A Student From India Wonders At Woke Sensitivities

Within India’s cultural context I was seen as a liberal, so when I came to America for college it was instinctive for me to identify with liberals there, too. But, when I got to campus, I realized wokeness was vastly different from my classical liberal values. Progressives back home fight for women to have fundamental rights, while progressives on my campus hang pictures of Mao in their dorm room.

I remember being handed a 15 page list of words I can and cannot use during a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion orientation for a campus job as a biology teaching assistant. I couldn’t say “born male,” I had to say “sex assigned at birth male.” “Ladies and gentlemen” should be replaced with “folks,” and “opposite sexes” should be changed to “all genders.”

‘In a mandatory orientation program, I was told that a professor complimenting an international student’s English would be racist. Incidentally, this happened to me in the past, and I took it as a compliment rather than an insult. In moments like these, I’ve seen just how much the woke worldview can trivialize actual bigotry. Back home, bigotry manifests in serious forms — even physically, like rape culture. Seeing that be conflated with relatively benign inconveniences on college campuses is hard for me to swallow.

Another time, my professor taught the class how to find what “triggers” them. Growing up on the streets of Delhi, there are triggers everywhere you look — so-called “microaggressions” are nothing compared to animal carcasses on the streets and malnourished children begging at every red light. I don’t know how my peers who treat every minor insult as a microaggression will survive outside the gates of their liberal campus.