sechan19 | Appropriate Responses.

The last couple of weeks I've been hearing little flashes of news about Alexandra Wallace and her racist rant about Asian students in the UCLA library. And for the most part, I've ignored it because it didn't strike me as all that interesting or unusual an occurrence. Member of the privileged class becomes annoyed about something, demonstrates lack of cultural sensitivity by making racist comments, everyone gets offended. Rinse. Repeat.

In the aftermath some people made worthwhile responses to the situation, and some people devolved into equal levels of repugnance. And some people flat-out crossed the line. Ultimately, Wallace left UCLA citing death threats as her motive for giving up the ghost at school.

And the fact that she received death threats just really pisses me off. It pisses me off as much as her original youtube posting pissed me off. Because you can say anything you want about any other person you want (provided you're not slandering them or otherwise messing with their life). You shouldn't do that, of course, but you can. What you can't do is threaten to harm another person--no matter how angry they've made you. One of them is free speech; one of them is not. And for all of Alexandra Wallace's failings (of which her original youtube video demonstrates there are quite a few), crossing that vital line wasn't one of them.

However, there were interesting debates that sprung up around the issue of how people responded to her discriminative tirade. In particular, the debate on how to respond to such a rant revealed as much about our society as the rant itself did. There were penetrating looks at the problem of attempting to fight racism with sexism and the inappropriateness of making death threats in response to something like this that were really intriguing and thought-provoking. And I hope we can all learn something from this.

And at the end of the day, I'm not particularly sorry for Alexandra Wallace. In fact, I'm not sorry for her at all. I'm glad that she's feeling the consequences of her actions. Too often in this country people say racist or bigoted things and then complain that the backlash they receive violates their freedom of speech, which is hypocritical bullshit. And maybe Alexandra Wallace would have gotten away with it on those grounds if her rant had been against Muslims instead of Asians. (Just sayin'.) Then again, maybe not.

But I do wish that more people had responded to this with appropriate anger and counters--not sexism and threats of physical violence.

And in honor of that, here's someone who did respond fairly well to the situation (if you ignore that crack about makeup, that is... nobody's perfect):