Skepticon has released a video of the interview to, I presume, shut down all the stupid claims by people who weren’t there.
It didn’t work. This is the kind of response I’m seeing on Twitter now.
@RealSkepticon Wow. Watched the video and the participants at Skepticon should be ashamed by their behavior.
— Zerilos (@Zerilos) November 15, 2015
@RealSkepticon Wow. Watched the video and the participants at Skepticon should be ashamed by their behavior.
I was there for the first half of the talk. I’ve now watched the whole video. Skepticon has absolutely nothing to apologize to Schierbecker about: they gave him and his publicist a time slot at the last minute, they allotted him 25 minutes and he went on for an hour and 15 minutes instead, and the audience was calm, made reasonable points, and asked difficult questions. And now their videographer worked extra hard to make the whole talk available on YouTube!
It seems the racists on Twitter want Skepticon to apologize for questioning a white man.
Considering one of the supporters on Schierbecker’s video made a point to change the ‘students’ part of the group’s name to a racial slur…yeah.
Shades of Stefanelli. Things just keep getting worse. Instead of being ashamed of being racists, people are comin’ out all proud of it, and the hate keeps rising. Fuck, the world’s gotten right nasty.
Uh huh. Meanwhile the “poor, poor journalist” did and/or said nothing wrong or offensive, amirite?
Tony: I bet it was just a joke.
Just finished the video. I’m really confused by Muscato’s statement that “Mark said multiple indefensibly racist things”. It seems like she screwed up badly in her execution of this and is looking for a scapegoat. Schierbecker acknowledges that has white privilege and implicit biases, but I would like to hear what the specific comments she is condemning are. Schierbecker strikes me as a unsympathetic figure with his determination to get a professor fired and his unwillingness to do things that might decrease his usefulness to anti-Black political forces, but I didn’t see anything as explicit as what Muscato’s facebook post suggests.
As requiring an apology, while the “white tears, stop it” comment [1:11:30-1:12:00] to an autistic person saying that social interaction caused them emotional distress was fucked up, but other than there was nothing objectionable or offensive about anyone in the crowd’s comments.
Yeah, I didn’t hear much that was offensive at all, beyond the fucked-up nature of the Q&A in the first place.
The “white tears” comment is defensible. In a situation in which black lives are being denigrated, we should be swayed because a white man was brought to tears by his plight? Oh, please.
Although I will agree that Schierbecker is a victim in this whole mess. It’s just that he’s a victim who is also a willing pawn for conservative/racist groups who want someone to distract people from the ongoing greater victimization of black people.
I mean, that was about a 5/10, maybe less, on the “QA Sessions Gone Wild” scale.
I get why folks are upset at the journalists, but this one of those cases that I try to set aside my substantive beliefs and argue procedure. If that was a Tea Party rally and everything played out as it did, I’m not sure there would be anyone defending the behavior towards the student journalist and the other reporters (or, more accurately, the roles would be inverted – Stormfront ranting about the evil media…). The law cannot be there only for people we disagree with.
Of course the Tea Party folks are crazy and upset about fake things, but that just means we want special press rules for people who are right vs. people who are wrong on a particular subject. And it should go without saying that an independent press cannot be taking instructions from the people they’re covering, even if we agree with the people being covered. There’s definitely a place for advocacy journalism, but that very, very quickly becomes PR.
And instead of confronting student journalists recording events in a public space, the faculty and staff would have done well to help the student groups find a room on campus to do their strategizing. That’s one of the main reasons Churches were so central to the Civil Rights Movement. I get that the protests are ad hoc and grassroots (as opposed to astroturf – no grand organization), but that’s one of the issues with organizing that way – you don’t have a thought out strategy developed in confidence. People get to watch the sausage being made.
So far I have learned that the best way to fightwhite privilege and to uplift black students is to blatantly ignore their wish to be left alone because there might be a story in there.
You also clearly say “fuck racism” by happily helping Breitbart and Fox News spreading more racism.
