Last week Buzzfeed broke a story leaking several private emails sent among members of a University of Chicago fraternity, calling the culture “toxic.” The easy response is to put on our swimsuits and dive headfirst into the self-righteous fray. But I think it’s time we went a step further, and consider how the easy response is in fact contributing to the longevity of racism and discrimination in society. If these students had posted the same content to blog posts instead of emails, it would be fair to assume that their words would be universally available and criticized. But they were not; they were private communications among friends that, despite all the furor, are not even particularly racist, they merely play with the same vocabulary. The deeper problem is that somehow it has become acceptable to mine private communication for possible unsavory speech. We have all had conversations with friends or families in which someone has injected a caveat,...(Read Full Article)