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Social Justice Tag

The magazine GQ has named former quarterback Colin Kaepernick its citizen of the year since becoming a "powerful symbol of activism and resistance" since he took a knee during the national anthem to protest racial injustice and police brutality. GQ said that this action has put Kaepernick in the same company of Jackie Robinson, the man who courageously broke the color barrier in baseball and had to endure ACTUAL racial injustice and brutality. Or Muhammad Ali, who protested the Vietnam War and refused to serve when he was drafted, which forced boxing to lock him out. EXCUSE ME?

The last time we reported on Reed College in Portland, Oregon, a student sit-in had shut down school’s finance office. The protests were organized by “Reedies Against Racism,” (RAR) a group that has been active on campus for a little over a year and whose members interrupted the lecture of a humanities class (Humanities 110) on Western Civilization it described as "Eurocentric" and "silencing people of color". Despite the intimidation and harassment, Reed College freshmen are battling back. The following snippet is from an article in the Atlantic that details the challenge the freshmen are giving to the RAR's moral authority.
...This school year, students are ditching anonymity and standing up to RAR in public—and almost all of them are freshmen of color. The turning point was the derailment of the Hum lecture on August 28, the first day of classes. As the Humanities 110 program chair, Elizabeth Drumm, introduced a panel presentation, three RAR leaders took to the stage and ignored her objections. Drumm canceled the lecture—a first since the boycott. Using a panelist’s microphone, a leader told the freshmen, “[Our] work is just as important as the work of the faculty, so we were going to introduce ourselves as well.”

Reed College Assistant Professor of English and humanities Lucía Martínez Valdivia writes in The Washington Post of the extremism from the "social justice" movement on campuses, and how too many faculty just stay silent., Professors like me can’t stay silent about this extremist moment on campuses. Her story begins with the history of a months-long continuous disruption of classes objecting to the required first-year humanities course, among other reasons because it included the teaching of Aristotle and Plato:

Apple's Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion Denise Young Smith had a bold idea -- maybe, just maybe, diversity is not contingent upon skin color. Speaking at One Young World Summit in Bogota, Colombia, Smith said, ""There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blonde men in a room and they're going to be diverse too because they're going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation," according to Business Insider. And she's right.