The concept of 'Safe Spaces'

[Arkhangel]

I both agree and disagree with parts of this article, but either way it's an interesting read.

[Altherion]

Yes, that article is interesting:

The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments “troubling” or “triggering,” a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. Emma Hall, a junior, rape survivor and “sexual assault peer educator” who helped set up the room and worked in it during the debate, estimates that a couple of dozen people used it. At one point she went to the lecture hall — it was packed — but after a while, she had to return to the safe space. “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,” Ms. Hall said.

I suppose we can treat college students the way kindergarteners are treated, but I'm not sure what good it does -- they'll have to go out into the world eventually and the world is most definitely not a safe place in any sense of the word.

[TrackerNeil]

I both agree and disagree with parts of this article, but either way it's an interesting read.

It is, yes, although I'm not sure free speech is quite that endangered, on college campuses or anywhere else, for that matter. However, I sympathize with complaints about terms like "the N word" or "the C word" or whatever else. If we're adult enough to clinically discuss these epithets we're adult enough to handle actually hearing them. That doesn't mean we should brandish them like weapons, but neither should we treat them like the Black Speech of Mordor, the very utterance of which causes calamity.

[Arkhangel]

I thought the point about infantilisation was interesting (surely the author is exaggerating when she says a 'safe space' for adults included play-doh, colouring books, bubbles and cookies, right?) and relates to your point about "N words" and "C words", TrackerNeil. Do we expect that people who want to be recognised and respected as adults should be able to hear confronting, perhaps even hurtful ideas and respond to them maturely?

I think so, yes, particularly in instances where they have the clear option to avoid engaging with those ideas if they choose. In the example in the article I linked to above, those who didn't feel that they could handle the debate on sexual assault clearly had the option of just not going. The kindergarten-esque 'safe space' was for people who chose to attend the debate. Having made that choice, shouldn't they as adults take responsibility for the consequences? Of course they should seek help if they need it, but the assumption that particularly that kind of safe space should just be provided to them seems both patronising and, yeah, infantilising to me.

Thinking it over, I suppose what I'm saying is that I see the value of clearly-marked safe spaces in instances where people are continually and inescapably subjected to whatever the damaging influence or idea is, like racism or sexism or homophobia. I don't think that "pop-up" safe spaces in response to one-off events which people are easily able to avoid, or which in fact they have to go out of their way to attend, are equally valid.

Edit: I also have some thoughts about the construction of victimhood and therefore, correspondingly the construction of protectors and power dynamics there, but I don't have time to get them down in a coherent way before work :p

[karaddin]

Personally despite not having them personally targeted at me, in most contexts I find both slurs used for girls like me extremely triggering. They instantly make me feel unsafe, and remind me that to the majority of even western society girls like me are freaks, detested and fair game for ridicule. I could handle their usage in a discussion of them, provided it's not an attempt to legitimise their usage (unless in a "we should try reclaim it" for t-word, s-word just needs to die - it is inherently misgendering and disrespectful and cannot be reclaimed). I certainly cannot handle hearing or seeing them in an every day context without my earlier description happening, the same is true of my old name (referred to as dead name) and male pronouns. You can tell me I should be more adult, but I simply can't. That's part of my point about an echo chamber being impossible, I can't even avoid my family screwing up occasionally and using the latter two, let alone go out in the wider world and have everything cater to me.

The thread seemed to be asking about the concept of safe spaces in general and I have more been arguing that rather than the specific example, the argument that they are not legitimate is one that I have seen time and time again so I'm leery of gettig drawn into it in any great depth, normally used to argue that we shouldn't even be allowed to have things like the GaymerX convention and that isn't even exclusionary, nor are most safe spaces that I'm familiar with.

If you want an example of an exclusionary safe space I disagree with though I'd go with MichFest, but that's as much because their policy is transphobic as fuck and offensive to both trans women and trans men (by allowing trans men to attend they are still denying their identity).

