First Amendment Day panel addresses use of trigger warnings

Student panelists debated if UNC should support trigger warnings, safe spaces and regulation of free speech on First Amendment Day at the panel “Trigger Warnings, Safe Spaces and ‘Special Snowflakes.’ ”

Panelist and third-year law student Caleb Johnson said everyone is a minority, even if their minority status is being left-handed.

“Can we as an institution be sensitive to every minority, every feeling, every possible offense out there without binding and shackling the free flow of ideas that make these institutions great?” he said.

Emily Yue, assistant opinion editor of The Daily Tar Heel, said saying everyone is a minority is problematic because people have sensitivity issues beyond minority status.

“I don’t feel super comfortable comparing people who are left-handed to, say, black Americans because left-handed folk aren’t criminalized for being left-handed,” they said.

Panelist Cara Pugh, co-chairperson of the UNC Student Government Multicultural Affairs and Diversity Outreach Committee, said minority status and being historically oppressed are different.

She said a lot of people do not like the word “privilege” because they think it is a bad thing. She asked audience members if they had certain privileges like being able to walk to Franklin Street without having to think about the Confederate monument Silent Sam.

“The question of a safe space has to go to people that do feel unsafe for many of those privileges that they’re lacking,” Pugh said.

Panelist Brooks Fuller, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Media and Journalism, brought context to the origins of safe spaces and trigger warnings.

Fuller said trigger warnings started to help rape victims and soldiers with post-traumatic stress from reliving their negative experiences. He said safe spaces were started by LGBTQ communities as a place where they could be themselves in the 1970s and 1980s.

“I’m not sure if in the trigger warning debate, it’s so much about accommodating minority status as much as it is accommodating power imbalance and correcting power imbalance,” he said.

Pugh said she thinks it is acceptable for participants in social movements to not talk to the media, but she thinks most students involved think media coverage is important for these movements.

“It’s unfortunate if media misquotes or doesn’t depict the story in the correct way, but we’ve seen time and time again for civil rights movements and for other movements to go further, media was definitely involved and media was definitely needed,” she said.

Pugh said UNC was created as a safe space for white men.

“That might explain why some people don’t feel safe in this space,” she said. “Because it wasn’t initially made for them. They had to make their way and it was difficult and it was tiring. And learning about that history won’t solve all our problems, but it would at least give you an understanding of where others are coming from.”

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