I have to say, I’m bothered by the stories I’m seeing on Facebook from colleagues (not at my university, obviously) who dedicate class time to an anti-Trump weeping session.
First of all, what if there is a student who is a Trump supporter? What right do you have to make him feel uncomfortable or weird when he’s paying for your time just like anybody else?
Also, infusing a teacher-student relationship with the possibility of emotional caretaking is dangerous because once you start to caretake, how will you find a way to stop?
Another thing that bothers me is that a person who is not qualified to offer mental health tries to do that and a person who is not a professional poli-sci person is offering unqualified opinions on politics. That’s not education, that’s a spinster sewing circle. Why should anybody pay tuition for this? Especially, as I said, if they don’t feel and think the same.
It was the same after 9/11. I wasn’t forcing anybody to come to class but once they came, there were no touchy-feely conversations. We worked like we usually did. Some students thanked me later because, as they said, it was nice to feel normal for a change.
Clarissa's Blog 
Most of these weeping sessions will actually be therapy for the poor, traumatized teachers, anyway…
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On a related note, have you seen the dozens of articles on Slate, Salon.com, The Guardian, etc. with titles like “What will I tell my traumatized young children about the Trump horror?”
What truly disgusting parenting! Young children don’t follow politics or news events. The only thing they know about events outside their immediate world is what they overhear — or are told directly — by their parents.
If young children are “traumatized,” it’s because the big people in the house who are expected to act like the adults-in-charge are going to pieces around them. That’s borderline child abuse, at least.
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“Young children don’t follow politics or news events. ”
Did you see the video of young children shouting ‘build that all’ in the classroom?
What about this?
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Teacher-President-Election-Donald-Trump-Deportation-Immigration-400851681.html
“A Los Angeles substitute teacher is accused of telling sixth-graders their parents would be deported in the wake of Tuesday’s presidential election.”
I have an Indian friend who live in Atlanta whose kids (8 and 6) were heckled by their classmates.
Which fucking world do you live in? Stop trying to normalize Trump. It ain’t happening.
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Absolutely. Back in the Soviet Union, my parents made sure we had no idea about their dislike of the regime. They wanted us to be happy and not freak us out with things we couldn’t understand. I agree that only horrible parents use children to feel better about their political dissidence.
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I actually did spend a few minutes in my research group meeting talking about the election. My group consists mostly of international students, including a Muslim student, and I reassured them that they will likely be safe, but they also should be careful and shouldn’t do anything stupid. Some students also wanted to know what the impact might be on science funding, and we had a brief discussion on how various administrations have prioritized science funding in the past.
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There is a conference in New Orleans in March, and I wanted to drive there with my students who are the presenters (about 14 hours); that would have helped keep the cost down so more of them can go. Considering that many of the students are either Asian or Middle-Eastern Muslim, I no longer think it’s a good idea to drive, because I don’t want anyone harassed when we stop for gas or to eat/pee in the middle of nowhere in Trump country. So we submitted fewer conference abstracts as those who will go will fly.
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Yes, beware of that distant sound of jackboots clicking on the cobblestone streets — they’re coming for you.
Or maybe they’re just looking for a Trump voter to beat up.
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Seriously, you think it’s perfectly safe for my Chinese and Iranian graduate students to stop at a random gas station or eat at a random highway restaurant in Mississippi or Arkansas, through which we’d be driving? I am completely nuts and my concern is 100% misplaced and thus totally laughable? Gimme a break.
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Do I think you’re spouting hysterical nonsense about an America that’s the same country it was a week ago, and simply had a decisive election?
Yes.
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you’re spouting hysterical nonsense
Thank you for this one.
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“that’s the same country it was a week ago”
It definitely emboldened you, motherfucker. Nice touch with the “hysterical nonsense” to a woman.
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Hello there, Stringer Boy. Nice touch with the infantile “motherfucker” language. Is that what passes for sophisticated talk on Monkey Hill, when it’s under a once-in-a-lifetime “supermoon”?
I wasn’t aware of “xykademiqz”‘s gender. But since we’re all equal now, how should that matter, except to an apparent sexist like you???
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https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/11/11/over-200-incidents-hateful-harassment-and-intimidation-election-day
Pulling from news reports, social media, and direct submissions at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website, the SPLC had counted 201 incidents of election-related harassment and intimidation across the country as of Friday, November 11 at 5pm.
‘Hysterical nonsense’.