The things you learn watching this…
@8
I would agree that the young man cannot both invoke the right of the press to cover a public event independent of the subjects’ consent and uplift or support or advance the cause of that subject. I think he has the right to be there and record, and the students have the right to ask him to leave. If you ignore the request, you’re not really on their side, but the press shouldn’t need to be an ally to cover an event.
He’s trying to have it both ways, which is, at a minimum, confusing.
More things I learned: the most important thing is that this woman get fired. It doesn’T matter if the story is spun on Stormfront. He’ll keep beating the drums until this woman is fired, no matter if he’s totally making it about himhimhim and completely stealing the attention from the black students. Because fuck “fuck racism”.
doubtthat
Nope, totally clear if you look at it from a point of entitlement.
+++
CAn I point out the fucking discrepancy between a small woman probably being charged with assault for mildly pushing him, what she shouldn’t have done, while men get away with sexually assaulting students for decades while still not facing any actual consequences?
Giliell @ 10:
Sure, and it’s a damn good thing to point out. I don’t know that it will do much good, as people seem to be much more interested in rules lawyering and hairsplitting minutiae.
This video is a textbook on derailment.
let me get this right. This is the same guy who is the focus of all the uproar about press freedom and assault and all. He is clearly not an objective journalist by his own words and actions.
Is there really any wonder why he got that reaction?
I am having a hard time understanding why there is such an ongoing reaction about this. As I understand it there was a protest rally in the quad. Did the rally “stray” into the area of breaking the laws/rules? It would have been surprising to me if the rally did not engage in some civil disobedience. I think we are past the time where peaceful petitioning of grievances is effective or more accurately we have not yet arrived at such a time where such petitioning is effective.
If not now when?
uncle frogy
numerobis @4:
I’m taking it at face value bc I have no other information to inform the Tweet.
It’s all about ethics in racism journalism.
Tony! @ 14:
I’m pretty sure Numerobis was being sarcastic, riffing on Hunt and the stream of others, who when called on something, resort to “hey, it was a joke!”
F.O. @ 15:
In a nutshell. +1
I was only there for the second half, and the audience continued to remain calm, make reasonable points, and ask him difficult questions.
–
Giliell:
Yeah, that’s how it struck me, too. “The black students have valid complaints of their treatment, but their concerns should only be addressed after I Have It My Way!”
I did get the impression that he hadn’t expected to become a Cause to Stormfront and the racist right; also that he didn’t “get” why people might not want to be captured on film (for possible targeting afterwards? Who knows? Who trusts, in view of people who have been singled out for retribution, in other situations?)—if it was no big deal to him, how could it have been a big deal to them? His lack of comprehension on that front seemed genuine enough.
–
it is not so much that he thought it should have no big deal as it is a sign of guilt that they should not want him to photograph all the intimate details and the roles of all the participants is a sign that they have something to hide. It is a sign of guilt, there must be some “outside agitators” and/or hidden agendas behind what “they” are doing.
As he has indicated it is a “they” as in someone who is different that “us” (me)
uncle frogy
I have a couple of points of confusion:
– Schierbecker wants to be a journalist, but he’s completely flattened by some rather mild pushback? What kind of stories does he intend to cover? Does he think that everyone rolls out the red carpet and caters to journalists? The other student photographer had a more reasonable response: “I don’t have and never had ill feelings toward her or the others in the video, and never took their actions personally — as a journalist, they were simply part of the scene I was documenting and not the enemy, so to speak,” Tai said. “But being a journalist is often an intrusive role, and I understand that everyone was acting on adrenaline and high emotions, even if both sides had good intentions.”
– Schierbecker seems confused about why he had a “right” to intrude. Was it because he pays tuition, and so can do as he likes on campus? (Which, of course, is as mistaken as most of his perceptions. You don’t get to wander the football pitch during a game or take video of a lecture without permission just because you pay tuition.) Was it because he’s a ‘journalist’? Again, no one is mandated to protect the livelihood of journalists. Was it because it was ‘public space’? My understanding, and I may be mistaken, was that the quad had been reserved by the protestors and that the circle was around the hunger striker. If I reserve commercial space under whatever rules are there, for that time, it is not fully public.
