In a discussion, the idea of tolerance is a prevelant issue in today’s America and world. We are becoming more open and seeking more connections with everyone overall than people before the 2000s. However, there comes the issue of tolerance and what people truly think. Some people have a different mindset than others and focus mainly on that rather than connecting with others. In this day and age, we shouldn’t be doing that and making safe spaces for people that have different ideas. I can see why though as, no matter, no one is extremely wrong on what they think. The entire issue stems from the fact that some people cannot connect with other people mindsets or even relate to them

Can truth and tolerance coexist? This was the question that Miroslav Volf and Dr. Vijay Pendakur tried to answer in their dialogue as part of the Veritas Forum. While much of the forum was focused on religion, Volf is a professor of religious studies at Yale, I felt that Dr. Pendakur’s discussion was much more relatable to the experiences of students and, more specifically, people of color. He recalled his childhood, from growing up in a primarily black neighborhood, to studying at a primarily white institution. Dr. Pendakur told his story of not truly finding himself amongst any of the groups he was a part of, since each of the groups seemed to contradict each other in regard to the members of each group.

Being a Latina who grew up going to primarily white schools, many of the sentiments that Dr. Pendakur stated resonated with the childhood I had experienced. The feeling of never truly fitting in with my peers or relating to their experiences was something that I learned to adjust to very early on. However, as time passed, I was able to make my own way, much like what Dr. Pendakur said, by finding my interests and different ways to connect with people. Although I didn’t find much of an answer to the question of the dialogue, I do think that I was able to connect to it through the similar experiences/sentiments that were said.

I went to the “Can Truth and Tolerance Coexist?” Veritas Forum event tonight, and it was interesting. I definitely sided more with Dr. Volf who more or less argued in the affirmative, that truth and tolerance can coexist. Dr. Pendakur seemed to believe that we should not tolerate unsafe beliefs, but this quickly leads to the question of who decides which ideas are safe and which are unsafe? This is colloquially known as the thought police, for good reason. No one, not even a fancy dean of students like Dr. Pendakur, has any right to police students’ speech, even if he does not like it. The first amendment only protects our right to free speech from the government, but private sector free speech rights are almost as important. I want minority students to feel safe, and I think the best way to do that is to make sure their ideas are tolerated and respected, not confined to safe spaces. The ACLU famously protected the free speech rights of KKK members to demonstrate in Ohio, and I believe that that was the correct decision. The US used to have laws making professors swear that they weren’t communist, and hundreds of alleged communists were blacklisted or imprisoned just for their beliefs. Those were terrible laws. We must be tolerant of even the abhorrent beliefs of KKK members and communists. If we fail to tolerate them because we decide that their beliefs are untrue, then we risk silencing weird and creative ideas that could help society improve and adapt.