Coddled? In what world is this crisis of racism and violence about being coddled?
Right now, and especially in recent years, college campuses across the US have been engaging in critical thought and interrogating hegemonic power structures that have governed their lives since birth. Brought into a new space of intellectual stimulation and challenging ideas, we’re forced to reconsider our own positions in a world of privilege and oppression. We also engage our fellow students in this process by interrogating lines of thinking evident in assumptions they make as they speak and reason. We interrogate these assumptions because they are part of a hegemonic culture that upholds the power structures we are working to dismantle.
But many of those whom we question, who often come from places of privilege, take personal offense at being engaged in this process of critical inquiry. Somehow, because we’ve isolated a pattern of thinking in their mindsets that relies on various unfounded, often prejudiced assumptions, we’re making a personal attack on them. Suddenly, we’ve blamed them for the power structures that we were trying to interrogate together. This is the hypersensitivity of the coddled American college student: the privileged students who have never before in their lives been forced to reconsider the belief systems that they have taken for granted as absolute truths.
So I wonder, why is it that those who question the status quo and interrupt hegemonic narratives of oppression are being labeled as “ultra-sensitive” or “childish”? Because it seems like this narrative is backwards. The male student who feels attacked when I talk to him about gender inequality is the one being ultra-sensitive, making up personal offenses where there are none. He is the one who is failing to engage in critical discourse and productive inquiry. We are the ones who are thinking; they are the ones who are attempting to shut it down.
We see commentaries throughout the millennial-obsessed blogosphere claiming that protests at Yale and Mizzou violate basic tenets of free speech and the First Amendment. Let’s reexamine that ridiculous idea: that somehow protests violate the First Amendment. Somehow these “PC Police” are restricting your right to the First Amendment by utilizing it themselves. Somehow, when someone else uses their free speech to disagree with you, it no longer counts as free speech. When we criticize your racism, sexism, and homophobia, you cry out like the coddled children that you are, “but I have a RIGHT to express my racism, sexism, and homophobia!” Yes, you do. And we have our rights to criticize you in response. And to protest you. And to petition for change. If you can’t handle that, who’s really the “coddled” one on campus?
With the freedom to protest the vast injustices of American society, we will continue to interrogate the power structures that these “coddled” minds uphold, and we refuse to accommodate the hypersensitivity of those who have long relied on those power structures to feel like they are somehow special and superior.