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Your guests have repeatedly used the word "offended" to describe the adverse consequences experienced by students as a result of hate flyers. The word "offended" trivializes the effects of racist hate speech on members of targeted groups. I am white, and there is no poster that anyone could post that would make me feel unwelcome at my university as a white person -- a poster claiming that white people were inferior to other groups would not have any the machinery of systemic racism supporting it.

Colleges should make such speech unacceptable in public spaces because it interferes with many students' ability to learn, in the same way that an outsider playing the trombone right outside the door during lectures would interfere with that ability. If Clark College can ban "X-rated" speech, as one of your guests stated they do, they can ban speech that asserts the inferiority of a particular racial or cultural group -- which is likely to do far more harm to students' ability to learn than a picture of a naked man.

posted 2 years, 7 months ago
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