Black Law Students at Georgetown: We are shaken and angry at conservatives’ response to Scalia’s dea
I recently read a thought-provoking, and for me a soul searching, blog "4 Ways White People Can Process Their Emotions Without Bringing White Tears" http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/02/white-people-emotions-tears/
The basic theme weaving through the 4 Ways is that the emotions of white people are constantly centered, coddled, and nurtured, elevating them above and to the exclusion of the experiences and traumas that people of color must live with everyday in a racist society. Speaking of the need for white people to confront racism in other white people she writes:
But when you don’t confront other white people, the onus always – and I literally mean always – falls on People of Color.
And whether that means we have to constantly exhaust ourselves teaching the white people who are willing to at least half listen or whether that means we become the victims of white people who exert violence on us, we are the ones who have to bear the brunt of white supremacy.
While you might have to have an uncomfortable conversation for a few minutes, we’ll have to deal with racism for the rest of our lives.
This came to my mind as I read the article in the title to this OP. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/02/22/black-law-students-at-georgetown-we-are-shaken-and-angry-at-conservatives-response-to-scalias-death/?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_no-name%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
When two professors objected to the school's "laudatory memorial announcement" for Scalia and proclaimed that he was in fact “a defender of privilege, oppression and bigotry” the reaction was predictable: "Leaders of the Federalist Society chapter and of the student Republicans reached out to us to tell us how traumatized, hurt, shaken, and angry, were their fellow students."
The rush to center this issue on the emotions of the white conservative students, to express the absolute horror (!) of having to face professors who penned words of criticism about their hero, should have been met with hard push back from scores of white students who value diversity of thought, word, and deed, and support anti-racism at their institution. Instead and predictably it fell to the black law students.
The Open Letter is brilliant (I predict a bright future for the authors); I only wish they had not been standing alone.
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I couldn't agree more!
I'm so proud of the students knowing fully well when to drop some home training and exclaim this man was "a defender of privilege, oppression and bigotry.” Just like the statue of Cecil Rhodes came down at the university in SA and elsewhere, it warms my heart to see many pockets of people refusing to celebrate historic terrorists and bigots.
Thanks for posting 
but there had to be some. The reaction of the white conservative students was tone-deaf, but I would have expected something better from the faculty: they had to know how hurtful that reaction would be to the AA students. OTOH, he was an alum and maybe they protect their own. 