END IT NOW!
(In response to Daniel O’Connor’s Sept. 29 column, “Sticks, stones, and privilege.”)
Daniel O'Connor's "Sticks, stones, and privilege" clearly should have gone through more than a first draft.
O'Connor says that discrimination "has not been government-sanctioned since the 50's." Really, dude?
The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, which ended many forms of institutional discrimination by race, did not pass until 1964 and 1965, respectively.
O’Connor then says that we should proclaim that discrimination “is no longer socially sanctioned." Did he forget the post-9/11 shooting of Indian gas station owner Balbir Singh Sodhi?
The killer, Frank Roque, shouted, “I stand for America all the way!” as he was handcuffed. I suppose under Mr. O’Connor’s standards, he would say that since he didn’t explicitly implicate Sodhi’s race, there was no evidence of discrimination.
O’Connor seems to have trouble understanding the difference between “Black Pride” and “White Pride.”
I suppose if you ignore all accounts of history and power in America and abroad for the past several thousand years, it’s pretty easy to see two colors and ascribe no underlying meaning to them.
O'Connor, more importantly, only implicated one race in this entire article. No Latino/a pride, no Asian pride, no multiracial pride, none of that. What an uninformed oversimplification.
Moreover, recent suicides by LGBT youth across the country have shaken the naïve narrative that immutable characteristics are out of social bounds for scrutiny and hatred, even after death.
Fourteen-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer’s suicide was received at his high school’s homecoming dance with chants of “You’re better off dead, we’re glad you’re dead!”
Our imperative should be to end discrimination, wherever we find it.
Michael Wong Undergraduate Click here to subscribe to the daily State Press newsletter.