– He (and many of the people using him) are woefully naive about the power of professors. They seem to have this childlike notion that professors are like second grade teachers looming over small children, or minions of “The State”. They also seem to think that if they pay taxes or tuition for something they have absolute rights over it. (I bought a packet of ibuprofen after beating my head on the desk. Since the pharmaceutical company took my money they have to reorganize their research department, staff, and goals around my preferences, right?)
22 minutes into watching the video and I’m not at all happy. It’s entirely too one-sided and focused on discussing-again-the use of physical force against the journalists. I get it. It’s wrong. They shouldn’t have done that. I think it can be agreed upon that threats of force or the use of force is wrong.
Moving on.
But where’s the discussion of *why* the protesters didn’t want them there? There are reasons why:
(the above article focuses more on the blocking of Tim Tai, but the portion I quoted above is relevant bc it gets to the heart of why the protesters didn’t want the journalists there)
The media fucking sucks at conveying the struggles of African-Americans with anything approximating ‘fair’. It’s took how long before the media paid attention to police brutality against black bodies? That shit has been going on for the entire time we’ve had a news media, but it hasn’t really been a focus until these events started getting recorded. And even then, sometimes the media has been very slow to pick up on stories. And when they *do* pick up on the stories, they love to run images of police brutality over and over again. And when it comes to protests, they are often not quick to pick up on what’s happening on the ground from the perspective of the protesters (in the early days of the Ferguson protests and the show of excessive, state-sanctioned law enforcement thuggery, Twitter was the best place to learn what was going on on the ground, not the news media). The distrust of the media by black people is also because the media often treats black victims in a harsher light than white people suspected of crimes and because the media often uses misleading statistics which help fuel negative stereotypes of black people. And of course black criminals are overrepresented in local media reports of criminal activity. So yeah, there are plenty of reasons black people have for not wanting the media anywhere near them, and this issue is separate from the issue of a few protesters and school officials using or threatening to use force against journalists. And all of that is why they really needed to have the perspective of a black person up there on stage. Based on just the 22 minutes I’ve listened to, they really shouldn’t have had this Q&A.
cicely
Yep. Which clearly demonstrates why he was the last person fit to be there.
If you think your story matters more than the people whose story you’re covering, you’re a bastard. I know, that is quite the standard for photographic journalism where 20 photographers surround somebody who’s dying to get what they hope to be the next iconic photo.
Also, it would not be the first time that terrorsits try to get nice clear shots of the people involved to use for threats later. I know that we used to look carefully who’s taking pictures at protests. If you don’t know that, you should just stay at home and take pictures of flowers.
Agreed.
All that and more, of course. There’s also the simple fact that one confrontation between protesters and a couple mid-level university employees on one side and two university journalism students, one with a side gig for ESPN on the other was not the story. The story was the toleration of racism by Mizzou to the point that really smart people found the best possible fulcra available to them and got together to lever the UofM System President right out of his fucking job.
On the thread specifically about tactics and media rights, I was happy to discuss tactics and media rights (and my harshest criticism was not at all for the protesters but for the professor and the “greek life” official). But we have had multiple discussions about this. If Skepticon had 5 events on the Mizzou activism and activists, one of those could have been about media rights and responsibilities when covering such events. To that one event, Schierbecker might reasonably have been one invitee. At that one event, for all the reasons you name, Tony!, there should have been Black people on stage with the experience and expertise.*1 However, if they were going to have only one event, it should have included only experts on the racist happenings, administration inaction, and activist response. Like on Pharyngula, discussion of the media should not have been the first Mizzou event booked and should never have been the only one.
Maybe we need more threads on media racism. I certainly wasn’t addressing Tony!’s concerns about the media being jackasses in the other thread. I don’t know why I didn’t. i don’t know why I compartmentalized the relevant question/s so narrowly,*2 but I assume my whiteness played a role. More threads would be more reminders to me that I need to be thinking about the racism of media. Maybe I shouldn’t be drawing lines so carefully about the topic of a thread such that one is about “racism” and one is about “the extent of the 1st amendment protection for media members against employees of a government owned university”.
