power of students and student athletes.