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Ah, Stringer Boy, how would I know that you were a “non-white man” (or do you prefer the ubiquitious “person of color” label)? Most of the Asian Indians whom I worked with in the 1970s (and now have had here in Arizona as the doctors taking excellent care of me) appear as white as I do, and that’s how they’ve always considered themselves.) Do you seriously believe that I would have let the few darker-skinned Asian Indian physicians put me under general anesthesia and cut into my body if I hadn’t had absolute faith in their capabilities as physicians — and as men?
I call you “Boy” because that is how you behave: Showing smug superiority toward anyone who dares to disagree with your obviously correct political opinions, and raining down bizarrre vulgarities like “Keep fucking that chicken!” that apparently have some meaning in your tight, adolescent social/political circle.
Monkey see, monkey do! If you don’t want to be compared to a monkey, stop pulling poop out of your ass and tossing it down onto everyone with whom you disagree. Try using adult-level debate instead.
As for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s highly selective choice of images, here are some examples ffom the other side.
Hysterical madness is transiently sprouting up on both sides, but it will soon sputter out to black on both sides — anarchist anger without mind or purpose always does.
So just chill out now. Sit back, and enjoy all that legal recreational marijuana in California. Just try to keep too much of it from drifting across the border into Arizona.
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Dreidel, please learn from others’ mistakes and do not oversimplify things in order to dismiss them more easily. Every time someone (or some thing, as in the case of Brexit) wins on anti-immigrant platform, it gives the (admittedly small percentage of) bigots a license to practice their bigotry openly and with glee. A week after Brexit there were more attacks on minorities than before Brexit. Even though Britain was obviously the same. And a Pole or two were actually beaten to death. In Quebec under PQ there were couple of incidents when Metro ticket clerk attacked an immigrant who on top of being a visible immigrant asked for something in a wrong language (English), or people were refused medical services. (I am only mentioning incidents that caused or could easily cause significant physical harm, for each such incident there were dosens of verbal attacks)
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This is so obvious, yet these guys need to have this explained to them. A racist, sexist, xenophobic demagogue was just elected president, and cliff/dreidel are here to normalize what just happens.
‘Meh, both sides do it’.
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“you think it’s perfectly safe for my Chinese and Iranian graduate students to stop at a random gas station or eat at a random highway restaurant in Mississippi or Arkansas, through which we’d be driving? ”
Pretty much. There’s always some chance of an unpleasant incident but most of the actual violence since the election has been from Clinton supporters.
If you were concerned, then staying on major highways/interstates and not going very far from the exits should be all the precaution necessary.
“my concern is 100% misplaced”
Not 100% but it does seem a little exaggerated. But it’s your call to make.
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\ Pretty much. There’s always some chance of an unpleasant incident but most of the actual violence since the election has been from Clinton supporters.
I think these are two different kinds of violence, no? Her supporters do not encourage bullying kids at schools or threatening minorities. The violence you mention probably was at demonstrations and connected to interactions with police. Or am I very wrong?
Also, just noticed it and… SB acknowledges people may feel unsafe because of a president – elect using violent rhetoric, which naturally emboldens the worst elements of society. But I was a racist worthy of ridicule for feeling unsafe in an only-Arab environment at a beach at night at Dead Sea OR taking an Arab driver during a terror wave when I am alone with him in a car. The rhetoric against Jews in Arab media is worse than anything Trump ever said, and, unlike in America, we have a real war going on for decades. Still, only people whom SB loves have a right to be afraid and take precautions.
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“But I was a racist worthy of ridicule”
Oh, and an idiot too. It’s embarrassing when you attempt critical thinking.
Did your country elect someone, many of whose supporters were an explicit danger to your community? Are you a minority in your country? Is it not true that your country’s leaders get away with saying the most heinous shit about Arabs?
With absolute power in your country you’re traumatized by ‘Arab media’. Comparing your ‘situation’ to what’s happening here is stupid.
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\ Are you a minority in your country?
No. But I am a member in one of two large groups which are actually at war with one another. (If you counts Israeli Arabs with Palestinians in PA and Gaza, their group is large too.)
\ Is it not true that your country’s leaders get away with saying the most heinous shit about Arabs?
True. And since Israel is a democracy, Israeli Arabs, including Arab MKs, get away with saying and doing much too.
