[FIRE] Rutgers caves to outrage mob: Prof. faces punishment for Facebook posts about white people

White lives matter.

 

You gave you opinion and discussed it rather than simply cutting and pasting an editorial or blog entry. I don't think anyone has a problem with you starting a thread when you actually offer your perspective or why the article is relevant.

 

This, don’t be a little “B”.

 

I do not agree with his opinion on racism.

I also do not think it is smart for a college professor to make the statements he made. He can say it was in jest, but he also is smart enough and sophisticated enough to that his "joke" was going to cause him problems and would open him up to criticism and possible loss of a job.

Having gotten all of that out of the way; the university and facebook have the right to censure what he said or terminate him.

However, I think it is a grave mistake for Facebook to start controlling what material is on their platform for a variety of reasons. First, they now will have to non stop filter their content. They will now have to make controversial decisions on what to remove and what not to.

As for the University. I think that we have gone too far in stifling opinion. Still, I think it is a little different when you are in a career path as an educator.

I personally think that he should not have lost his job for posting ignorant comments..... let the discourse happen.

 

Here's the thing, would there be any question if he deserved to be fired for the statements if he was making were about another race or ethnicity....I mean exactly the same statements allegedly meant as comedy or satire? I don't think there is, thus I support the firing. In current year you can't go around making racist comments, even as a joke....even if it is against a race or ethnicity you represent without running the risk of losing your job.

Honestly I could go either way on this issue, I just insist that there is consistency. If we want to live in a society where racist comments are grounds for termination then he deserves to be fired. If we want to live in a society where people are free to make racist comments without fear of being fired, then he should keep his job.

When it comes to the "free speech" aspect of this, he wasn't imprisoned or fined by the state, so his free speech wasn't infringed. If that was different, I'd feel VERY differently about it.

 

We live in a white male's world and live in a country that was founded by white men and has been largely ruled by white men. You sure as hell better believe White Lives Matter. I will be dead, but I wonder how the USA will be in 70-80 years when white isn't necessarily the ruling class. As I see more minorities pierce white family dynamics, and see more biracial families I wonder what the outcome will be.

Sadly, it has been my observation that the definition of "white" has just changed. You now have wealthy kids that are half black referring to themselves as white and putting down people darker than themselves. I have one cousin that is half black, he lives in the upper class suburbs and he told me he couldn't stand n*gg***. He is 14 years old, I pulled the car over and reminded him that he is half black and there are folks that wouldn't be so kind to him because his father is black. He cut me off and said he was white and I just didn't know how it is now.

 

Well yeah, and IMO it probably should be. That doesn't have anything to do with free speech.

 

I was curious what the guy wrote that caused such a ruckus. So I looked it up. He has every right in the world to say what he said. Preach it from the mountaintops.

If I'm his employer? I fire him for breaking our rules and making our institution look bad.

 

I would direct you back to my first comment on the subject

 

I think if you substituted a different race than "white" the demand for his termination would be intense.

I also think he has redefined the word "racism" to fit his liking. There is racism all over the world. Pretending only whites can be racist and that it originates with slavery is false. Hate is hate. Ignorance is ignorance. And his "world" view appears to be purely US-centric.

 

1. It seems a bit overbearing to police your professor for saying stuff on Facebook, which is semi-private. I would like to better understand if he had students or other faculty getting his feed, however. If he's sharing his racial opinions with coworkers and customers, I can see how the university might think it contributes to a hostile environment and they have to intervene.

2. I'd expect a history professor to be more eloquent. If he'd explained the complex of moral issues he saw reflected in the increasing patronage by whites instead of just complaining about white people, the university may have been likelier to call it academic freedom. What he actually wrote, aside from being a bit insulting, was unreasoned. I think it's reasonable to confine academic freedom to academics and not allow it to mean that a prof can spout off on whatever enters his head regardless of the detriment to his employer. That he had reasons that he was later able to explain a little doesn't really help in the original instance insofar as it promotes a hostile environment.

3. Rutgers and other schools that fire tenured professors might someday regret it. If the best professors don't think the Rutgers environment lets them be free to say what they believe, they can go to other schools. Then the best students will also go to other schools.

 

Well, Nook, I think what you might want to ask your young cousin to do...
...just for his own sake...

...is to make sure he finds out from white people which half of himself they're going to accept.

I mean hell...

...we just got rid of a half-black (sorry...half-white...all lives matter, forgive me) president...who in all of the ways that we get told are supposed to matter…

(…father, husband, and a rarity among Negros and half-Negros alike: no side-chicks or baby-momma-drama…)

...was whiter than the president in office now...

...and he still got the full-n!gger treatment.

I'll tell you something, Nook.

(…been a little while since I soliloquized...a skill I promised myself I'd keep sharp...Al Sharpton's gotta die sometime and he'll need somebody to take over for him, so indulge me, please…)

...My mother told me something a long time ago that I didn't understand when she said it.

She said "...Boy, the world gonna be a whole different place for you than it was for me. Some things in your life you gonna get to do I can't tell you the first thing about, 'cause it wasn't that way for me. I can't teach you about stuff I don't know. All I can do for you is get out your way, and let you find out what things are for yourself..."