[Fez]

I'm massively against the concept of safe spaces; even in private really, but obviously people/groups have the right to organize as they want in private. I think groups that have a history of being oppressed/abused/etc. should certainly have protections, but the whole idea of safe spaces is incredibly problematic. It leads to things like this

Last Monday, about thirty Northwestern anti-rape activists marched to their school’s administrative center carrying mattresses and pillows. The event was a deliberate echo of the performance art project of Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz, who is lugging a mattress everywhere she goes on campus for a year to draw attention to the university’s failure to expel her alleged rapist. At Northwestern, the target of the protest was not a person accused of assault, but the provocative feminist film professor Laura Kipnis. Her offense was penning a February essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, titled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe,” which argues against her school’s ban on sex between professors and students, and more broadly against the growing obsession with trauma and vulnerability among feminists on campus.

“If this is feminism, it’s feminism hijacked by melodrama,” she writes. “The melodramatic imagination’s obsession with helpless victims and powerful predators is what’s shaping the conversation of the moment, to the detriment of those whose interests are supposedly being protected, namely students. The result? Students’ sense of vulnerability is skyrocketing.”

Including, apparently, their vulnerability to articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education. As the protesters wrote on a Facebook page for their event, they wanted the administration to do something about “the violence expressed by Kipnis’ message.” Their petition called for “swift, official condemnation of the sentiments expressed by Professor Kipnis in her inflammatory article,” and demanded “that in the future, this sort of response comes automatically.” (University President Morton Schapiro told The Daily Northwestern, a student newspaper, that he would consider it, and the students will soon be meeting with the school’s Vice President for Student Affairs to further press their case.) Jazz Stephens, one of the march’s organizers, described Kipnis’s ideas as “terrifying.” Another student told The Daily Northwestern that she was considering bringing a formal complaint because she believes that Kipnis was mocking her concerns about being triggered in a film class, concerns she’d confided privately. “I would like to see some sort of repercussions just so she understands the effect something like this has on her students and her class,” said the student, who Kipnis hadn’t named.

and this.

A socialist organizer friend of mine weighs in on the fourth point. I read it and….huh. It kinda does sound like the poster is blaming white LGBTQ+ individuals for their own oppression. I mean, I can kinda see the point (these struggles are connected, and one oppression fuels others), but it was made in such a bombastically ridiculous way as to lose the point entirely. And knowing the struggles that white LGBTQ+ youth endure in the South, this particular admonishment came across as being very unfeeling and insensitive.

The response that he gets from others? Google It, basically. Maybe I should not have done this, but I basically told the person who said that to stuff it. Like, this mess gets very old, very fast. When another person, a queer Black woman, came in and left a big block of text stating that it was perfectly within her right to tell people to Google It, and how I was apparently devaluing intracommunity work by stating that it is an organizer’s job to educate, I stated the following:

Everyone cannot be an organizer. Fine. But please, do not politicize your laziness and comfort.

Her response?

Did you just call me lazy? Did you not hear me say that I am a queer Black woman….

What conversation is there to be had around that? It is as if the mere existence of her identity inoculates her from any critique. How did we get here?

Safe spaces are just a way for people to cocoon themselves from things they don't want to hear. Certainly, when that's oppression or violent things they should have the right to be free of that, but there's already other mechanisms in place to do that. The problem is, safe spaces are so much more than that, they let people avoid opposing view points, criticism, challenges, etc. and wrap themselves in this warped cocoon of reality that leads them to taking actions that further marginalize and sabotage their positions (e.g. rejecting potential allies over perceived apostasies).

[The Killer Snark]

Absolutely. That's a position that's proved whenever you hear some extremist ranting on Tumblr and Twitter nowadays. When you answer back (quite civilly) to one of their prejudiced idiocies, they just block your comments instead of giving an intelligent reply.

[karaddin]

How on earth are either of those examples of safe spaces?

ETA: Killer Snark, your perfectly civil response may look identical to the way they've had a conversation already dozens of times and lost patience for it, so they don't even bother trying anymore. Blame the fuckwits, not those who grow tired of wasting time beating their heads against a wall.

