Safe spaces don't want your privilege

By now, most Columbia residents will have encountered the controversial “safe space” flier. Printed in the bright pink color of Everyone Allied Against Homophobia’s “Safe Space” flier, the Columbia University College Republicans flier criticizes supposedly exclusionary safe spaces like those of Stephen Donaldson and Malcolm X lounges. However, its critique mistakes collective, identity-based activism for divisive victim politics and perpetuates the privilege-based power structures that safe spaces subvert.

First, the flier criticizes safe spaces for “suggest[ing] that the rest of the campus is in some way dangerous.” That’s partly the point: To think of America, or Columbia, as a non-racist and non-homophobic sanctuary is dangerously naïve. Safe spaces remind us that discrimination exists, even if we’re lucky or privileged enough not to experience it firsthand. The creators of CUCR’s flier forget, however, that no safe space pretends or aspires to be the only discrimination-free zone. Rather, safe spaces provide one of many havens for minorities, no matter what happens outside of the room’s walls.

Additionally, by alleging that safe spaces “legitimize a mentality of on-campus victimization,” CUCR insinuates that such feelings are wrong and invalid, that no one has the right to feel victimized on campus. This ignores, shames, and—most ironically—excludes students who are actually harassed by their peers on the basis of their identity. This particularly noxious type of victim blaming has no place on campus, much less on a flier that decries safe spaces for their exclusionary nature.

However, the entire debate—including Sarah Ngu’s otherwise excellent editorial last Friday—has missed another crucial reason to protect safe spaces. I’ve already discussed how safe spaces provide minorities with repression- and oppression-free zones in which to explore identities. Secondly, safe spaces subvert the status quo insofar as they exist as spaces created by minorities, for minorities.

Safe spaces give minorities a much-needed escape from white and hetero-normativity, which is epitomized by non-minorities’ undue exercise of privilege in minority conversations. Take the following example: In the midst of a conversation about the racialization of poverty, a white person asserts that white people are poor, too. While the statement in and of itself is correct, it is irrelevant to the topic and effectively shuts down the conversation. Moreover, while this kind of defensive response can be made in good faith, it is too often accompanied by truly racist or otherwise discriminatory allegations: for example, that race has nothing to do with poverty, and that colored people have nothing to complain about.

Safe spaces counteract this problem—they provide sanctuary from these typical privileged/minority interactions, in which privileged people silence minority conversations through the conscious or unconscious exertion of privilege. Moreover, they allow minorities to freely discuss discrimination, identity, and other topics with people who truly do check their privilege at the door. No longer obliged to justify, cater, or defend their discussions to privileged people, minorities can focus on their own matters.

Conversations with our white, heterosexual, and/or male peers should and must happen if we ever aim to dismantle the status quo. However, safe spaces are not the place for these conversations. Moreover, they are not places of victimization and differentiation. They are havens from discrimination, places to accept and grapple with identity in all its complexity. Inclusive societies, such as the one CUCR espouses, cannot be forged by naïvely pretending that discrimination doesn’t happen. But by demonstrating solidarity with minority groups, and by questioning our own privilege and challenging others’, we can strive for a world in which every space truly is safe.

The author is a Columbia College sophomore majoring in English.