The first time I can recall seeing the word / term "safe space" was on a sticker outside the office of a teacher at a boarding school, inside a pink triangle. This was in like the early 2000s.

If you're very young, you might not appreciate just how quickly and dramatically opinions about marriage equality and a host of other issues have changed.

At the time, and especially in that place (where a bunch of adolescents were living in sex-segregated dormitories), it does not take a great imagination to see why being gay might be particularly fraught/scary and why having a place to talk about it without fear of judgement or ostracism might be helpful.

Later, people began to extend the concept somewhat.

One of the dilemmas of being visibly different from most other people around you is that you both want to integrate and fit in but at the same time you also don't want to give up being true to yourself or acquiescing to mistreatment.

What makes this even more complicated is the fact that you often don't know whether someone is just razzing you, whether it's pathological bullying, and to what extent it matters.

To some extent, everyone has to deal with this at some point no matter their personal characteristics. But for a variety of reasons all of these questions are particularly acute when it comes to race.

Because of that, many minority groups like to have places where they can talk among themselves about the things that they experience in common and what to make of them.

Also, I think much of the discussion about this is dramatically overblown; I think one of the great tragedies of race in America is that it is so painfully obvious that Americans love to think about race, but hate to talk about it.