But you know, you can also be awfully insulting while being perfectly polite.

[The Killer Snark]

Because they are examples of how extremism of opinion can result from a process of eliminating other society-representing opinions in a spirit of one sided debate. Don't get me wrong. I think it's perfectly acceptable to have safe spaces for rape victims, etc, but I think the use of these within more ideological areas of society is overextending itself a bit.

[Fez]

Because they are examples of how extremism of opinion can result from a process of eliminating other society-representing opinions in a sprit of one sided debate.

Exactly. I suspect that most of the people mentioned in those examples would not be taking the stances they are, were it not for coddling themselves in safe spaces throughout their formative years. Those aren't safe spaces themselves, and I didn't say they were, they are the result of safe spaces. Its important for people to be challenged and face conflicting view points, because when they aren't, they stop respecting the value or legitimacy of other points of view and support censoring or silencing anything and everything that doesn't fit their preconceived notions.

[karaddin]

But neither of those examples are resulting from safe spaces. You can't just say "safe spaces are echo chambers, here are two examples of why echo chambers are bad" as proof safe spaces are bad when you've never shown they are echo chambers. They aren't. You get to take brief refuge in them, then you come back out into the real world and are faced with people telling you how wrong you are all the time.

Even that you are wrong for wanting that brief respite in the first place.

And at Fez - I'm the advocate for safe spaces in this thread, does it look like I'm hiding from alternative points of view? You can't fucking live in safe spaces.

[Altherion]

I think they are referring to the NYT article which addresses this issue:

But the notion that ticklish conversations must be scrubbed clean of controversy has a way of leaking out and spreading. Once you designate some spaces as safe, you imply that the rest are unsafe. It follows that they should be made safer.

...

In an interview, Mr. Shapiro said, “If the point of a safe space is therapy for people who feel victimized by traumatization, that sounds like a great mission.” But a safe-space mentality has begun infiltrating classrooms, he said, making both professors and students loath to say anything that might hurt someone’s feelings. “I don’t see how you can have a therapeutic space that’s also an intellectual space,” he said.

[sologdin]

y'all are smoking crack with the unilateral debate thing. we might in this connection take note of the cappy media for the last 100 years. the point of 'safe space' is that the majoritarian position is inescapable, and it always already structures the minoritarian position, which acts as a response thereto. even where the participants of the alleged safe space do not mouth the majoritarian position, they still as yet carry it with them; they are certainly aware of it; there is no risk that they will forget the traditionalist rightwing ideas that apparently are at the greatest risk if even one statistically insignificant group tries to talk about something else for a moment.

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

I'm with Karaddin on this one. I don't see presenting two examples of people taking positions that you happen to disagree with as being any meaningful kind of condemnation of "safe" spaces (whatever that means, it's a term I dislike).

I do not, necessarily, have any issue with people forming exclusionary, private groups with others based upon a similar set of narrow characteristics to discuss, commiserate and empathize with, even when the focus is on empathy and complaining and being supportive. I think that there can be perfectly valid and perfectly good reasons to do this.

I just don't think that these types of groups should be officially sanctioned by a public university. Public institutions should be governed by non-discrimination policies, and these kinds of groups are inherently discriminatory. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing - my tolerance for private, associational discrimination is pretty high, even when I might disagree with the basis for the discrimination (and there are many situations where I wouldn't disagree with the basis of the discrimination - as FB initially noted in the thread, the exclusion of men from a private group where female victims of male sexual assault gather for support).

The idea that one might oppose these private groups because of the impression that they are "echo chambers" seems woefully misguided to me. Certainly, we can object to overbroad social pressures against reasoned, polite disagreement without unnecessarily condemning any particular type of group. Because obviously, these kinds of social restrictions crop up all the time in all sorts of different types of social situations, and it seems kind of silly to project one particular fear onto millions of small associational groups that, by necessity, are going to be incredibly diverse.

[Fragile Bird]

Fez, I have great sympathy for that professor.

