re: Auburn professor doesn’t know if he can say the War in “War Eagle”

That’s a lot of words to say nothing

I graduated in the 2000's, I'd say most of my liberal arts professors were pretty clearly liberal and most of business school professors were centrists with maybe a few leaning conservative. I think that is probably the standard at most southern universities.

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”Abolish Whiteness." Second, can someone tell me what this even means?

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It means end white privilege.

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He is currently revising his dissertation into his first book, Abolition Time: Slavery’s Afterlife and the Excessive Present in Law, Literature, and Performance. The project argues that a temporality of an “excessive present” which collapses past, present, and future into the moment of the now enacts possibilities for thinking and practicing a politics of abolition that reaches towards both abstract concepts of freedom and concrete visions such as the end of prisons.

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Reading that alone should disqualify him from teaching at Auburn. It also should get the person who hired him fired.

No, he made it private after the media hoopla. Al.com did a write-up on this guy. That's how it became so known.

Yeah, I had no idea and googled it. I’m white, I’ve worked and lived in numerous states as an HR professional and an alternative school system administrator, servicing a school population mostly made of black and Hispanic students.

Racism is still a huge problem in this country and white privilege still exists. NFL is currently having to revisit the Rooney rule. I’ve had to investigate and terminate many people over the years for racist nonsense in the workplace or from social media posts.

This guy is a nut and shouldn’t be instructing at our college, but part of what he supports is that all people should be treated equitably, regardless of race, gender, etc... which I certainly support. You’re also a complete idiot if you can’t say WDE.

I’ll start it off:

I was brought up by a single mom of 3 and GI Bill privilege.

You sound entitled af.

(obvious sarcasm)

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Like clockwork, the classic "my life / my great-great grandpappy's life was hard too" responses. Trust me, I get why people have that response. I would just try to suggest to not think about it as belittling your achievements and more about the unecessary obstacles from others.

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To be clear, I agree with most of your post, but I do have problems with how these privilege conversations are usually carried out and this type of statement is a big reason why.

If the context is "being in a majority in a community carries with it an implicit advantage because people gravitate to things and ideas that are familiar to them", having a similar socioeconomic background as your community would certainly be a relevant factor in the multi-variable problem of how the society around you prejudges you. I'm not sure how you differentiate between which factor creates the relevant majority vs. minority dichotomy when there are so many factors that comprise the background of an individual. Be it how they dress, their accent, their sexual orientation, their religion, their tattoos, their race, their gender, their marital status, etc.

Clearly we should strive to remove these prejudices from our world, but I find these privilege conversations are single-variable in nature, which is such a simplified model of how we perceive each other that I'm not sure how valuable it really is. It doesn't help that the underlying phrase "privilege" and how it is thrown around is definitely accusatory in nature in many instances and gets people on the defensive immediately.