Schwemmer Responds to Cartoon’s Reception 

To the Editor:

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and I would guess that only about 400 of the words I heard in response to my cartoon were responding to the message I intended to send. In that regard I suppose Andrew Smith is right in calling me a schmuck (though wrong about everything else). I hope that I can express myself more concisely, if not more vividly, in writing than in pictures. First of all, I was not saying anything about the racial situation anywhere. I was making an analogy using the archetypal image of Southern segregation, and as [senior] Mary Margaret Towey wisely reminds us, if the “magnitude were the same it wouldn’t be an analogy!”
I must also rebuke the assertions of those who call my views ignorant: although I may lack understanding in many areas, I feel safe in claiming first-hand experience on this issue. I have one good friend who lives in Baldwin, and I have recently made a few more through polite and fruitful dialogue on my cartoon’s topic. I should also point out the impetus behind my cartoon. The last time I visited Baldwin I was quite emphatically asked to leave because I had wandered into the wrong room in search of a garbage can and absent-mindedly sat down to pick out a melody on the piano. I can blame nothing but carelessness on my part for my failure to check for a sign on the door to see whether people fitting my demographic profile were allowed in or not. I had never been anywhere where that was a concern before I came to Oberlin, so I hope the residents of Baldwin will excuse my naiveté.
Most importantly, whatever others may say about it, I maintain that the exercise of projecting ourselves beyond our finite being to see other viewpoints is crucial to even the most rudimentary grasp of any issue, including this one. Those who claim that safe space segregation is different from white-on-black segregation (in kind rather than in degree), because of the balance of power, reveal their especial deficiency in this regard. I hope that I can demonstrate the usefulness of the method for you now.
As I write my head is somewhat sore from trying to imagine the august city fathers of Birmingham getting together and pondering how best “to visibly demonstrate white supremacy,” (as first-year Rebecca Tinkelman puts it) and finally deciding that segregating public places by race would be a fine way to celebrate this well-established fact. 
When we examine the evidence we find that racism is based on a nearly opposite impulse: fear and paranoia. If there were conscious beliefs motivating the actions of these cowering bureaucrats, they were something like this: that black people were going to take over — marry our children, dominate commerce, rape our women, pollute culture, etc. Feelings of supremacy are seldom, if ever, the white supremacist’s main motivation. Do you believe the Klansman when he tells you that all he’s about is celebrating the White Culture he loves? No: that is the positive cover story for his mainly negative actions. And so when we consult works that try to look inside the experience of people involved in this issue in order to better understand it and broaden our perspectives (also known as art)—for instance, To Kill A Mockingbird, American History X and especially Birth of a Nation — we find that racism is based not on thoughts like, “Let’s remind everybody that we’re superior to those colored folk (rah rah rah),” nearly so much as, “We’d better watch out for those black people — our safety and the status quo are threatened by their presence.”
The thesis of my cartoon is that the same kind (different degree, obviously) of fear motivates the little, seemingly harmless, retaliatory segregation that Oberlin likes to call “Safe Space.” Sophomore Lisa Merriweather, in her dialogue-filled letter, “Cartoon Didn’t Promote Dialogue,” confirms this by calling Safe Space “a response to oppression,” (by oppressing them back, of course). Keeping certain kinds of people out of a room because of what they are supposedly likely to do, based on demographic research or personal prejudice — in short, fear, however justified and however dispassionately held — is an evil equal in kind, if not in degree, to the most purely pernicious example of segregation in our experience. Thus the point of the cartoon is the expression on the white girl’s face: she is afraid, because authority figures in her life have told her that black men are dangerous, just as many Oberlin women feel that they have well-documented reason to fear the company of men.
Safe Space is also completely different from — and in fact opposed to — freedom of assembly. To paraphrase the dissenting opinion of Plessy v. Ferguson (the case establishing segregation in the South) and apply it here, what if my friends from Baldwin and I wanted to get together to play the piano and study in the lounge? Sure, we could go elsewhere, but that’s outside the realm of principle, on which law must be based. For these reasons, I believe that Safe Spaces represent an unjust rule and should be integrated. If women want to get together alone to discuss issues and build community they have my hearty support. It is for freedom of assembly that I am fighting here, and one thing that prevents it is the arbitrary labeling of a space as for one demographic group only. I do not presume to invade the women’s bathroom or the private rooms of an all-female dorm; universal common sense supports these useful things. 
The ideology behind Safe Spaces, however, is completely different from this, because it would not necessarily limit their presence to program houses: from Baldwin’s theory, Safe Spaces all over campus (and why not Safe Classes taught by Safe Teachers?) are only a step or two away.
The whole world should be everyone’s safe space — that is the goal of writing laws. You may say I’m dreaming, but if we assume that the law isn’t going to work and try to circumvent it by keeping out whoever we think is most likely to break it, we incite a kind of Safe Space Race: our own little paranoid Cold War right here in the Oberlin bubble(s). By boarding up the windows against each other, we are not giving peace a chance.

–Patrick Reinhart Schwemmer
College sophomore