This is actually the first comic of the series that doesn’t look more like a parody of PC. I enjoyed it thinking it was making fun of feminism for the longest time.
I had a lot of jokes to make about how they assume that “you are part of group X, thus you know all about them”, but none of them worked in a nice snappy way.
Probably because positive prejudice is just as big a nuanced problem as negative prejudice, and nuance is lost in brevity. And I’m already hard enough to understand without brevity getting in the way.
You see, regardless of race, gender. or anything else, always assume that a university student hasn’t been paying attention.
I really should get back to my revision now…
Oh good, I could use some counter-arguments to the “PC culture” crowd. 🙂
Also some perspective. I find your comic good for finding a new perspective on things. Especially since you always poke fun at everything, even the things you support.
The teacher-calling-on-student thing being portrayed as stereotyping troubled me, vaguely… When I read it, I asked myself, “If I were going to ask WASP poster child John Smith to comment on this topic, wouldn’t I have asked the very same question?”
The first panel doesn’t make it clear that the teacher is asking Aniyah this question because she’s part of the minority in question (though it’s clear that’s how Aniyah interpreted it) and not simply because the teacher was picking a student at random to ask. If Aniyah is in the right, here, and not just imagining things, it might be better portrayed if the teacher said something that made it clear he was calling on her because of her race. (E.g. “As her people were the ones affected by this, perhaps Aniyah could speak to the topic at hand.)
When teaching a mixed-race class, is it necessary to avoid calling on certain students for a given topic because of their ethnicity?
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away named Happy Valley, where the Lion was King, the only courses I could take were in large echoing lecture halls where football heroes had stand-ins sign attendance and take notes for them (I never understood why the notes since they seemed to know all the right answers for each test beforehand); questions were posed by students after the lecture one-on-one at the blackboard or later in the office of the graduate TA as the professor was never available for undergraduates; and yet one day a bold student raised their hand during lecture, and when they deigned to ask a question (which pointed out in a very delicate way an obvious contradiction/misstatement by the professor) without being recognized was regarded in a manner that would have impressed even Mr. Bumble, ridiculed, and further ignored. Minority students were mainly associated with the athletic department (unless they were from the Pacific Rim), and thus see above for stand-ins. So they were saved such embarrassing PC harassment. Have things changed there much since then? Probably.
I have, it was very common in my education. The teachers would have a list of students in front of them and call names at random. You didn’t answer you lost credit. You answer wrong you lost credit. Hesitated or didn’t speak loud enough and the teacher would cut you off, and you lost credit. Ah good times… of gut wrench anxiety and night sweats.
I think it’s a question how old school your college is. My teachers had the opinion that students had to prove they deserved and education, that they were willing to do the work and take the heat. They felt it was their job to try and break you because the real world is even worse. I don’t know if it’s a better method of teach but it is a method.
But yeah, without context it’s hard to tell if the teach is just a hard ass or if the question is racially motivated. Although it does sound from the lecture that this is a humanities class and those tend to use less adversarial methods of education.
At my university, at least in my field, we had regular exams. While that has potential flaws of its own, it seems to make more sense as a tool for determining credit – you’re, generally, testing the student’s understanding of the subject, rather than their ability to come up with something convincing on the spot. I studied physics, though, so maybe there are different priorities there?
Aaaaaanyway, the question doesn’t particularly need to be racially motivated, at least not explicitly. It’s not like it can only be insensitive if the professor’s specifically thinking “hmm, who should I ask about Jim Crow laws? Ah! The black girl. Her kind should know!” It could easily be an entirely subconscious thing, which wouldn’t necessarily imply a racial motivation, but would still be pretty dodgy and would be something to be aware of in the future.
It’s also worth noting that it’s Aniyah’s perspective that it’s insensitive – it’s not stated with the voice of the omniscient narrator, “this is insensitive!” Maybe there was no conscious motivation on the lecturer’s part, and maybe there wasn’t anything subconscious either; maybe the lecturer uses a random number generator to pick students when they want to ask questions, and it was a genuine and entirely innocent coincidence that she was the one called upon to answer that question…. It still makes her feel weird to be the one picked out to answer questions on racist laws in history when she’s representative of at most, unless the second panel is a really bad representation of the group,* 1/15th of the class.
