That probably wasn’t what her professors and peers wanted to hear.
Jay Stephens is a graduate of a four-year liberal arts college (she doesn’t say which one, which I can completely understand). She wrote about her “See The Light” moment in this column over at Vice, where she talks about how she grew up in a social-justice-minded household and felt that, as a black woman, she had plenty of oppression to complain about. But it was when that was the ONLY thing her college professors ever wanted to talk about – without ever offering any real solutions – that she became disillusioned with all that politically correct nonsense –
It all started with a quiet disdain for political correctness, a seed that grew—through the miracle of college—into a giant beanstalk. I quickly learned that, at liberal arts school, the general aim of each class was to identify something problematic, discuss it, and then refuse to do anything about it. We were expected to offer solutions, of course, but the only acceptable answers were noncommittal and intersectional. Any attempt to get to the actual root of a problem was generally seen as problematic too, and a politically correct policing was instituted to hinder any real solutions of important issues. Most group discussions devolved into us asking one another how to ask questions about something problematic without being problematic.
After a childhood and adolescence of being the only black kid in class, I never would have considered myself an enemy of political correctness. I was rather indignant about exposing cultural insensitivities until I was inundated with college classes that seemed dedicated to manifesting real and imagined enemies from every available shadow. So I began to check out and (much to my surprise) quietly echo the conservative sentiments against oversensitivity that I had once dismissed as bigotry.
You’ve gotta love the craptacular lectures she was subjected to while she was sorting through what her beliefs ultimately were going to be. If I had to accept values that told me watching someone masturbate on stage was totally okay, I’d rethink my priorities BIG TIME –