[-empyre-] under the gun

[empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au]

I do feel I have to say this now. I respect the moderation of this list, 
so I did not make a big deal of it when Murat bounced a contribution of 
mine early Wednesday morning. The rejection: "While your post writes 
about a seismic event, it is completely off the topic of
this week's event." My response was to Alan's heartfelt lament about the 
events of Tuesday night, and there have been Trump related, political 
responses since then. To be fair, maybe I was off topic if we parse hard 
enough, an activity I am totally not interested in in any case.

The post was very controversial indeed, about the important need to 
protect people right now, and to organize community self defense as the 
first priority. By Thursday, one of my students (a woman of color, 
though you might have guessed that) had already had rocks thrown at her 
car by a white man in another car who was yelling something 
incomprehensible through closed windows and road noise. Her response to 
the incident is most inspiring! I found her in the undergrad computer 
lab the following day - a national holiday - working on her parallel 
compute project. She told me, we can't let them take away our education! 
I nearly broke into tears.

My point is, maybe we are not really ready for what is about to happen. 
We don't want to discuss some very hard realities that exist on the 
ground. By "we" I mean specifically the kinds of liberal intellectuals 
and artists who inhabit this list. And especially I mean those most like 
myself: whites who feel less under the gun (literally) today than our 
brothers and sisters who are currently active targets. Not that I know 
exactly what to do, I admit. I just have some ideas, maybe worth 
rejection as ideas, and my post was a call to think through a very hard 
situation in a very serious way that as I perhaps indicated, will be 
uncomfortable to most. Assuming that I might have had a legitimate point 
of view, I will leave it to the list moderators to decide if that post 
has any merit.

above all stay safe,
Brett Stalbaum

On 11/13/2016 10:54 AM, Murat Nemet-Nejat wrote:
>
>
> Hi everybody, since the beginning of the month, every time someone 
> encountered an idea or subject, or image one disagreed with, the 
> reaction has been one of outrage and dismissive withdrawal or 
> one-liners instead of engaging with the adverse statement or object, 
> maybe assuming that other *might* have a legitimate point of view. 
> This is extremely unfortunate

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