Roxanne Gay on safe spaces, trigger warnings, and free speech

[Recursion]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/opinion/sunday/the-seduction-of-safety-on-campus-and-beyond.html?_r=0

Really good piece.

Those who take safety for granted disparage safety because it is, like so many other rights, one that has always been inalienable to them. They wrongly assume we all enjoy such luxury and are blindly seeking something even more extravagant. They assume that we should simply accept hate without wanting something better. They cannot see that what we seek is sanctuary. We want to breathe.

On college campuses, we are having continuing debates about safe spaces. As a teacher, I think carefully about the intellectual space I want to foster in my classroom — a space where debate, dissent and even protest are encouraged. I want to challenge students and be challenged. I don’t want to shape their opinions. I want to shape how they articulate and support those opinions. I do not believe in using trigger warnings because that feels like the unnecessary segregation of students from reality, which is complex and sometimes difficult.

Rather than use trigger warnings, I try to provide students with the context they will need to engage productively in complicated discussions. I consider my classroom a safe space in that students can come as they are, regardless of their identities or sociopolitical affiliations. They can trust that they might become uncomfortable but they won’t be persecuted or judged. They can trust that they will be challenged but they won’t be tormented.

When students leave my classroom, any classroom, they have to and should face the real world, the best and worst of it. I can only hope they are adequately prepared to navigate the world as it is rather than how we wish it could be. But I also hope they are both realistic and idealistic. I hope that, like me, they search for safety, or work to create a world where some measure of safety, not to be confused with anything as infantile as coddling, is an inalienable right.

[Chitown Kev]

1. hmph...

...I believe in safer spaces as opposed to "safe spaces" because of a very complex set of reasons which basically boil down to: I am, by nature, kind of a non-conformist and a questioner who has been known to, at some point or another, question various premises and rules of "safe spaces...or something like that...

[Donald Ian Rankin]

2. Some of this makes sense, but some doesn't.

Two lines that jumped out at me as worth challenging:

Safe space is not a place where dissent is discouraged, where dissent is seen as harmful.

I think that's precisely what safe spaces in the current usage are.

And so the students at Mizzou wanted a safe space to commune as they protested. They wanted sanctuary but had the nerve to demand this sanctuary in plain sight, in a public space.

This, I think, is a key point. Gay uses the phrase "had the nerve to" ironically, but I think it applies unironically - University campuses must be free to as wide a range of speech as possible, and hence it's not OK to demand that they become a safe space for a particular viewpoint. There's nothing wrong with wanting to talk to people who share your basic preconceptions without being disrupted by people who disagree with them (although I think it's probably intellectually unhealthy to do so exclusively), but it has to take place in a space that the people you want to exclude don't have a reasonable expectation of being able to use.



I also find it very, very striking that she talks so much, and so passionately, about "safety", without ever giving any hint as to what she does and doesn't mean by it - what degree of safety, from what?