I think my position is hardening about the issue - there are very few groups I would give 'safe spaces' to, victims of assault, for example. But the for the rest of them I am suspect I would suggest that open dialogue might be a better route to take, and organizing a support group that wasn't exclusionary. I think groups are within their bounds to set rules that should work to keep the group safer, like expelling people who show up to disrupt a meeting. Or making membership numbers small, so a trustworthy atmosphere can develop.

I really don't understand the concept of having a public meeting where you exclude people along certain criteria, like skin colour, then up the ante by saying no reporters, either.

[TerraPrime]

It's quite clear that the majority has no idea about the experience of someone like me, and speaking to them about it often leads to them defending, minimizing or excusing blatantly *ist things that happened or were said to me.

You mean like in this thread, from some users, who so patiently and paternalistic inform us how we need to not hide from challenging viewpoints, as if in this fucking world we have a fucking chance of hiding from the viewpoint that racial minority/LBGT people are defective/inferior? Oh no, let's not run the risk of coddling all those minorities into thinking that the world is fair. Think of the chilll-drun.

Yes, because, as we all know, the fall into the "echoing chamber" where everything is hunky-fucking-dory teeters on the knife-thin edge of a college campus student group meeting.

Give me a fucking break and take the concern trolling to /dev/null/void.

ETA

Parts of discussion are also as predictable as that-thing-which-is-highly-predictable. It's the "why do black people have a black history month" and "why can't we have a straight pride week" writ large.

[TrackerNeil]

I thought the point about infantilisation was interesting (surely the author is exaggerating when she says a 'safe space' for adults included play-doh, colouring books, bubbles and cookies, right?) and relates to your point about "N words" and "C words", TrackerNeil. Do we expect that people who want to be recognised and respected as adults should be able to hear confronting, perhaps even hurtful ideas and respond to them maturely?

Let me be clear: I do not support the casual use of epithets, and I'm completely supportive of trigger warnings in this regard. What I mean here is that if I were moderating a discussion about racism, sexism, whatever, I would advise participants that we're eschewing placeholder terms, so that those who don't want to deal with that can leave. After all, we shouldn't be trying to press peoples' buttons, yes?

[Fez]

And at Fez - I'm the advocate for safe spaces in this thread, does it look like I'm hiding from alternative points of view? You can't fucking live in safe spaces.

No, I don't think that at all. And while I haven't interacted with you a ton on the board, but from what I do know, I certainly don't think you're stuck in a safe space. I'd say the same thing about most people from a minority/vulnerable group that are in their late-20s or older.

However, I think among those younger than that, especially those at college, there is a very different view point; one that is attempting to use oppression/victimization as justification for totalitarianism. The atmosphere on too many campuses is toxic these days, stifling debate, criticism, and critical thinking in the name of creating safe spaces for students.

And throwing out comparisons to "white history month" or "men's rights" is a complete strawman. There's a massive difference between not acknowledging that a history of oppression and violence exists and needs to rectified, and not acknowledging the right of people to punish others because their feelings (and only their feelings) were hurt.

[Larry of the Lawn]

I think what a support group really needs, is an outsider like me 'splainin to them what's up.

[TrackerNeil]

I think my position is hardening about the issue - there are very few groups I would give 'safe spaces' to, victims of assault, for example. But the for the rest of them I am suspect I would suggest that open dialogue might be a better route to take, and organizing a support group that wasn't exclusionary. I think groups are within their bounds to set rules that should work to keep the group safer, like expelling people who show up to disrupt a meeting. Or making membership numbers small, so a trustworthy atmosphere can develop.

I see what you're saying, but it's a tricky line to walk. You want to be inclusive, yes, but at the same time you don't want the safe space taken over by those who have no need for the space. Let's face it; there are some people who just don't get privilege: white, male, cis-gendered, heterosexual, etc. They are ignorant (sometimes willfully so) of the benefits of privilege and don't care to learn, and you don't want those kinds of people using the safe space as a venue for not all men or whatever other privileged objections they want to raise. So it's trip between Scylla and Charybdis, and we don't always get it right, but that doesn't mean the journey is doomed.