Whatever the case, there are ways to address it, and none of them are glorbling^ about out of control PC culture.
*That second panel is a significant piece of context, btw – there are not very many people of colour in that panel, making it statistically unlikely (again, unless the panel is badly unrepresentative of the rest of the lecture hall) that she’d be the one picked out for that particular quesiton.
Ooooh. Can you work pinkwashing into this one? i’m an ace and my BFF is bi and we are both POC and sick of the whole charade. Like, why do white gay guys get all the love even when some of them say we don’t exist? DJ is cool, but it would be really sweet if you could address this.
Love this. My college had 8 female students of African American descent and about fifty-something non-white students total. We used to laugh how campus photographers bent over backwards to make sure they had shots of all 3 non-white students in a given area for the brochures.
Me at school:
Teacher: Can anyone give us their thoughts on Hitler? Maybe… Lily? Or Hunter? Or Brad?
Yeah. Call on the Jews. Nice.
Also: Class, what do you think about the Dred Scott decision? Maybe Tanya can answer? Or Aaliyah? Tomas?
Wow, call on the black ones. Classy. This is truth right here.
I’m with the horribly out of date, defrosted peaches monster – “really insensitive sometimes”?! Woah there, lady, put the pitchfork down! 😛
So basically it’s Hedorah but from toxic culture? I’m game.
(Oh alright, I do prefer Hedorah’s design, but to be fair it’s only one frame so far)
I never heard of Hedorah before this moment, but yeah, that’s about right.
Welcome back…and next thing you know, that toxic sludge will be running for President on the GOP side…
Thanks! Any resembles to IRL Republican presidential candidates is *purely* coincidental.
For one, ol’ Sludgy there doesn’t have a toupee on…
Poor girl. And eww. :/ Is it toxic sludge or just a gross pile of racist sludge?
Stay tuned…
Is there a difference?
One is bad for your body, the other for your mind. Depending on exposure and water used to counteract.
Well one will outright kill you. The other is toxic sludge.
*fistbump*
*fistbump*
I think it’s just Rush Limbaugh in a rubber kaiju suit.
(And welcome back!)
Great to see you back. Time to see that evil Pc culture get defeated by the noble sludge monster, I mean that’s what’s going on right ;).
This is actually the first comic of the series that doesn’t look more like a parody of PC. I enjoyed it thinking it was making fun of feminism for the longest time.
I had a lot of jokes to make about how they assume that “you are part of group X, thus you know all about them”, but none of them worked in a nice snappy way.
Probably because positive prejudice is just as big a nuanced problem as negative prejudice, and nuance is lost in brevity. And I’m already hard enough to understand without brevity getting in the way.
You see, regardless of race, gender. or anything else, always assume that a university student hasn’t been paying attention.
I really should get back to my revision now…
Oh good, I could use some counter-arguments to the “PC culture” crowd. 🙂
Also some perspective. I find your comic good for finding a new perspective on things. Especially since you always poke fun at everything, even the things you support.
One thing that always confuses me – is PC culture in any way related to the PC master race?
The teacher-calling-on-student thing being portrayed as stereotyping troubled me, vaguely… When I read it, I asked myself, “If I were going to ask WASP poster child John Smith to comment on this topic, wouldn’t I have asked the very same question?”
The first panel doesn’t make it clear that the teacher is asking Aniyah this question because she’s part of the minority in question (though it’s clear that’s how Aniyah interpreted it) and not simply because the teacher was picking a student at random to ask. If Aniyah is in the right, here, and not just imagining things, it might be better portrayed if the teacher said something that made it clear he was calling on her because of her race. (E.g. “As her people were the ones affected by this, perhaps Aniyah could speak to the topic at hand.)
When teaching a mixed-race class, is it necessary to avoid calling on certain students for a given topic because of their ethnicity?
I’ve never once attended a class in a large lecture hall in which the professor called on students at random.