“But some things gonna be what they are no matter what you do. Some things and some folks ain’t gonna do or say or be nothin’ more than what they are…and you gonna have to make up your own mind as to who is right and who is wrong…you gonna always be a n!gger to some folks, boy…but that ain’t because you got to be…”

…I spent a year in a magnet school out in Houston’s fourth ward, sometime in middle school (7th or 8th grade). Went there at the recommendation of some school administrators who were into the whole “student exchange” sharing thing that was going on back then—sending kids from poorer (read: urban) districts into schools with more “access” to “accelerated learning paths”, I think is what the counselor said…I’d done so well on some of those standardized tests (IOWA Test of Basic Skills…actually suggests that at one time, somebody in Iowa actually did have a brain) that the staff jumped at the chance to send somebody like me over into one of those programs…

…had a history teacher there who took a bit of a liking to me. She seemed pretty young, as far as teachers went (different time, I know)…but she was very energetic and excited. The class was fairly diverse (lots of different races of kids, a good smattering of white, black, hispanic and asian), and I remember we had a lot of interesting discussions about a lot of different things. Despite my best efforts, I always found myself having to answer a question or ten that she asked me directly (a tactic she got from my English teacher I later learned, as a way to get me to participate more often in discussions)…

I never really noticed anything odd or untoward about the way this history teacher behaved with me, possibly because she wasn’t, in my mind, behaving any differently than I’d become accustomed to with teachers in classroom settings. I didn’t notice that she seemed to spend a little bit more time with me in a discussion setting (because I was as contentious then as I am now) than she did with the other black students. I didn’t notice that she seemed to set me up as an example of a model of behavior she found acceptable, even though she rarely made any mention of that in regards to any of the other students. And she seemed very interested in my home life…what kinds of influences I had, that sort of thing.

She got so interested about that, in fact, that she offered to give me a ride home one day. Not a small thing—I lived at the time in Southeast Houston (Sunnyside, for the uninitiated)…and the bus ride from school to home could take a couple of hours or more. At that time, my mother, younger brother and I were living with a cousin, and my mother had gotten used to me getting home from school at a certain time. I showed up way ahead of schedule with the teacher, smiling, proud to introduce the lady to my mother.

And my mother, God bless her, barely smiled at the woman.

Momma told me to go in the house while she talked to the woman alone, and right then and there I knew there was something wrong. My mother could be a brutal conversationalist…and animated, verbal bloodletting was not at any time beneath her. But she did speak calmly to the woman, and she to my mother, for maybe about a half-hour or so. After they were done talking, Momma let me thank the teacher for the ride home…but she still seemed a little uneasy about the whole thing.

I can only really remember my mother saying two things to me about this. First thing was a question: “Boy, why is you the only one this teacher is bringing to the house? What is that school bus for? Do she do anything like this for them other children?”

Other thing was: “Boy, you ain’t no better than anybody else. You don’t get no special treatment from folk there just because. You ain’t all of a sudden become no smart child because you sitting up around white folks and they decide to notice. God made you smart as you is, and He ain’t asked nobody if they was all right with it. They can’t pick and choose which one’s they gonna treat special and which ones they ain’t. She ought to treat alla you children as special, or leave alla you alone.”

Nothing changed about this relationship after this, incidentally. The teacher was still fond of me. We still got into some loud, good-natured conversations during class. But she did seem to engage in just about the same manner with my other classmates from that point on (particularly the black kids) as she did with me…and since I was never really the jealous or attention-w**** type, I found that most definitely cool. All of that was probably because whatever it was my mother may have said to her, that teacher didn't pretend that she had all the answers or that she couldn't be given some insight into something she probably had no real clue about.

Didn't hear one word from her about any white guilt or white shame or reverse-racism, either. And this was somebody who, on a lark, took up the advocate side in a class argument for the pros of fascism in Europe in the 1930s.

Lot of things I learned about myself that day, and that year. Not the least of which was to make very certain that I noticed the difference between acclaim and esteem. Acclaim is given (and taken away) by anyone who has the ability to do so. Esteem is as inherent as your heartbeat, and not up for sale or scrutiny, because it accounts for itself. I had to learn to be very careful not to become one of those Negros who get so enamored with a white person’s approval or acceptance or appraisal that they accept it sight unseen…and it’s tempting to do that, believe me…I’ve had more than my share of opportunities for that to happen. A couple of pets on the head here…a scratch or two behind the ears there…and before you know it you’re rolling around on the floor in front of a bunch of people, convinced you learned to do that trick all by yourself.

I realized (and still do realize) that I’m bridging the gulf my mother could never cross…the gap between history and destiny…a gulf she could only bring me to the edge of, but one I could cross if I was willing. I’ve got no business trying to go anyplace I didn’t belong or wasn’t welcome…but I had every right to set my own course.

Your cousin, Nook, is in that place, that bridge of destiny. And I don’t think that that’s a bad thing at all, really. Sometimes what you don’t know can’t hurt you. And as most young people, he’s sorting out what kind of person he is based on the world he lives in. That’s a much, much different world, in a lot of ways, than the one you or I knew. If the young man needs anything, I’d think it’s a history lesson.

He already seems to know his mother’s side of the story…

 

This disappointed you and thats why posted it. Also cause of your job. WTF is your profession cause you have flooded this forum with threads. You must be a disaster relief worker with the flood of posts.

Re****inglax

 

In all of my years on this forum this may well be the best post I've ever read, just incredibly thoughtful. Thanks for sharing.


As for the original story, it's clear the man can say what he wants and the school can discipline or fire him if they want but I think his comments are mostly just fodder for the internet trolls to vent fake rage. A person slurring their own ethnicity in a joking manner happens all the time in every ethnicity. It's so far down on the racism totem pole as to be irrelevant.