Today is a disheartening news day. As the leader of the free world claims that people need to have voting ID to buy cereal, educators around the country are being called out for acts of discrimination. Earlier today, there was the teacher in Maryland who called a man in a Walmart parking lot the N-word because she was annoyed about a parking spot and now there's a professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio(yes, a University professor! This is an educated person!) who's being called out for calling the cops on a student who had her legs up on a desk. An overreaction, to say the least, but also a racially motivated one.
The teacher, Anita Moss, had already been "on a whole tirade about how uncivil [the students] were because a few students were on their phone or not paying attention, cutting lecture time for the rest of [them] because her ego was bruised," according to one student's Tweet. The same student posted a video of the police escorting the student, Paige Burgess, from the class:
The University's president, Taylor Eighmy, has written a letter to students, laying out what they're doing to fix the situation:
We are currently conducting two separate investigations into the matter, one on potential discrimination [...] and the other on classroom management. No matter the outcome of the investigations, the incident shows issues that extend far beyond the events of yesterday. The reactions expressed through social media, emails, phone calls and group meetings I’ve attended confirm that feelings of marginalization on the part of some students—especially our African American students—are real and profound.
