#multicultural center

Going back to school, I plan to join one of our college's multicultural clubs. Unironically, I am member of which each one protects.

There’s a factor that I personally think plays a role here, but is also hard to measure honestly and relies on extending charity that is likely undeserved: to what extent is the difference of opinion regarding discrimination one isn’t part of or along lines one disagrees with, and to what extent is it a hatred of euphemisms? I, for one, lean towards the latter. “Multicultural center” is the kind of thing that degrades language and society by being an implicit lie. It’s not honestly multicultural because we know what cultures count and don’t count, and treating “multicultural center” that way is kinda sorta racist-phobic-whatever in that it defines all other cultures against the “standard” of some vaguely-defined “white culture” that maybe doesn’t really exist but is also maybe the root of all evil. Is that healthy, or useful, to group students by their non-whiteness? There’s something perverse about the way society has accepted this particular wink-wink, nudge-nudge. While a frame can be drawn to be negative or positive, and it’s easy to redraw frames to reverse the polarity, I wonder if there’s less resistance to explicit for-discrimination compared to this implicit against-discrimination. A mens center is not the same as a non-womens center, like a multicultural center is not a black student center. I recall my university had many such networking groups- a Black Student Union, Christian Student Union, an equivalent for Muslims that I’m forgetting the name, Hillel House, International Student Organization, etc. I don’t think there were mens and womens groups other than frats/sororities though. The finer-grained groupings avoided this issue of “this group is explicitly named to admit everyone, but implicitly limited, and if you don’t play by the unstated rules you’re a troll.” Of course, it’s very easy for people to say they prefer this version, but in practice they react just as poorly. Hence, perhaps I’m extending too much charity and simply projecting my own frustration with such terminology, when others might have a different problem with it. Huh… I bet the explicit/implicit communication dichotomy could be connected to the male/female education split too, and how this reinforces as a feedback loop. I’ll leave that as an exercise for someone else. It’s also kind of a “spectrumy” complaint to dislike society’s implicit lies, isn’t it? Having to learn all those extra rules the hard way.