[ad_1]
– Wuhan? Let me put the mask on, the professor joked. So it was done.
After his first encounter with students last week, university professor Joel Poor is now accused of racism and xenophobia. He is also exempt from teaching at the University of Columbia in the US state of Missouri.
It is the time shift Khrono that tells the episode.
The incident occurred on Monday of last week, in the first digital meeting with the class, in zoom. The teacher asks if any of the students are from other countries and a student answers that they are from China.
“Where in China?” Poor question. “Wuhan,” the student replies.
That’s when Poor first repeats “Wuhan?” and then add “Let me put my mask on.”
Since it happened in zoom, it wasn’t long before the clip in question appeared on twitter and was shared with the call: “Kick Professor Joel Poor for his racist and xenophobic comment in marketing class today.”
Shortly after, the university responded, also on twitter, that they had sent the video to their “civil rights office”, and also to federal authorities for investigation.
And that same night, Professor Poor sent a message to the students that he had been deprived of his teaching assignments.
The background to the incident is, of course, that Covid-19 was first discovered in the Chinese city of Wuhan, and that many Chinese in the United States have experienced reluctance and racism because of it.
Poor himself has apologized, assuring that it was just a joke:
“I should be more sensitive. Although I am a complete supporter of the Chinese people / students, the political context is that the United States is not. I should have thought about it and not comment as I did.”
In many ways the case is similar to the well-known German prank case at the University of Bergen, where a student complained about a comment that “Germans have been here before.”
Except that in this case it is not the student in question who has complained. On the contrary, it appears that the student perceived the comment as, yes, exactly, a joke. And in a longer version of the zoom video clip, it appears that Poor follows the joke by welcoming the student and asks if the trip went well.
Furthermore, Poor says that he has only been to Chongqing and Shanghai, and that he has not had the pleasure of visiting Wuhan.
Read more comments from Erik Stephansen
The recent incident at the American University shows perhaps most of all how biased it can be when allowing people to be raped on behalf of others. This is, among other things, the reason why the professional press committee here at home always demands consent of the victim whether to process a third-party complaint.
They should probably introduce such a rule in American universities as well. Hopefully the Norwegians have already done so.
[ad_2]
