A little context here. The writer, one Aeman Ansari, is talking about a situation at Ryerson University in which two white student journalists showed up to cover an event organized by something called Racialized Students Collective. The white students were told they had to leave - that no white people were allowed at the event, not even student journalists to cover it.
That touched off quite the brouhaha on campus, but Ansari comes to the defense of Racialized Students Collective as well as the decision to kick the white students out. Her argument? There has to be somewhere you can be safe from the oppressors:
These spaces, which are forums where minority groups are protected from mainstream stereotypes and marginalization, are crucial to resistance of oppression and we, as a school and as a society, need to respect them.
Earlier in the week a newsroom colleague and I went to an ad-hoc committee meeting on sexual assault policy. When we arrived we were told it was a safe space, and that we would not be able to report on anything that would be discussed in the meeting.
We understood the value of these sorts of events, where people can share their common struggles. Our understanding let us attend and contribute to the conversation, even if we couldn't report about it.
We understood the people there had a right to privacy. They had a right to collectively work through the challenges society had imposed on them. They had a right to claim parts of the campus, parts of the world, for a few hours in hopes of creating broader social change.
The two students who tried to enter the RSC meeting said that they were embarrassed when they were asked to leave and that the group was being counterproductive in sectioning themselves off. Similarly, some of the comments on the piece written about these students speaks to the idea that excluding certain people from these events, this dialogue, is encouraging racial tension. Their embarrassment isn't as important as the other issues involved here.
Segregation was imposed on people of colour by people of privilege, not the other way around. The very fact that individuals organizing to help each other get through social barriers and injustices are being attacked and questioned for their peaceful assembly is proof that they were right to exclude those students.
Racialized people experience systemic discrimination on a daily basis, on many levels, and in ways that white people may never encounter. The whole point of these safe spaces is to remove that power dynamic. That's partly what makes them spaces for healing.
That second-to-last paragraph is really a piece of work. Segregation was imposed on minorities many decades ago. That's true. It has since been outlawed, and rightly so. If you insist on continuing it, that's on you. Furthermore, no one is attacking them for the "peaceful assembly." They're being questioned for excluding others on the basis of race.
Now if you just want to have a private meeting where only your members can attend, fine, have at it. All you'd have to say if a student journalist tried to walk in is that the meeting isn't open to the press.
But that's not what they did. They went off about the ominous nature of the "oppressors" and the need of their members to feel "safe" from them so they can "heal." And if the students felt embarrassed about being asked to leave - a complaint I'm having a hard time feeling sympathy for . . . if you want to be a journalist, get used to it, kid - well that pales in comparison to the far more important issues of racial oppression by the power structure or whatever.
Look, if you want to look at a couple of college-age journalists and call them oppressors from the power structure because they're white, hey, think what you want to think. But if you're afraid of people like this, you're your own problem. Black people do still face some societal disadvantages that remain from slavery and Jim Crow. That is absolutely true. But there are also a lot of people interested in helping black people to overcome those obstacles, and I'd recommend to that Racialized Students Collective that they start looking for ways to work with some of these people instead of treating them all like enemies.
