The Washington Times reports a story about protesters on the UC Berkeley campus physically blocking white students from accessing a bridge while police stand by and watch:
Students at the University of California, Berkeley held a day of protest on Friday to demand the creation of additional “safe spaces” for transgender and nonwhite students, during which a human chain was formed on a main campus artery to prevent white students from getting to class.
The demonstrators were caught on video blocking Berkeley’s Sather Gate, holding large banners advocating the creation of physical spaces segregated by race and gender identity, including one that read “Fight 4 Spaces of Color.”
Protesters can be heard shouting “Go around!” to white students who attempt to go through the blockade, while students of color are greeted with calls of “Let him through!”
Students turned away by the mob are later shown filing through trees and ducking under branches in order to cross Strawberry Creek, which runs underneath the bridge.
The protests were a response to a Safe Space being moved from the fifth floor of a building down to the basement.
[Original version of this story had "UCLA"; corrected to: "UC Berkeley" -Ed.]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 29 2016, @08:02PM
Perhaps they wouldn't. But there's two rebuttals to that.
First, that only matters if you assume the protesters are mostly/all trans people. In reality, a typical college campus probably has more SJW types looking for a cause than transgender people, so there may well be more of them in a protest intended to rectify some injustice against transgender people than there are of the directly affected trans people, and the protest is thus liable to collectively make choices that don't actually help the intended beneficiaries.
Second, I don't think this protest is just about trans people. I'm not sure I understand the situation on campus, but AIUI both safe spaces for transgender people and safe spaces for people of color were moved to less desirable real estate (and maybe less square footage as well?) in order to make room for a for-profit bookstore on campus. So you have people who are upset about either safe space being moved, plus people who don't care about those safe spaces in particular, but are annoyed at the intrusion of an external business getting space on campus.
Well, one banner (mentioned in TFS) says "Fight 4 Spaces of color"*, and another sign says:
#FIGHT 4 QUEER&TRANS
SPACES OF COLOR
#FIGHT 4 SPACES OF COLOR
STUDENTS OVER PROFIT
Seems racial to me; "of color" is a specifically racial term, and I can't imagine they'd have chosen that wording if they just meant to suggest that the transgender safe spaces should have colorful decor.
*Trying to quote this banner in print is complicated. TFS has it as "Fight 4 Spaces of Color", but the actual banner seems to have a lowercase C. Moreover, instead of separating words with spaces (in the longstanding tradition of the patriarchy), they've chosen to jam the words together, but color them alternately red and yellow, so the banner reads "Fight4Spacesofcolor".