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away named Happy Valley, where the Lion was King, the only courses I could take were in large echoing lecture halls where football heroes had stand-ins sign attendance and take notes for them (I never understood why the notes since they seemed to know all the right answers for each test beforehand); questions were posed by students after the lecture one-on-one at the blackboard or later in the office of the graduate TA as the professor was never available for undergraduates; and yet one day a bold student raised their hand during lecture, and when they deigned to ask a question (which pointed out in a very delicate way an obvious contradiction/misstatement by the professor) without being recognized was regarded in a manner that would have impressed even Mr. Bumble, ridiculed, and further ignored. Minority students were mainly associated with the athletic department (unless they were from the Pacific Rim), and thus see above for stand-ins. So they were saved such embarrassing PC harassment. Have things changed there much since then? Probably.
I have, it was very common in my education. The teachers would have a list of students in front of them and call names at random. You didn’t answer you lost credit. You answer wrong you lost credit. Hesitated or didn’t speak loud enough and the teacher would cut you off, and you lost credit. Ah good times… of gut wrench anxiety and night sweats.
I think it’s a question how old school your college is. My teachers had the opinion that students had to prove they deserved and education, that they were willing to do the work and take the heat. They felt it was their job to try and break you because the real world is even worse. I don’t know if it’s a better method of teach but it is a method.
But yeah, without context it’s hard to tell if the teach is just a hard ass or if the question is racially motivated. Although it does sound from the lecture that this is a humanities class and those tend to use less adversarial methods of education.
At my university, at least in my field, we had regular exams. While that has potential flaws of its own, it seems to make more sense as a tool for determining credit – you’re, generally, testing the student’s understanding of the subject, rather than their ability to come up with something convincing on the spot. I studied physics, though, so maybe there are different priorities there?
Aaaaaanyway, the question doesn’t particularly need to be racially motivated, at least not explicitly. It’s not like it can only be insensitive if the professor’s specifically thinking “hmm, who should I ask about Jim Crow laws? Ah! The black girl. Her kind should know!” It could easily be an entirely subconscious thing, which wouldn’t necessarily imply a racial motivation, but would still be pretty dodgy and would be something to be aware of in the future.
It’s also worth noting that it’s Aniyah’s perspective that it’s insensitive – it’s not stated with the voice of the omniscient narrator, “this is insensitive!” Maybe there was no conscious motivation on the lecturer’s part, and maybe there wasn’t anything subconscious either; maybe the lecturer uses a random number generator to pick students when they want to ask questions, and it was a genuine and entirely innocent coincidence that she was the one called upon to answer that question…. It still makes her feel weird to be the one picked out to answer questions on racist laws in history when she’s representative of at most, unless the second panel is a really bad representation of the group,* 1/15th of the class.
Whatever the case, there are ways to address it, and none of them are glorbling^ about out of control PC culture.
*That second panel is a significant piece of context, btw – there are not very many people of colour in that panel, making it statistically unlikely (again, unless the panel is badly unrepresentative of the rest of the lecture hall) that she’d be the one picked out for that particular quesiton.
^It’s a creepy sludge monster. Creepy sludge monsters glorble. True fact.
Ooooh. Can you work pinkwashing into this one? i’m an ace and my BFF is bi and we are both POC and sick of the whole charade. Like, why do white gay guys get all the love even when some of them say we don’t exist? DJ is cool, but it would be really sweet if you could address this.
Love this. My college had 8 female students of African American descent and about fifty-something non-white students total. We used to laugh how campus photographers bent over backwards to make sure they had shots of all 3 non-white students in a given area for the brochures.
Me at school:
Teacher: Can anyone give us their thoughts on Hitler? Maybe… Lily? Or Hunter? Or Brad?
Yeah. Call on the Jews. Nice.
Also: Class, what do you think about the Dred Scott decision? Maybe Tanya can answer? Or Aaliyah? Tomas?
Wow, call on the black ones. Classy. This is truth right here.
Teacher: Class, we’re going to learn about the Vietnam War. Alex Nguyen, what can you tell us about it? [True story from a friend.]