Patterns? What patterns?
The Department of Education last week outlined changes to civil rights investigations that advocates fear will mean less consistent findings of systemic discrimination at colleges.
Under the Obama administration, certain types of civil rights complaints would trigger broader investigations of whether a pattern of discrimination existed at a school or college.
But Candice Jackson, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights, told regional directors for the Office for Civil Rights in a memo that the Department of Education would no longer follow those guidelines. In detailing the latest civil rights shift under Secretary Betsy DeVos, Jackson wrote that the department was setting aside existing rules and empowering investigators with more discretion to clear case backlogs and address complaints in a timely manner.
Ah yes. Treating everything as a one off does indeed speed things up. Consider Grenfell Tower for instance. If there’s no need to see it as part of a pattern of saving money by not getting the fire retardant building material, then it becomes just a matter of tidying up and moving on.
The shift is significant because many of the violations OCR has found in recent years have involved systemic issues that go beyond the original complaint that prompted investigators to look into a college or school.
Former department officials and advocates for victims of discrimination say it’s critical to examine individual cases in the context of wider practices at an institution — and to apply that standard consistently across various OCR offices.
That’s critical unless you’re a libertarian. If you’re a libertarian, there’s no such thing as a “wider practice.” All is random and uncaused, a matter of free people freely choosing, and there’s no need to look for patterns and explanations.
Spot on. A lot of criticisms of libertarianism seem to be scattershot, lumping libertarians and Republicans and conservatives and extreme right-wingers and fundies together to one extent or another, but I think this observation of yours is 100% apt.
I think the problem is that they define “aggression” narrowly as the use of physical force or the threat of same. There is no libertarian concept of psychological aggression — but unfortunately psychological aggression is very real. I think that’s also a key reason that libertarians are overwhelmingly young, white, and male. Anyone who has experienced non-physical aggression will find the narrow libertarian concept repellant (possibly without being able to articulate why).
This often leads to severe misunderstandings in which both sides use the word “aggression,” meaning something different by it, without fully appreciating the fact. Libertarians believe that they’ve defined away “psychological aggression,” since the whole idea is pretty much a myth, while their interlocutors quickly become convinced that libertarians approve of psychological aggression, based on their resolute refusal to address or even acknowledge it. It’s not exactly that they approve it; it’s that the concept hits them square in the privilege and they literally can’t comprehend it.
And in some ways more insidious, because people experiencing it will often feel hesitant to report it as “aggression”, since that word often is taken to mean physical. As someone who suffered extreme psychological abuse in childhood, I know that it is difficult to call that what it is – abuse, aggression – because, well, it didn’t leave bruises or broken bones (though many of us who suffer psychological abuse also suffer the physical kind, and I can say, the psychological wounds take much longer to heal).