The Pacific Northwest certainly has no shortage of outraged students. The latest student protests to make national news took place at Portland's Reed College, where over the past year, students have organized against Humanities 110, a required course that, according to the student group Reedies Against Racism, is super fucking racist.

The trouble, according a new article in The Atlantic, ramped up when a Humanities 110 professor played a nearly 40-year-old clip of Steve Martin performing a song on Saturday Night Live. The song, "King Tut," satarized a touring Tutankhamun exhibition and the "commercialization of Egyptian culture." The skit was debated in class, but apparently, the clip was traumatizing to some students. Thus began Reed College's Great Cultural Appropriation War of 2016, 2017, and probably 2018.

The whole article, by Chris Bodenner, is worth a read, but here's a choice passage:

Beginning on boycott day, RAR protested every single Hum lecture that school year. In-class protests are very rare on college campuses. During the nationwide upsurge of student activism tracing back to 2015, protesters have occupied administrative buildings, stormed into libraries, shut down visiting speakers in auditoriums, and walked out of classrooms—but they hardly ever disrupt the classroom itself. RAR has done so more than 60 times.

A Hum protest is visually striking: Up to several dozen RAR supporters position themselves alongside the professor and quietly hold signs reading “We demand space for students of color,” “We cannot be erased,” “Fuck Hum 110,” “Stop silencing black and brown voices; the rest of society is already standing on their necks,” and so on. The signs are often accompanied by photos of black Americans killed by police.

One of the first Hum professors to request that RAR not occupy the classroom was Lucía Martínez Valdivia, who said her preexisting PTSD would make it difficult to face protesters. In an open letter, RAR offered sympathy to Martínez Valdivia but then accused her of being anti-black, discriminating against those with disabilities, and engaging in gaslighting—without specifying those charges. When someone asked for specifics, a RAR leader replied, “Asking for people to display their trauma so that you feel sufficiently satisfied is a form of violence.”

But another RAR member did offer a specific via Facebook: “The appropriation of AAVE [African American Vernacular English] on her shirt during lecture: ‘Poetry is lit’ is a form of anti-blackness.”

During Martínez Valdivia’s lecture on Sappho, protesters sat together in the seats wearing all black; they confronted her after class, with at least one of them yelling at the professor about her past trauma, bringing her to tears. “I am intimidated by these students,” Martínez Valdivia later wrote, noting she is “scared to teach courses on race, gender, or sexuality, or even texts that bring these issues up in any way—and I am a gay mixed-race woman.” Such fear, she revealed in an op-ed for The Washington Post, prompted some of her colleagues— “including people of color, immigrants, and those without tenure”—to avoid lecturing altogether.

Harassing people of color to fight white supremacy? Looks like best minds of this generation choose Reed.