Like it or not, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has had an enormous influence on academia, alternately portraying campuses as hotbeds of racism where paper lantern hangers and loose lighting cables are mistaken for nooses but students feel perfectly empowered to present administrators not only with a lengthy list of race-based demands but also a bill for the time they took to compile it.
Asian students are taking a cue from #BlackLivesMatter, learning, for example, to speak up against “culturally appropriative” offerings in the dining hall that are “disrespectful” to their heritage, both in their preparation and cultural meaning.
Campus Reform reports today that Japanese students at the University of California, Davis, consider themselves “heavily traumatized” by a party game in which students dressed in padded sumo wrester “fat suits.” Oh, right, the game also promotes fat shaming.
The sumo wrestling game with fat suits? It's traumatizing UC Davis: https://t.co/GCAcnNBpAr #tcot pic.twitter.com/Qhhu8sNLyW
— Campus Reform (@campusreform) March 15, 2016
Anthony Gockowski writes that the activity, sponsored by the Associated Students of the University of California-Davis, has inspired at least one student to demand reparations for those traumatized by the spectacle. “February 19th was Remembrance Day for Japanese internment during WWII, and some of my Japanese friends were heavily traumatized by seeing their culture mocked in such a clearly racist fashion,” the student wrote on his Facebook page.
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A student attempted to collect "raparations payments" after UC Davis had "Sumo Suits" on campus: https://t.co/8VM70UfC7l
— Campus Reform (@campusreform) March 15, 2016
Another student argued that the sumo suits were “an expression of white-supremacist anti-Asian structural racism,” portraying Asian Americans as “mute, hapless victims.”
The ASUCD has apologized for its “egregious oversight” in renting the sumo suits for its campus block party, although a demand stands for ASUCD members to report for reeducation; that is, “complete cultural competency training.”
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