Trigger Warning: Trigger Warning

College is not necessarily a “safe space”.  It is a place where students are challenged to discover new things about themselves and the things around them. This may entail tackling some big scary stuff. And guess what…life is big and scary. TRIGGER WARNING: ranting about trigger warnings

We must first agree that going to a university prepares you for the “real world”. Moran specifically states about the study of English, that it compares the relationship between: “…literature and ‘the outside world” (Moran 19). This may be half true—college (especially one that is isolated/not located in a city/etc) is a bubble. We are surrounded by mostly only people our age in one big pot of hormonal confusion. All of us more-or-less in the same phase, trying to figure ourselves out at the same time. However, if this place really is a set up for the real world, specifically within literature, why do people think censoring it is a good idea? When students start asking for warning signs before a topic that may conjure some no-good feelings in them it can lead education down a very dangerous path. The classroom is not a place for hands to be held. Teachers are not there to coddle.

Trigger warnings started out as a medical term used for people with mental illnesses like PTSD. That being said, I do think it is very important for people to seek help when anxiety becomes debilitating in the classroom. Every school should have programs and places should be funded so that people can get help when they need help. Furthermore, every student should feel comfortable enough to leave a classroom when topics become unhealthily overwhelming.

However, I do think it’s important that people challenge themselves and stigmas. Being upset can engender learning. We must try to step out of our comfort zone to peek our head out into reality. Interactions after school will not be labeled with a warning. Our jobs, our interactions with other people, our subway rides will be littered with unsettling material that may stimulate us in traumatic ways. There will be no prettily packaged box labeled “fragile” on the top, there will be no “read more” link to click on. So why prevail it in the classroom?

Trigger warnings also put people in a vulnerable spot. They usually come from women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, minorities, people with mental illnesses, etc. This starts to place these groups of people in a delicate light, as if we have to be careful with these people. Instead of instilling any sense of power to these groups, it places some sort of stigmatized label of weakness on them and even scarier, that these people are somehow “other”. In this way, trigger warnings may seem like they are beneficial, but are in actuality much more harmful.

Additionally, once we start labeling works as “traumatic” it starts to highlight the topic disproportionately. Cane amounts to a book about rape, death, racial inequality, etc. These are definitely all topics that Toomer seeks to include, but there are other aspects to the book. With trigger warnings, we would pay less attention to the fall imagery and flowery landscapes and focus more on the “scary” aspects—however subconscious this may be (especially people who have anxiety rooted in personal circumstances or memories that can arise). Cane isn’t just about death and injustice, it’s also about capturing the beauty of a certain time period and preserving that and we lose sight of that with a big bold LABEL slapped on the front.