But even I – with whatever I’ve gotten wrong in the last few days – even I recognize that if you’re only going to have one fucking event on Mizzou, it can’t possibly be appropriate or just to focus it on a white guy ranting about media rights.*3 It has to be about a student body president who is forced to listen to white students call him the N word with no Mizzou administration defense of his humanity. It has to be about white supremacy and a sh*t swastika. It has to be about Wolfe’s egotistical and racist selfishness: being more willing to risk harm to students by driving through them than to listen to them for 5 of his precious minutes; being more willing to risk harm to students by failing to investigate harassment than spend work time ordering university employees to take such harassment seriously, which might take 5 of his precious minutes. It has to be about the hunger strike, the football team and the relationship of risking harm to one’s body through a hunger strike in order to get the education any person deserves and risking harm to one’s body through concussion-reckless sports in order to get the education any person deserves. It has to be about how racism decided that funding sports teams more and education less …when people of color started making it to college more often. It has to be about how racism decided that brown international students and brown athletes are money-making commodities rather than the valuable minds that a state needs to better itself over time. It has to be about how those decisions of commodification left the school administration open to pressure if the students decided that what they had to lose was worth less than what they had to gain. It has to be about how the students found such a pressure point and popped Wolfe right out of his chair.
Frankly, I don’t see whatever the organizers did that would make this talk so central to skepticism that Schierbecker had to be invited. Schierbecker and the interviewer can throw out random background facts all they like, and qualify their media-focussed statements all they like*4, but at the end of the day, they created a presentation where racism at Mizzou was simply the backdrop for the white reporter’s story.
There was no need for this event at Skepticon, and having this event without others that do focus on the racism at Mizzou and the anti-racist heroism in response? that sends a message whose negative value far outweighs what Schierbecker and his publicist/interviewer had to say during their entire 32 minutes of uninterrupted time.*5
*1: This doesn’t necessarily mean “officially recognized” expertise like a degree, but also means you don’t get to grab anyone with coffee skin and assume your responsibilities in creating an educational event that includes a black perspective on a specific topic are fulfilled.
*2: I really should know better: racism in the media isn’t a new topic to me, and it’s not like I didn’t think of media racism during the writing of my comments over there. What I did, which is worse, was decide that media racism wasn’t relevant to the questions we were addressing. But that required careful selection of the “relevant questions” to exclude racism. Who knows exactly why I did it: it was wrong.
*3:
To add racist insult to the racist injuryTo add yet more racist injury to the racist injury, he wasn’t even the media figure excluded. He’s a white reporter whose voice of vicarious grievance is amplified over the voice of Tim Tai, a reporter of color, who wants the public to get more education about medias rights and roles…and wants the media to get more education about media responsibilities…and who thinks that he did some things wrong as well…and that properly locates the worst actions as the actions of the white government employees and not the mainly Black protesters. The value of Schierbecker’s perspective (at least as illuminated here) wouldn’t equal the value of Tai’s perspective (as I’ve read in his own words) if you added to Shierbecker’s perspective a thousand years of compound interest for white ownership of the banks.*4: they ask Schierbecker if this is distracting from the issues of racism – and he weasels a bit. Though I’m not entirely unsympathetic to the weasel on a societal level (we can have more than one conversation at once) when they actually interview Schierbecker after setting the stage, the only question on racism is “Are you racist?” Fuck yeah this is distracting attention from racism. Schierbecker even discusses needing to use white privilege to end white privilege – so why not use your stage to talk about the racism you’ve actually witnessed and strategies for ending it you’ve actually witnessed during the course of these events?
*5: whether the audience responses or this discussion or other discussion sparked by this event can justify it are other questions, but Skepticon has to justify the value of their events on the content of their events – they don’t get a pass because someone unconnected to skepticon’s board/staff says something brilliant in critique.
@PZ
So which is it? Did he, to quote Danielle, “sa[y] multiple indefensibly racist things” or not?
In other words, Dear Muslima? The plight of those with mental disorders is irrelevant because others may have it worse? You’re sounding awfully ableist there.
Ah, so then you’re victim blaming, and guilt by association?
