In the summer months of the progressive year of 2016 one college did the absolutely unthinkable, it attacked safe spaces. The University of Chicago sent a letter to its incoming freshmen telling them that their campus was a hive of intellectual debate, reason, and free speech, scandalous. The blowback from this decision was immense. Tons of Millennials were offended and triggered by the fact that they may have to hear the opinions of people who disagree with them or hear facts, statistics, and jarring world history without trigger warnings, how weak, right? Cameron Okeke on the other hand, paints a different picture of these so called “weak Millennial snowflakes”. In his essay “I’m a black UChicago graduate. Safe spaces got me through college.” …show more content…
Like a medicine a little pathos can help you, but an over reliance can harm or even kill the point you are trying to make as I believe Okeke’s did to his otherwise well written essay. Like all poor outcomes Okeke’s use of pathos came with good intentions, he starts out fairly lax saying things like “marginalized students know that this declaration ignores the real problems on campus: sexual assault, racial profiling, and other troubling issues.” he shows that these are the bad things things that safe spaces help to prevent, which works, it helps the audience feel for the “marginalized” students and shows what they go through. When Okeke writes “If, on the other hand, you only want the boring babblings of rich, white, cis, straight men whose worst experience was burying their fourth family pet, then keep doing what you have been doing since your inception. Keep pandering to the politically incorrect and the privileged if you want, but do not expect the depth and nuance that experience brings. Don’t expect us to show up.” that statement tries to put forward that if you are straight, if you are wealthy, if you are white, or cisgendered your life experiences hold less value, your political views are misguided, and anything you have to say is incoherent babbling with no merit in today’s society. Saying the university “panders” to these vile and crass white men points to them as the villain of Okeke’s …show more content…
The argument Okeke uses is the equivalent of if he were to call a hospital a safe space and claim that this letter attacked hospitals. With very little effort and research I was able to find on The University of Chicago website that these offices, or “safe spaces” are still there and doing as good if not better than in previous years. In using all of these false examples Okeke misses the actual intention of the letter, which was that free speech needs to be protected at all costs, controversial speakers need to be free to come and be debated and ideas need to be spread for all university students to grow. The better way of going against this letter would have been saying that there could be compromise, there can still be free speech with trigger warnings and safe spaces while explaining, simply without attacking groups of people, how to accomplish