Madeleine Kearns writes for National Review Online about one leading college‘s latest disturbing document.
Last month a document produced by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion’s Resource Center Team at Amherst College in Massachusetts, titled “Common Language Guide,” surfaced. The document was described by its authors as a “list of carefully researched and thoughtfully discussed definitions for key diversity and inclusion terms.”
And what did they come up with? A slew of rather obscure definitions of oppressive behaviors and structures such as “eurocentrism,” “heterosexism,” “ethnosexism,” “cissexism,” as well as more heard-of terms such as “ageism,” “classism,” and “racism.”
“Microaggressions,” the document explained, are “rooted in institutional oppression” and involve “verbal and nonverbal indignities and denigrating messages targeting people of historically and presently marginalized backgrounds.” This translates as insults, both accidental and deliberate. (Insults and slights are unpleasant, but are they really so ideologically loaded? Might this be encouraging people to be overly sensitive?) …
… The document is far more preoccupied with students’ love lives than with wider society. However it does briefly touch upon economics, politics, and culture by leaving room to explain that “capitalism” is “an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state. This system leads to exploitative labor practices, which affect marginalized groups disproportionately.” And “American exceptionalism” is also immoral. And adopting the hairstyles of marginalized groups might constitute “cultural appropriation.”
As one might expect, some found this document to be rather overreaching. Brantley Mayers of Amherst College Republicans told the Boston Herald that the college was unacceptably “establishing the parameters of speech.”
