I’m not sure I get this student’s point. If you’ve ever visited Harvard, you know it’s a very safe campus environment.

Katherine Timpf of National Review.

Harvard Student’s Op-Ed: Our School’s ‘Safe Space’ Isn’t Safe Enough

A student at Harvard University published an op-ed on Wednesday complaining that her school’s “safe spaces” are just not safe enough.

According to Madison E. Johnson, her time spent in the “safe space” was really great at first — there were “massage circles,” “deep conversations,” and “times explicitly delineated for processing and journaling.” But then it all changed.

First, one of her fellow safe-spacers asked her if she was “a full black” — and then a white poet got on stage and said “the n-word a few times.”

Whoa.

Johnson then went into an in-depth discussion of what a “safe space” is supposed to be like, explaining that some people would define it as somewhere they can be themselves without being judged, while others would say “all it takes is for everyone to try really hard not to say anything obviously prejudiced.”

“For me, a safe space is one in which I feel that I can express all aspects of my identity without feeling that any one of those aspects will get me (including, but not limited to) judged, fired, marginalized, attacked, or killed,” she wrote. But here’s the thing. If you look at it that way, couldn’t that white student say that she wanted to come to a safe space to read her n-word poem without being “judged?”

“I’m realizing ’safe space’ might mean different things for different people,” she wrote.


 
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