One true example: an Israeli Arab commits a terrorist act and his mother goes on Arab radio to talk how prowd she is of her shahid (martyr) son. While getting all pensions / health care / social security payments /other from Israeli government.
Another example: a terrorist, a citizen of Israel, talked how he was moved to attack because of incitement in Arab media, referring to the claims that Jews plan to harm the al-Aqsa Mosque. There was a wave of “lone-wolf” attacks going on at the time, all supposedly because “Jewish attacks on al-Aqsa.”
\ With absolute power in your country you’re traumatized by ‘Arab media’.
I have not used the word “traumatized.”
“traumatized by media” sounds like an expression only some drama-queens in America would use.
I am aware of dangers of living in Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and when a new wave of violence rises, am extra-careful, as all Israeli Jews are asked to be.
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I suggest you plan your trip in such manner that you make stops in university towns. Those are much more used to all kinds of international students even if majority there voted Trump. They are used to thinking of foreigners as first and foremost as students. I spent a lot of time in such a town – until recently even a black person there was assumed to be a student from Africa, not African-American…
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I live in Louisiana and honestly think your fears are exaggerated. There are parts of Oregon and Idaho, where they are less used to seeing people of other races and nationalities (many live here) and where there are more white nationalist groups, that I would consider worrisome before I considered worrisome a drive to N.O.
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Sundown towns are real, and flying has its own set of potential issues. That’s where the buddy system comes in and planning the route to break or end in “safer” towns comes in. I don’t know the route they’d take but I suspect any towns through which your local black students (not international) have been warned not to drive through or stop in by their parents are towns in which those international students might not be safe after dark.
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xykademiqz, what I mean is this. If you can, sprinkle your white dude grad students among the cars so there’s at least one in each vehicle. It cuts the chances of cops trying shit significantly. Charge your cell phones. Like all of them. One cell phone should be charging in the car at all times. Nobody gets down without at least one other person. If you’re really paranoid, tell everyone to check their lights on their cars before driving down. It’s a fairly cheap thing to fix. Other car fixes are just part of maintaining the car.
Travel might be shorter on a plane. However you cannot buddy system your way through a TSA line. Also other people have been known to get jumpy at the randomest things like differential equations.
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Coming into N.O. through AK and MS has to mean coming in on I-55. It doesn’t mean stopping at night in small towns that aren’t black, etc. — I tend to stop in cities if I stop, anyway, and you can stop at black places or in black parts of town, too. I wouldn’t worry about that too much, although I take precautions because I am a woman driving alone & they’re more or less those Shakti gives — but I do those things everywhere, anyway.
I would think some small-town sheriff might follow a car wherein everyone was very obviously dressed in Muslim-type garb & might advise either dressing to look American or not having a whole carful that someone might say looked “terrorist.” But again, I’d take these kinds of precautions in places like Idaho as well.
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“Hello there, Stringer Boy. Nice touch with the infantile “motherfucker” language. Is that what passes for sophisticated talk on Monkey Hill, when it’s under a once-in-a-lifetime “supermoon”?”
lol Again with the monkey talk. Can’t even do racism properly.
“I wasn’t aware of “xykademiqz”‘s gender. ”
Of course you weren’t. She’s only been posting here for years. The same way it’s just a coincidence you use ‘monkey’ to refer to me. Or ‘boy’, when you belong to the generation that knows exactly what calling a non-white man ‘boy’ means.
It’s all just a big coincidence with this motherfucker.
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You’ve got to love the irony. Telling people they’re being paranoid about racism while literally typing racist slurs at the same time.
😀
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The real guilty party for Trump’s election has been found at last! Look (and it’s not the only article of such kind I stumbled upon in the latest 20 minutes of checking progressive blogs):
\ White Women Sold Out the Sisterhood and the World by Voting for Trump
…
What leads a woman to vote for a man who has made it very clear that he believes she is subhuman? Self-loathing. Hypocrisy. And, of course, a racist view of the world that privileges white supremacy over every other issue.
…
The shocking results of the election prove that most white women don’t consider themselves part of the coalition of nonwhite, nonstraight, nonmale voters who were supposed to carry Clinton to a comfortable victory. Most white women still identify more with white men than they do with black women, Latina women, Muslim women, transwomen, and every other woman who will have good reason to fear for her physical safety under a Trump regime.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/11/09/white_women_sold_out_the_sisterhood_and_the_world_by_voting_for_trump.html
Israel is a very different society, of course. Still, nobody thinks a female gender of a Jewish woman makes her identify with Muslims (men or women) or illegal migrants from Africa. The idea sounds completely weird in Israel. May be, it’s less weird in USA because of American history.