Now, why was the panel all about media matters with the MU campus and not about the racism inherent to the MU system? Why were there no representatives of Concerned Student 1950? Apparently they declined the invitation. This presumably transformed the panel from a discussion of racism on college campuses to freedom of the press. Perhaps a better strategy would have been to cancel it altogether, but why should Schierbecker bear the brunt of that decision (which was not in his hands)? Why are the good people at Skepticon, and Danielle, throwing this kid under the bus for having one of his constitutional rights violated?
Additionally, is the freedom of the press so unworthy that it shouldn’t merit discussion?
@21
Unfortunately, that is the only aspect of the situation upon which the speaker was qualified to speak. Again why the anger with the young man? Why is he being labeled a racist because he’s not an expert on race relations on college campuses?
What’s the saying about “I understand x/I’m not x, but…”
Two things: First, does it change the matter at all to find out that proffessor click requested a media presence on the campus a few days before assaulting and having that media forcefully removed? And second, it doesn’t fucking matter that the protesters didn’t want them there. You’re using a public forum as your platform, if the media come and you don’t want them there, too fucking bad.
The people who assaulted the photographers should be brought up on charges, full stop.
#24 is a great example of what I’m talking about.
Skepticon organizers did not call Schierbecker a racist. The people I was hanging out with did not call him a racist, except to point out that the studied neglect of the primary victims of racism was in itself racist (also, many of the people I talked to also regarded Schierbecker as a victim, exploited by unscrupulous conservatives).
The person who called him a racist was his own publicist, which is kind of fucked up right there.
But here you go, ignoring the excellent commentary by black voices that I posted this morning, to whine endlessly about a white photographer’s terrible, terrible oppression.
You know what? That’s pretty racist, too.
Drew,
The ableists here are the people who “other” the person with the mental disorder, putting him in the “special snowflake” category and demanding he should be exempt from all criticisms.
Fair enough. I didn’t see that and hadn’t completely read the apology by skepticon. So I retract the part of my comment about skepticon throwing him under the bus, the rest still holds true. Your comment included victim blaming, guilt by association, and ableism.
And on the other aspect of your response. I welcome discussions about systemic racism on the MU campuses. I’m more than happy to do whatever it is I can do to support cause of ending it, and to listen to find out what help from me is welcome.
Unfortunately Mr. Schierbecker is unqualified to speak on that topic. What he is qualified to speak on, sadly, is a different sort of Constitutional violation. The crimes perpetrated against him are not less because the perpetrators had a good cause.
Is there anything that justifies the professor assaulting a student? Is there anything that justifies a group of people in a public square assaulting a member of the media? Does it change anything about the racist narrative of right wing news sources that almost all of the people who committed the assaults are white?
@26
He made the comment about how being autistic makes the public speaking aspect extremely difficult and that the stress would cause him to be weeping for a length of time following the event. This was glibly dismissed as his “white tears”. That is ableism. Defending that remark is ableism. Pointing out that ableism is not.
No, actually this is the opposite of “Dear Muslima”. Dear Muslima is bringing up people who have it worse in a discussion about bad things that happen to somebody. This is a very privileged person demanding that people stop paying attention to the very serious matters of racism until his own petty complaints have been dealt with.
@29
Yes, “Dear Muslima” was about, “Shut up because other people have it worse than you.”
Or,
“Sure your Constitutional rights were violated and you were assaulted, but those other people who were oppressing you have been dealing with systemic oppression for their entire lives so shut up about it already, you very privileged person.”
It’s absolutely true that I can’t begin to understand what it’s like to deal with the systemic racism inherent in society from the receiving end. Does that deserve a pass for assaulting people? How many people does each person get to assault? And where is the line drawn? Pushing? Hitting? Beating? When does the violence stop being excusable? When does the complaint of the assaulted stop being “petty” and become justifiable?
Dawkins threw “Dear Muslima” into the debate as a smelly red herring, because it had nothing to do with the issue at hand. In case you did not notice, Drew, neither Rebecca Watson in particular nor feminists in general were trying to use her harassment problems to draw attention away from FGM victims in order to focus all attention on themselves. But here we have different situation – white people are actively and purposefully trying to use comparatively petty grievances (even if justified) to draw attention away from much graver issues at hand.
