We’ve all engaged in these actions.

The aggrieved might “exercise covert avoidance, quietly cutting off relations with the offender without any confrontation” or “conceptualize the problem as a disruption to their relationship and seek only to restore harmony without passing judgment.” In the most serious cases, they might call police rather than initiating violence themselves. “For offenses like theft, assault, or breach of contract, people in a dignity culture will use law without shame,” the authors observe. “But in keeping with their ethic of restraint and toleration, it is not necessarily their first resort, and they might condemn many uses of the authorities as frivolous. People might even be expected to tolerate serious but accidental personal injuries.”

* * *

The Oberlin student took a different approach: After initially emailing the student who offended her, she decided to publicly air the encounter that provoked her and their subsequent exchange in the community at large, hoping to provoke sympathy and antagonism toward the emailer by advertising her status as an aggrieved party.

She did so in a post to the web site Oberlin Microaggressions, a blog “primarily for students who have been marginalized at Oberlin.” The aggrieved student quoted the aforementioned email: “Hey, that talk looks pretty great, but on the off chance you aren’t going or would rather play futbol instead the club team wants to go!!”

Then she explained her grievance:

Ok. 1. Thanks for you thinking that the talk is “pretty great”. I appreaciate your white male validation. I see that it isn’t interesting enough for you to actually take your ass to the talk. 2. Who said it was ok for you to say futbol? It’s Latino Heritage Month, your telling people not to come to the talk, but want to use our language? Trick NO! White students appropriating the Spanish language, dropping it in when convenient, never ok. Keep my heritage language out your mouth! If I’m not allowed to speak it, if my dad’s not allowed to speak it, then bitch you definitely are not supposed to be speaking it. Especially in this context.

She also published the email that he sent to the white student:

Your not latino, call it soccer. You don’t play futbol. Futbol is played with people (LATINO) who know how to engage in community soccer, as somebody who grew up on the cancha (soccer field) I know what playing futbol is, and the way you take up space, steal the ball, don’t pass, is far from how my culture plays ball. I’m not playing intramural once again this semester because you and your cis-dude, non passing the ball, stealing the ball from beginners, spanish-mocking, white cohort has ruined it (for the second time). Unless I find another team you won’t be seeing me. I don’t care if this email is over the top or mean. So complain to whatever white friends you want about it. You’re never going to know what its like to not be able to your own heritage sport comfortably because of your gender/race/ethnicity.

And she quoted the white student’s reply, which emphasizes the white student’s own sense of grievance:

...I’m sorry that I detracted from your event. Do you really think people who were going to go to the talk changed their mind because of my email? I don’t think so, and that was not my aim at all - I wanted to give those people who had been looking forward to playing soccer on Thursday a chance to do that. You do not get to define who I am. Fuck off. Clearly you only see me at face value and yes I’m white and male, what do you want me to do about that? I have a second family that I have spent a good portion of my life with. My brothers Paco Rafa and Diego my mom Julie my grandmother Margo and my father Arnoldo. Technically their my god-family but for all intensive purposes they are my family, call me their 4th son, and I am extremely close with them. My father came from Costa Rica as a fourteen year old boy, living, working and studying through an education program jointly coordinated by the catholic church and UC Berkeley. My 2nd family is Costa Rican, and I am a part of that family no matter what you say. I’m not claiming to be latino and I don’t think I’ve ever claimed that, but I do have a latino family and you trying to separate me from them, to create distance that doesn’t exist based purely on how you incorrectly perceive me, is terribly offensive.

The white student goes on to assert that white, male privilege is a huge problem in America, and briefly chronicles his attempts to wrestle with it and live a just, moral life.