As for nonstraight, the division in Israel seems to be between religious vs non-rligious, not between men vs women.
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It’s Slate, you can’t take it seriously.
Americans are engaged in some weird ritual where they all – winners and losers – are revving themselves up to feel self-righteous and victimized. I hope they will get it out of their system soon.
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Highly unlikely that it will end soon. Supposedly according to “progressives” racism in the US today is worse than in Kenya under the British during the suppression of the Mau Mau insurgency. The claim that the US is if not the only source of racism and evil in the world is the worst offender in world history with the possible exceptions of Nazi Germany and South Africa under apartheid is very silly. But, it is the official orthodox view of the US left today.
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“Ah, Stringer Boy, how would I know that you were a “non-white man””
He says, after more than an year of continuous posting of racist slurs.
Live shot of Rip Van Dreidel here:
He just doesn’t know how he ends up calling a woman ‘hysterical’ and an Indian ‘monkey worshiper’. Just a massive coincidence. Or maybe magic.
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Dreidel, what’s wrong with you? I’m very disappointed.
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There’s nothing wrong with Dreidel. He’s behaved this way for a long time.
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He’s mostly fine but then he has these flare ups every so often that are kind of scary.
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Haha, flare ups. I like this racism as Herpes metaphor!
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My students weren’t traumatized but they were surprised and clearly wanted to talk about it and so I did just for a few minutes.
I had actually said ahead of the election that I would not be surprised by either candidate winning (which wasn’t not a message they were getting anywhere else) so they thought I might make some sense of it.
It was a little of why I thought he won and to not believe doomsday scenarios (yet) and we went back to business as usual.
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Completely normal that Trump appointed his children to the presidential transition team.
https://twitter.com/Rschooley/status/797295635686780928
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WHILE they will be running the business, I assume.
This is corruption of the most disgusting kind. I’m ashamed of Americans who are flushing all of their achievements down the toilet like this. Pathetic.
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On another topic, a curious article:
Syrian refugees regret move to Gaza
12 Syrian families sought refuge in the Gaza Strip after fleeing their war-torn country to Egypt and then, as the situation deteriorated there, moved to the Palestinian enclave. They are ineligible for most social services given to Palestinians, but also unable to leave.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4878801,00.html
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На президентских выборах в Молдавии победил выступающий за сближение с Россией лидер Партии социалистов Игорь Додон. По данным ЦИК Молдавии на 8:00, он получил 52,4 процента голосов. Его соперник, сторонник евроинтеграции Молдавии, глава Партии действия и солидарности Майя Санду, набрала 47,6 процента голосов.
…
Подчеркну, что помимо российской пропаганды есть абсолютно ясные и понятные процессы -маятник от глобализма качнулся к национализму всюду.
И всюду реакция принимает формы двух краев политического спектра. Потому тчо сложи вшиеся элиты атакуют популисты под флагами социальной справедливости и национализма. И, как то и было в 30-е годы прошлого века, популистские лозунги становятся знаменем и крайних слева и крайних справа, и фашистов и коммунистов.
http://trim-c.livejournal.com/1420903.html
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Back to the original topic: I am not discussing the election in class, either. I’m not of the view that I would have to be political scientist or licensed counselor to do so and I am willing to discuss outside of class.
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Hey, thanks for a great outing in Houston. I had a fantastic time.
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Thanks to you! I had a great time too and so did my student … who apologizes for having overslept your talk. He really liked you, said it was rare to meet a professor who could have an intellectual conversation in general, not just on a narrow topic
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I generally agree that political discussions should be avoided in class–unless that’s the explicit topic in the class (say a class focused on the American electoral process for instance.) But professors are human and this election is weighing heavily on many of us. In one of my classes, I let it slip that I was disappointed in the election results in an off-handed comment. I generally avoid all discussions of contemporary politics since that’s not my field. But it was my last class after a very long day and I was tired and my comment slipped out.
I sort of regretted my comment–mostly because I worry that perhaps I do have a Trump supporter or two in the class. (It’s a small class though and I doubt it.) But I’m human and it happened and it was only a brief comment. But truthfully if any of those young people are supporters, they should contemplate what a terrible decision they made and resolve to do better in the future.
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