Those two situations are not analogous in principle, they only may seem so on the surface.
Then shut the fuck up about your problems, minor that they are. Your imaginufactured idiocy is laughable. You have nothing to speak from about systematic institutional discrimination.
What the everloving fuck?
@31 So then my question from @30 is reitterated, When does the violence stop being excusable? When does the complaint of the assaulted stop being “petty” and become justifiable?
Additionally, though some RW media outlets have drowned out the racism story with the freedom of the press story, that hasn’t happened across the board. And frankly those outlets that have would never have made the racism story a priority in the first place.
@32 they’re not my problems, they’re Mr. Schierbecker’s problems. And he shouldn’t be vilified because he was assaulted as a media representative by a group who he was covering as they were protesting. Are you suggesting that the right of the press disappears in public fora on college campuses? Are you suggesting that protesters should be free to willy nilly assault media members who were in fact invited by one of the people who later assaulted them?
@33 That’s a basic run down of the situation isn’t it? He was assaulted as a media representative and people are telling him to shut up.
Or as it specifically relates to PZ’s comment @ 6
I can only repeat that I’m amazed at what is assault when it happens to a white guy and what isn’t assault when it happens to PoC or women…
Schierbecker is the only one coming out of this with head held high as far as I’m concerned. For his erstwhile publicist and then Skepticon to retcon his Q&A as something it never was to begin with is both professional malpractice and a bad faith move on their respective parts. This was about Schierbacker’s experiences, which were only a part of what what happening at Mizzou and did not have to be justified otherwise to take place and have value to those attending Skepticon.
I’m in agreement about the ‘white tears’ being indefensible. I have no intention of defending his actions, or attacking them. However – he was in the middle of agreeing with a female audience member on the need for journalists to respect personal space. The audience member cited female safety concerns vs aggressively advancing photographers. Schierbacker was saying in paraphrase:
I totally agree with the personal space issue. I’m out as….I’m autistic. I’m probably going to weep after this {white tears!} from all the social interaction I’ve endured so I totally understand that and journalists so I agree that journalists do need to respect personal space issues.
So yeah – it is an understandable ejaculation from someone who is upset. In that it was defensible. But in actual context, it was one of those times that the man was agreeing that the media is too invasive. He might not have got the other concerns about his story eclipsing the more important one and so on, but this was the issue he was not only agreeing with this but he also seemed to genuinely understand the issue. This was the only time in the interview he was not being privileged. He does not have the privilege of toleration for intense social landscapes for long.
Therefore, PZs comment about us being swayed because of a white man’s plight – that commits the same faux pas. We shouldn’t be swayed because of a white man’s plight. We should be swayed by the knowledge that there are many people, some women, some disabled – who are testifying to experiencing anxieties surrounding personal space. I wouldn’t have thought you needed swaying at all on this issue but in so far as we are examining the ‘swaying intent’ of the sentiment expressed – that was what it was.
It might be that you have accidentally had some conflation with the raving racists defence of Schierbecker with what he actually said. Which was on point for ‘SJW’s.
“I’m in agreement about the ‘white tears’ being indefensible. I have no intention of defending his actions, or attacking them. However – he was in the middle of agreeing with a female audience member on the need for journalists to respect personal space. The audience member cited female safety concerns vs aggressively advancing photographers. ”
That’s where I am too. My understanding of “white tears” is that it’s a reference to white people getting all upset after being called out for something bad they did. This derails the conversation and diverts sympathy from the actual victims. Happens all the time, for sure, but It’s not a catch-all term for every time a white person happens to cry. Here, he seemed to be saying that he would be crying because he is autistic and social interaction is emotionally distressing. Not because of the content of the conversation. And as #37 points out, he brought it up in the course of agreeing with his questioner, which isn’t really even a derailment. It seems like an ableist comment to me, but not exactly earth-shattering.
I also didn’t understand the “don’t justify assault” comment. Thee publicist was explaining a legal process that prosecutors go through.
