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“There’s also this whole theory that you can’t be insensitive, you can’t hurt anybody. It doesn’t matter whether what you say is true or not, or whether it’s reasonable or not, or whether it’s funny or not. If it hurts, then it’s wrong.”

That was precisely the reasoning behind the decision to sanction Mr. Farnan, It only took a single complaint among the 22,000 recipients of the message to trigger an investigation under the SSMU’s equity policy.

“The fact that a complaint did come forward does prove that someone was harmed and did feel harm, and I think that there should be more apologies in society generally,” Joey Shea, vice-president, university affairs, at the society, said.

“I don’t think much harm can come out of an apology.”

‘I microaggress all the time. You microagress all the time. Even people of colour microaggress all the time’

She acknowledged she did not personally find the Obama video clip offensive.

“But one person did,” she said. “I am not a person of colour. I am white. I will never know what it feels like to experience racism, so I don’t think it was a stretch for us to ask that there be an apology.”

Mr. Farnan declined a request for an interview.

In a report this month to the student legislative council, he said he has already planned his sensitivity training sessions with the university’s social equity and diversity education office. He is also being advised by a professor on “email-related communications” to avoid offending anyone in the future.

Mr. Grey, who last year came under fire from the SSMU equity commissioner for a presentation at McGill in which he made a case for the assimilation of ethnic groups, said the political correctness of universities reveals a double standard.

“We’re perfectly prepared to hurt those who make the remarks in a completely disproportionate way in their career and in their future because somebody was supposedly offended or hurt,” he said.

But Ms. Shea said the controversy has had the positive effect of raising awareness about microaggression.

“I microaggress all the time. You microagress all the time. Even people of colour microaggress all the time,” she said.

“The point is becoming aware that certain things in our language are oppressive.”

National Post

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