Certifiably brown Texas student Rohini Sethi1was suspended from the University of Houston student government after she uttered “Forget #BlackLivesMatter; more like AllLivesMatter.” while not being brown enough on social media. For offering the wrong empathy Sethi faces the following sanctions:
- 50 Day unpaid suspension from her paid2 student government position.
- Compulsory attendance at an August diversity workshop and three university sponsored cultural events every month from September through March with the exception of December.
- Compulsory writing of a "letter of reflection" about how her TweetCrime has impacted the student government and the University of Houston as a whole.
- Mandatory public presentation on September 28th, 2016 on “the knowledge she has gained about cultural issues facing our society.”
Handing down the punishment white Student Government Commisar Shane Smith3 (WOT:nonperson) attributed the intensity of Sethi's sanctions to her failure to acknowledge just how much more the class of black lives matter at the moment compared to the class of all lives.4 Smith was granted one time powers to punish Sethi as he saw fit in a vote that only required a simple majority, because kicking her out of her paid Government club gig would have required mustering a 3/4 majority and a trial5 in front of Student Supreme Court.6
Shane Smith on the implications on his decision on speech at the University of Houston offered:
The first amendment [sic] prevents a person from being jailed by the governmetn [sic] for what they say. But [it] does not prevent people from receiving other consequences for what they say.
Apparently you can't get a university education in Texas.
Vice President of the University of Houston's Student Government association and WOT:nonperson ↩
~700 United States Dollars monthly ↩
Self declared 3.4 GPA anticipated graduation Spring 2017 with a major in economics. Considering graduate school and full time employment according to his LinkedIN. ↩
In fact lives do not matter all that much. ↩
Shane Smith is a member of the University of Houston Mock Trial Association. ↩
And everyone knows Supreme Courts are clogged with old white men with names like Clarence Thomas, Sonya Sotomayor, Elena Kagen, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and son of an immigrant Samuel Alito. ↩
A helpful reminder, for folks who indulge in the rather popular delusion that Texas is whatever kind of sanity reservation.
And that is indeed a very popular delusion.