Lastly, what was with the guy’s own publicist asking if he was a racist? Weird. Plus, it came off as a complete non-sequitur.
Ultimately, there was nothing objectionable enough to warrant an apology. Certainly not by the organizers. Not even close.
starfleetdude@36:
Do you say that to all the assholes who diminish the Black Lives Matter movement with bullshit like “Journalists Lives Matter”, or is Schierbecker the exception?
Drew @24:
1-“Journalists Lives Matter” (a Tweet from Schierbecker)
is racist.
2. I’m not sure you fully comprehended my post. My ire in that post was not directed at him. My ire was directed at those involved at Skepticon who thought it a good idea to host this one-sided “Q&A” about the events at Mizzou. And I explained why I thought it was one-sided. Hell, the same criticisms I have were shared by a young woman in the video in the OP.
First off, you’re doing the same thing that so many other people are doing: you’re focusing on the aggressive response from the faculty and some of the protesters. I’ve already criticized that. I’ve already said that shit was wrong. Did you miss the part where I said “Moving on”? My post was not about that. My post was about the misguided “Q&A” held by Skepticon. And you’re coming across as blaming all the protesters for the actions of some of them.
Secondly, and more importantly, you’re dismissing the reasons the protesters didn’t want the media to cover them. That’s irritating as fuck, bc you’re dismissing the frustrations many black people have with the media regarding the coverage of black lives and black pain. You’re treating this like a very binary situation of right vs wrong and failing to look at the nuance here. And in the process, you dismiss the very real anger, frustration, and outrage of many black people across this country. Please stop doing that.
jdsb @38:
Not enough to warrant an apology? I disagree. They should not have held this question and answer in the manner they did. They should have had some African-Americans on the stage-preferably some of the protesters. It was a one-sided back and forth that was biased in favor of the journalist and almost entirely on one aspect of a very important protest. And so many people are letting this one incident of aggression on the part of some faculty and some protesters to overshadow the whole point of the protest.
@35 Giliell
My thoughts exactly.
I talked to some of the organizers afterwards and they were HORRIFIED at what was happening, like they were promised one thing and was seeing something else entirely.
Thank goodness they owned up to their mistake of even allowing this nonsense and apologized.
#41 fair enough, though if you actually watch the video they make pretty clear that they made reasonable efforts to have protestors on stage. Those protestors declined.
Maybe that means they shouldn’t have had the session at all. I’m sympathetic to that view, though Mark’s video was certainly topical and newsworthy and there was great potential for a good discussion.
On the other hand, as it turned out, the opposite view was actually pretty well represented. The questions went on longer than the actual talk.
#44
Well yes, exactly, on the second part.
But no, for this last minute thing, the cannot possibly have been any reasonable effort, such a thing would be impossible. And exactly because it is a last minute thing, i can see anyone else asked to represent their views and experiences being entirely suspicious or such a think, and simply not think it is a good idea with no preparation time. But people keep saying this as if it were some negative reflection on the other side, like they declined to “defend their position” (tone intentional) because they wouldn’t be able to. It is a gotcha setup. Anyone commenting in good faith should drop it.
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As to various claims about ableist attacks on someone who isn’t neurotypical, i suspect that as someone who wants to present his views, and a later explanation, he should probably be a bit more prepared, particularly given the journalist training. For one, he isn’t comfortable acknowledging his white privilege. That might sound worse than it is. But he may have wanted to explain why that is (he doesn’t understand and isn’t aware of it? or he really thinks it is not a real thing?) and probably should have either said he didn’t understand it (wow, opportunity for learning and dialog there) or did some minimal investigation so he could understand and acknowledge it as far as his current ability to do so. Certainly no one is perfect, and this was rushed, and yes he is autistic. But he has rather gone on to demonstrate that he mostly only has sympathy for himself. Never mind he wasn’t the journalist who was shoved, and clearly hasn’t paid much mind to what *that* journalist has said. IOW, he hasn’t really stopped digging. And he also has not so far commented against the BS media outlets who use him as a pawn, which would be sensible if he believes differently, and also a good exercise in journalism.