The biggest problem with this narrative is that it is unsupported by evidence. We have to go down to the level of gut feelings, anecdotes about how a particular personal interaction made someone feel uncomfortable. Feelings can't be measured, tested, or quantified. Perhaps some day in the future, advancements in neuroscience might give us some objective index through which we might judge a person's internal emotional landscape, but for now, these claims are nothing but supposition. Yes, feelings do matter, but they are ephemeral.
To understand why this point is important, you only have to examine how the relative importance of someone's feelings changes when the contexts and people involved change. If a woman receives a death threat, or is even just called an unkind name, her feelings are what people supposedly care about. If those words anger or sadden her, she has been "harassed". If she feels "unsafe", this is the worst tragedy of all, tantamount to a physical assault, to hear some people tell it. Change the context to a male being insulted or receiving death threats, and his concerns are dismissed. We don't feel empathy for him and may even attack him for crying for attention.
Change the context to race and it is much the same. Insults and harassment towards racial minorities is spun up to the level of tragedy and horror. Last month at Vanderbilt University, a campus minority advocacy group was outraged when a bag of dog feces was discovered on the steps of the black cultural center. On Facebook, the group posted the following message:
This morning someone left a bag of feces on the porch of Vanderbilt University's Black Cultural Center. The center has served as the nexus of many aspects of Black life on Vanderbilt's campus since it's [sic] inception 31 years ago. The violation of a place that in many ways is the sole home for Black students is deplorable. As many of us sit in grief, recognize that these types of actions are what we speak of when we note the reality of exclusion and isolation of students of color and specifically Black students on our campus. This act has hurt many and will nto be received lightly. We will not allow for the desecration of the place we call home. As we announced yesterday and reaffirm today, we will not be silent.Such hurt, most racism, indeed. If these were normal times, one might chalk this up to the hateful actions of some nasty individual and move on, Even better, if you were free of an environment that insists that a significant portion that the people around you hate you for the color of your skin and that trains you to look for and call out any and all perceived slights against you, you might not immediately jump to the conclusion that this was some cowardly act of racism.
And you would be right. As it turns out, the hateful dog poo was actually the product of a service dog, collected into a bag by the dog's owner, a blind student, who was unable to find a trash can. The fact that her disability led to this incident is an amazing teachable moment for those of us who detest the wrong-headed ideas of identity politics and intersectionalism.
Above all, it underlines my point that how you feel might have little to nothing to do with reality. Those students in that group felt "hurt", "excluded" and "isolated". These were all feelings conjured up by their own expectations. In a way, it was the activists themselves who inflicted the pain they felt by creating the environment I alluded to above.
I don't mean to imply that racism does not exist, but simply wish to point out that if the innocent actions of a person with a disability can be so intensely misread as hatred, how many "micro-aggressions" are likewise the product of differing expectations and expression of individuals? How much harm are we inflicting on the minority youth of this nation by setting them up to expect rejection at every turn, and then feeding them the tools to ensure they internalize and act out their own oppression?
On the flip side, the culture of grievance being created, the now tired concept of "check your privilege" being foisted on those of us who don't belong to the equal but separate minority group, serves only to divide us. In the name of "raising awareness", what is raised is distrust and anger. To address the issues minorities face, failed methodologies must be abandoned, scientific inquiry must not be viewed as hate speech, and truth, not feelings, must be the basis for taking action.
