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What's good, Joel? This is Code Switch. I'm Gene Tembie.

And I'm Shireen Marisol Miraji. We're back and we have to start with a warning.

A trigger warning. If conversations about trigger warnings make you crazy or roll your eyes like they do in my case, get ready.

And you know, one of the things that makes us so crazy is that trigger warnings get tossed into this big pot with all these other ideas like political correctness and safe spaces.

They all get conflated. So we're going to get specific.

Yes. So with all the debate on campuses about what students do and don't need and what professors can and can't say, we wanted to really understand what's actually going on.

So in this episode, the view from the front of the classroom, do college professors need to give trigger warnings? What for? What's the debate here really?

And when a school like the University of Chicago sends a letter to students saying, our commitment to academic freedom means we do not support so-called trigger warnings.

And that's the real quote. Is this really such a big deal?

And is it so-called trigger warning? I'm doing the air-cooked thing that I always do.

Yes, you love to do that.

Is that really any different from the kind of content warning you might see before a movie or when you buy a video game?

And so since this is code switch, we wanted specifically to talk about trigger warnings related to racial content like racist imagery.

Race and violence in America are inextricable.

And when professors teach an unsanitized version of American history, it's disturbing.

But is it triggering? And when we're talking about race and identity and how we communicate about who we are, that gets even messier.

And a few minutes, we're going to get into these questions with two professors who deal with them every day.

But before we hear that conversation, we need to lay a foundation because things like trigger warnings can be so subjective.

Right, so our friends at the MPR-18 recently published the results of a big survey about trigger warnings.

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