The article  “The Intellectual Deficiencies” published recently was troubling to me in a number of ways. I will begin by saying it does raise a fair point: “safe spaces” should never be coddling or shield people from truth and fact.If we hide from those things we can never learn and grow as individuals, a nation or a world.

All spaces, however, should be “safe” in the respect that no person feels too threatened or intimidated to discuss who they are and how they feel, because if we silence how we feel, we turn off the very thing that makes us human. The movement toward safer spaces, while occasionally going too far, is rooted in the fact that many people — because of race, sexual orientation or gender — have often been systematically silenced in our nation since its founding. The goal of safe spaces is to allow these voices to be heard, for the first time, at the same volume as the voices of heterosexual white males.

It is a fact that slavery happened. It is a fact that reconstruction failed.

It is a fact that it was government policy to segregate housing based on race from the 1930s through the 1960s. It is a fact that peaceful black protestors were needlessly jailed, tortured or killed throughout the civil rights era. It is a fact that on our own campus students of color often feel unsafe to walk on our campus because they see confederate flags in windows, the words “White Power” scrawled across car windows and countless other instances of aggression and discrimination which I can’t begin to describe or imagine. This is not “imagined victimhood”:it is tangible, it is present and it is very real.

This is also not an issue which can be parted so clearly down partisan lines as the author would have us believe. In regards to climbing college tuition, it’s true it has been rising since the 1960s, but according to data from the College Board it has been rising consistently throughout that time, regardless of what party or policies have been guiding our nation. An editorial in the New York Times last April attributed this meteoric rise, not to government policy, but to a massive increase in administrators and administrative pay at colleges and universities.

The percentage of the population which is foreign born, according to data from the Census Bureau, has been rising consistently since the 1970s (the immigration legislation Ted Kennedy promoted was passed in 1965), though it is still lower than the percentage from the 1860s through the 1920s. The difference is that the higher rates of immigration in the 19th century were made up of largely European immigrants while a majority of immigrants today come from Latin America. I agree we need immigration reform, but the current plans from Republican front-runners include forcing Mexico to build a “huge wall” and raiding houses to find every man, woman and child who came as an undocumented immigrant. I wonder if they plan to also round up the over 300,000 people in this country who came from Europe illegally, or will it only be the ones of Hispanic descent?

Why, if rising health care costs are only a result of “liberals trying to fix it,” does the United States pay significantly more per capita on healthcare, according to the World Bank, than Canada, Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom and almost every other developed nation who has “liberal” policies regarding universal health care? In my view, a contributing factor is that since 1998 the pharmaceutical industry has spent over $3 billion on lobbying government officials.

Democracy is complex, nuanced and difficult. It is easy to release a soundbite saying what people want to hear, but we will never solve issues of systemic racism, sexism, wealth inequality, globalized warfare, immigration reform or health care by shouting out incredibly simplistic and reductionist solutions to massively complex problems. Democracy thrives when we are educated, informed and passionate about looking out for the good of our fellow citizens, not when all we seek to do is tear them down or tell them their feelings do not matter.

Yes, facts are great. And safe spaces are great so that we can discover those facts together.