"Why didn't anyone protest?"

[Warpy]

30. I did protest, it didn't do a damn bit of good

The class was in engineering school, one I needed that year, no alternatives. The instructor was Pakistani and demanded that all men sit in the front rows of an enormous lecture hall, all women in the back row, many rows of empty seats between us. His accent was thick and the blackboard too far away to see.

So I lodged a protest. I was told, "It's just his culture." I told them he was in MY country and he needed to learn to respect MY culture, that I'd paid for that class, I needed it, and I was being cheated out of it. Cue massive struggle to reboot by a bunch of men who'd never considered that women might have some rights. It was 1967.

So I said fuck it and quit.

I hope things have gotten better since then.

One takeaway that professor missed is that picking on someone who is perceived to have few rights, a POC or especially a woman, would cause absolutely no protest to occur. Had he picked on a white male, it would have been very different.