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This chapter looks at the impact of the growing multiracial college student population on college campuses and how campus environments influence them. It describes the importance of campus racial climate for multiracial students and how they navigate potentially hostile structures and interactions on college campuses, including having to deal with microaggressions and monoracism. The chapter concludes with recommendations related to recommendations on service delivery programming for students, institution-level policies, and system-wide policies that impact multiracial students.

This chapter examines how the sometimes subtle, sometimes overt moments of hostility between Latino and non-Latino residents of Lafayette emerged in the immigration debate of 2006. It considers the lived moments of conflict and confrontation as well as the social borders and boundaries set up throughout Lafayette. It analyzes the responses of Latinas and Latinos regarding gendered differences that manifested in multiple microaggressions, as well as Walmart's role as a space of interaction in the perceptions of Latinos and non-Latinos regarding their daily routines. It also discusses the experiences of second-generation Latinos who were targeted with slurs, negative interactions, and traumatic moments of denied belonging.

An important facet of the story of the poetics of everyday life this book has traced is increasing commitment to enhancing our attentiveness to the daily. Recent everyday-life poets have set out to explore and stretch the boundaries of poetry and aesthetic form to make visible the operations of gender, race, sexuality, and capitalism in daily life. As an example of this development, the chapter provides a brief discussion of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. Reminding us that the everyday is always an embodied, situated phenomenon, Rankine’s book powerfully evokes the traumatic experience of “everyday racism,” documenting microaggressions that continuously interrupt and punctuate daily life for people of color.

This chapter addresses the charge, implicit in justice-based arguments for intellectual “safe spaces” on college campuses, that protecting academic freedom undermines equality of educational opportunity for students targeted by harmful expression. The discussion clarifies this argument’s central concepts and assumptions, including the concepts of expressive harm, psychological trauma, and “triggers”; the notions of microaggression and implicit bias; and the idea (articulated in the work of Jeremy Waldron) that there is a connection between a community’s “aesthetics” and its capacity to assure its members of respectful consideration. It is argued that limiting or eliminating academic freedom would stifle the critical reflection and robust debate most likely to promote justice in the face of contemporary challenges. A university that is safe for robust debate about justice cannot provide the comforts of “home.”

One popular line of thought in the media holds that academic freedom of speech is under threat from politically correct students and universities. In this chapter, it is argued that this debate is enhanced by enriching our range of concepts for thinking about freedom of speech. While silencing is an important concept, it’s a crude tool for thinking through these complex issues. Several new categories are introduced, presenting uncontroversial instances of each before working through how they apply to the more controversial instances that are the main focus. Using this new framework, it is argued that content warnings and the calling out of microaggressions do not present a significant threat to academic freedom of speech. However, there is a legitimate reason that they may appear to do so: the increasingly insecure employment structure of academia means that a wide variety of student preferences can have a damaging effect on pedagogical freedom.

Free speech and academic freedom are vitally important values. According to growing media reports, however, they are under attack and they are under attack in the exact place where they ought to be most protected: in our institutions of higher learning. This chapter explores two phenomena alleged to silence people on academic campuses: politically correct culture and microaggressions. These sorts of silencing involve a person deciding against speaking and deciding this because of the speaker’s beliefs about how the audience would respond to her speaking. As this chapter will show, not all cases of choosing to remain silent are on a par; the issues are complex but each sort of these two sorts of academic silencing is a real possibility.