I agree that in the face of bullying or racist speech, we should try to thicken our skin and move on with our lives and understand that the problem is on the part of the perpetrators, not with me. But that doesn't mean I don't think we should try to get rid of bullying and racism in our society..
I hate to break it to you but there are some serious issues with the justice system. In usa at least.
Why?
Congratulations on being such a paragon of excellence. Why should we require such virtue of all humans? Instead of expecting you to develop a thick skin (are you sure this is a good thing?), why can't we try to reform your aggressors in the first place?
Because modern society and civilization rests entirely on the ability of people to tolerate being offended. It's what made the enlightenment possible. It's what makes scientific inquiry possible. It underlies every improvement to the human condition, because any new idea is offensive to someone.
If you can't do that then we will try to help you improve yourself if you can (and you want to), and try to give you a place to have a comfortable life if you can't. But there isn't and can't be a place for you at a university, where accommodating you would disrupt important work that will ultimately improves everyone's lives.
Imagine you have an API that receives a POST with some JSON. Every time your API receives a malformed POST, your application crashes or hangs. Do you a) try to do your best to make sure no one ever POSTS to your uri with malformed data, or do you b) rewrite your API to be more robust and send back an error code when malformed input is received rather than crashing?
Does that analogy make any sense or is it too far fetched?
I don't believe this is true. Human behavior can change. Relative to its levels 500 years ago, we've all-but eliminated physical violence in first-world countries. I don't think it's much of a stretch to believe we can all-but eliminate emotional violence as well.
We're dealing with human beings, so I didn't read your JSON analogy, sorry.
Unreliable, unpredictable, illogical, making no sense and you never has exact idea which rules they obey at the moment and what output they will generate.
So human beings indeed sound like Javascript or PHP ... [1]
[1] 10 years experience with php and JS.
It's also a lot easier to change yourself than every other human on the planet.
What gave you that impression?
> It's also a lot easier to change yourself than every other human on the planet.
I agree, but that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.
Because "we" are not special. "We" are not better than anyone else. It's none of our business to try and change how other people are.
Because someone somewhere defines something about another group of people as aggression and we can go "reforming" them with impunity. Take a wild guess what the ranges of something could be ...
> I grew up being called Gwailo, Gaijin, Auslander, and when I finally returned to the anglosphere in my early teens, I was still an outsider as I spoke with a weird accent and was by that point a through-and-through third culture kid. I got the crap bullied out of me
I don't see any value in accepting this behavior. What harm is there in trying to eliminate it?
I'm a white male, but I grew up being called Gwailo, Gaijin, Auslander, and when I finally returned to the anglosphere in my early teens, I was still an outsider as I spoke with a weird accent and was by that point a through-and-through third culture kid. I got the crap bullied out of me, and eventually figured out that it only hurt if I took it to heart. I learned to pity those whose worlds were so small that they could only take satisfaction from being cruel to me. It was their problem, not mine.
Folks need to have thicker skin, and realise that not everything is about them. In fact, very little is ever about you, most of what people say and do are manifestations of their own thoughts and emotional issues. Physical violence is of course something that needs to be fought against (and this is why we have criminal justice systems which typically take this sort of thing perfectly seriously), but you can only be the victim of "verbal violence" if you choose to take the position of victim.