Arizona Laws Bring out ASUO Flaws
I truly thought all the ASUO senate hullabaloo was over for the term, until I grabbed the most recent Ol’ Dirty. Last night seven ASUO senators were absent from last nights meeting preventing a quorum. This prevented club presentations for funding from being heard. This cancellation was after the senate desperately attempted to have Paige Libadisos”attend” the meeting through video chat. Prior to the senate meeting Sen. Libadisos sent out an E-mail saying she would not be attending the meeting due to family reasons. Which makes it rude that the senate had to disrupt her to try to have a quorum, there were six other senators not there.
It is safe to assume most of the senators missed the meeting due to yesterday being Cinco De Mayo. We did not even send a reporter to the meeting, but we are psychic like that. Apparently one senator did not skip for celebration reasons but out of protest (ASUO accusations of racism DRINK!). Sen. Jairo Castaneda refused to go to the meeting last night due to Sen. Fisher telling the women’s lacrosse team “don’t forget to take (their) birth certificates” when they go to Arizona.
So a bad joke turned into a missed oppurtunity for student programs looking for funding.
This Arizona law is a serious issue and will be joked about. I mean it is a ridiculous law, but I do not see how mocking it can be seen as racist. It is a law that leads to racial profiling but does mocking it make you racist? Furthermore does one misguided joke qualify for skipping out on your job? I think not.
Sen. Castaneda skipped out on the meeting and his job due to this misguided joke. However he was able to write out an opinion piece marginalizing all students. In his letter to the Ol’ Dirty he writes, “The Daily Emerald completely ‘forgot’ to mention something that transpired during the Senate meeting on April 28. The comment made blatantly speaks to how lightly and comically the University and its students view issues of race, class, gender, sexuality and diversity.”
Maybe the Ol’ Dirty wanted to write something that was not about race issues, or maybe they saw it as everyone else did a small joke that caused some giggling. It’s a bad joke, and this situation could have been handled differently. I’m on the side that the ASUO is amateur politicians and that the Ol’ Dirty are amateur journalist.
So my question to our readers is: was Sen. Castaneda’s response to the joke handled correctly or mishandled?
PS I know Lyzi beat me to the point, but we’re also amateur bloggers.
Castaneda was completely out-of-line to overreact the way he did about the somewhat inappropriate joke at last week’s senate meeting. Not only do people indignantly walk out of meetings all the time (rendering his initial stunt powerless) but his subsequent letter and meeting-skipping were absurd.
Furthermore, his insistence on turning a small joke into a blown-up rage about the “environment” of the ASUO was ridiculous. If people truly cannot let these things go, then why would any of us talk at all? Faux-paus happen to everyone and if they didn’t we couldn’t learn not to make them. When those things happen, we have to look behind the awkward joke to the intent behind it, and Fisher’s intent was certainly not racist, sexist, etc.
Buh, ASUO is a joke.
“How lightly and comically the University and its students view issues of race, class, gender, sexuality and diversity” – are you kidding? Like many Universities, the faculty and many of the students fall over each other to be politically correct, to make as much fuss as possible over everything, from bitching at kids for saying “that’s so gay”, all the way to calling people ‘Nazis’, because they are survivors of the Soviet Holocaust rather than the Nazi one, and have a different perspective on history to the official one, and advocating violence against them.
“Lightly and comically” is the best way to view issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and diversity. The color of your skin or the direction of your genitals are not relevant to how you should be treated, so stop making such a big fucking deal about it.