The local public university convened a meeting for "Strategies for Healing Post-Election." Right off the bat, you know this is going to be dynamite. For the hour I sat in and watched, it did not disappoint. The panel that delivered their testimonies of victimization consisted of a gay 41 year-old professor who looks like Jim Gaffigan, a woman in her fifties whose profession wasn't specified but who could only be a gender studies professor by virtue of the utter stupidity of what she said, an Asian prof who said nothing, a black male grad student and two undergraduate female "persons of color."
It was every bit as bad as you would imagine. The middle-aged broad prefaced her initial remarks by first acknowledging her "privilege" as a "white, heteronormative...." and some term with which I and every normal person is unfamiliar, but which undoubtedly refers to some characteristic shared by 200 million people in the United States. (I'm still unclear on any of the 59 genders beyond the first two, I just know I'm the bad one.) She explained how she sat her biracial son down the day after the election and informed him of all the dangers he would now face in this God forsaken country. He was sitting in the room, by the way. Looked to be maybe 14/15. What a mother! She also explained there is a double, perhaps triple threat from Trump, on account of the fact that her daughter is "disabled" and they are one of those families "on the dole." Gaffigan lookalike spoke of the perpetual fear in which he now lives "on campus and off campus." As you can probably guess, you'd be hard pressed to find a "safer space" on the face of the planet than this particular university, but he lives in perpetual fear. (One of the questions I should have written down was whether he had considered carrying a gun but it didn't occur to me at the time. ) He mentioned the people who are surrounding Trump who are going to target gays, mentioning "conversion therapy." Apparently, I missed Trump's plan to implement gay conversion therapy on the federal level. Oh, and he mentioned the Miami massacre and, son of a gun, he didn't mention any Islam angle.
"Space" and "spaces" along with "feel" and "fear" were repeated more than any other words. "Intersectionality" was mentioned, but had nothing to do with traffic flow or stoplights. The discussion was bereft of anything approaching logical discourse. It was simply five or six people sharing their irrational fears in a "white, heteronormative" environment. And, as we all know, gay people and "persons of color" are under greatest threat in overwhelmingly white communities, right?
The two undergrad females spoke. The first prefaced her remarks by stating that she didn't know if she could even speak she was so fearful. Then she cried. She announced that she was the one "you may have seen on Facebook" the day of a Trump rally and described nasty things said to her and the other protestors about "going back to your own country." The other undergrad told of her partner at another university who is "undocumented" (she stated she would not say "that word," presumably meaning "illegal immigrant) whose continued enrollment is jeopardized by Trump.
The one and only moment that didn't seem like a person craving attention through stories of woe was the black grad student recounting his experiences being pulled over at his first university in rural Iowa and up here in Wisconsin. Alas, he too then lapsed into speaking of the perpetual fear under which he lives now that Trump has been elected.
In short, attendees were treated to five or six of the most prejudiced people you will ever meet who make all sorts of assumption about people of whom they have virtually no information, based mostly upon outward appearances.
Unfortunately, I was unable to stay for the last hour, when it was to be opened up to audience questions. I envisioned the university's "bias response team" rushing in to grab me after my first question to whisk me away to a re-education camp.
BTW, much of the UW System has already tried to head off the need for re-education camps after the fact by creating a mandatory indoctrination/encounter group for all incoming freshmen.