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It's a bad look, for sure, but how is this not just run-of-the-mill drunken disorderliness? "Racism" is not really the same thing as racial epithets. If you get drunk and repeatedly call a man a "dick" we don't generally run a story about a "sexist outburst." This strikes me as a wild exaggeration:
Extreme drunkenness can happen among younger generations, for sure. And when your drunk brain looks for the most offensive thing it can say to someone, and your social milieu is one where a racial epithet is the most offensive word you can think of, then the more strongly we disapprove of racial epithets, the more often we're going to hear them from angry, irrational people. Calling that "racism" seems like rhetorical sleight of hand to me.
Imagine a student getting plastered and, noticing her RA's MAGA cap, calling the RA a "Nazi" two hundred times. I can't imagine students putting together a petition demanding the drunk person's expulsion--it would be ridiculous. The drunk girl clearly has some problems, but none of them appear solvable by either tarring her as a "racist" or by expelling her from school.
In your hypothetical, the student is characterizing being a Nazi as detestable. In the real-life event, the student is characterizing being Black as detestable.
I'm skeptical of widespread American anti-Black racism narratives, and I don't think this case supports them (except weakly at the margin). I think it's possible (although unlikely) that the White girl doesn't harbor meaningful animus towards Black people, and that she was just grasping clumsily for an epithet that carried a powerful valence. I also assume the White girl has some fairly serious emotional problems (as do many people, such as myself) which were exacerbated by alcohol use.
Nevertheless, the White girl's behavior was grotesque. I have no objections at all to expelling her from school.
No. In my hypothetical and in the real-life event, a drunk person chooses the word that seems most likely to offend the person they are confronting. "Characterizing X as detestable" is just far, far too much cognition to attribute to someone this drunk.
As I've said, I'm confident that expulsion solves nothing in this case. But I could probably be persuaded that this girl should be expelled for her behavior (including both heavy drinking and resisting arrest), conditional on other students routinely being expelled for similar behaviors. What bothers me is the idea of expelling students because they said a naughty word (yes, even if they said it 200 times). If the line between expulsion and not-expulsion is "did you say a racial slur," that violates my intuitions regarding the importance of freedom of speech, thought, and inquiry in institutions of higher education.
In the same way that kids telling their little brother that he's adopted don't hate orphans, they just like teasing their little brother.
I think this example supports my position. Yes, the older brother is trying to rile the younger brother. But there's also common knowledge across the participants that the older brother holds that it's undesirable to be adopted.
It's undesirable to be adopted because it means you aren't as much a part of the family as he is, it means your parents don't love you as much as the children they gave birth too. It wouldn't matter if adopted children were considered heroes by society, it would still be hurtful, because inside your family your status is diminished. When we were little, my parents were very strict about cursing, so we invented our own insults. My little sister (5 or 6 years old) wanted to be a princess, so we called her a puncess. It upset the absolute shit out of her, she cried so much about it that my parents added puncess to the list of curses we had better not say if we valued our hides. Because it didn't matter what the word was, our intention was to hurt her and we put all the venom we could into it.
Words can not hurt you. It is the way words are used, the intentions behind their use which hurts, and then only as much as you let them. And we have set up a system which rewards people for being hurt. Would you be ok with her being expelled for shouting asshole 200 times?
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