The first point I want
to makes about the student protests currently being held on the Yale campus, which have as their most proximate cause Prof. Christakis' email about offensive Haloween costumes, is that the "this isn't really about the email" argument seems
not only weak, but disrespectful to the students involved. Yes, the evidence
indicates that there are other serious matters going on at Yale, which merit
strong protest, prompt administrative response, and decisive change. But the
idea that the protests aimed at these professors - and it is not in dispute
that there are protests aimed specifically at these professors, and
specifically in response to this email - are themselves "really
about" the other things going on, turns the students who are protesting
these professors in response to this email into petulant children - taking out
their understandable and justifiable frustrations about other things on the
most recent and most convenient, but not directly related, target. So I'm not
going to address that point, because I can't see how it cuts any ice.
Having read the email
in question carefully several times, it seems to me to make the following three
points - or at least to contain the seeds of them, since each is not fully
developed. 1) There is good reason to doubt the competence of administrative
authority to determine what is and is not offensive (notwithstanding
that what came from the administration was a "suggestion" rather than
a rule or policy - suggestions from high-ranking administrators are not
ordinary suggestions); 2) the contemporary
concept of cultural appropriation is problematic - it is an amorphous mass
which has swallowed up the clearly important and reasonably well-defined notion
of harmful cultural misrepresentation, and a discussion about how its
boundaries should be determined is one that needs to be had; 3) even if
administrative authority is competent to determine what is offensive and what
is not, any administrative policy which succeeds at restricting everything
offensive will almost inevitably cast too wide a net, and restrict forms of
expression which, though transgressive, are also genuinely valuable in one way
or another.
Now, my own view is
that these three points are actually correct - but nothing I have to say
depends on that (although I will delve a bit more deeply into 2) below). It is,
at the very least, not out of the question that they are reasonable; and
likewise, it is not by any means a foregone conclusion that they are themselves
offensive or intolerant. Acknowledging this point does not imply that one
cannot recognize the potential for harm in another person's choice of Halloween
costume - that potential certainly exists, against the social, cultural, and
historical background of contemporary America. It does not even imply that one
cannot recognize the possibility of costumes so virulently racist that a
punitive response on the part of the administration would be appropriate. But
such situations already fall within the purview of existing codes of conduct at
virtually all American universities.
There are two aspects
of the specific response by students to these professors caused by this email
which I want to discuss. The first is the desire for the administration to take
on the role of determining and discouraging the offensive - the desire which
point 1) above calls into question. I believe I understand the motivation
behind this desire - the daily lived exhaustion, physical, emotional and
cognitive, of living within social structures infected with systemic
oppression. The weight of that consideration should by no means be
underestimated. But the question which at least has to be asked is whether a
society in which administrative authority plays this role is part of the just
society we should be working toward, or is even a likely transitional step on
the way to a just society. The reason this question is so important is that,
even if we conclude that a university administration ought to play this role on
a college campus, it is seriously in doubt whether the State should play an
analogous role in society at large. And the interactions between university
students and university administration is, quite appropriately, a training
ground for the relationship between responsible citizens and the State. This
point does not place the responsibility for fighting oppression solely on the
shoulders of the oppressed - all students, and likewise all citizens, bear that
responsibility, though the question of how to organize and coordinate the
efforts of those who are directly affected and those who are not is an
incredibly difficult one. The point about the importance of carefully
considering, questioning, and debating the appropriate role of authority
remains.
The second is the
nature of the protest directly aimed at the professors, demanding their
resignation in the event that the administration should fail to remove them.
The troubling feature of this protest its unwillingness to engage in even
forceful debate on the basis of reasons - more than this, its explicit and
self-conscious rejection of the appropriateness of this in the present context.
This applies even to the formal letter calling for the resignation, which
manifestly mischaracterizes the content of the email it is a response to. But
it applies far more to the preceding and ongoing campus protests. These are
marked by a feature which has become a disturbing trend, an equating of
disagreement itself with disrespect, a demand for apology in response to
something which has caused emotional pain, which cannot even countenance the
possibility that act which caused the pain was not wrong, that not every act
which causes emotional pain is thereby wrong. This point brings us to a very
thorny issue of epistemic authority. We can, should, and must recognize the
epistemic authority of oppressed individuals and communities in relating both
the events which mark their lives and their physical, mental, and emotional
experiences of these events. This authority has not been recognized throughout
American history, and today change on this front is thus far slight and
excruciatingly slow. I do not doubt for a moment the reality of the pain being
experienced by these students, or the fact that the email in question is the
proximate cause. I recognize their epistemic authority on these points. But
these descriptive questions must be distinguished from two normative questions
(I use the term "normative" in its philosophical sense). The issue of
epistemic authority on normative matters is much trickier than it is on
descriptive matters; and it is not at all clear that the one translates into
the other in the matters at hand - that is yet another question which must be
open for honest and critical reflection and debate. The first normative
question is the individual-level one of whether this pain - the self-reported
inability to eat, sleep, attend class or do homework on the part of some
student residents of this college - is reasonable.
Now, the very questioning of
the reasonableness of the emotional response to a specific perceived act of
oppression by those who live within social structures which do systematically
oppress them is incredibly fraught - the real and horrifying history of
gaslighting makes this so. But to permanently place this question out of bounds
is dangerous, in both the short-term and the long-term. First, doing so
excludes the emotional responses of the oppressed from the realm of reason - it
may look superficially as if what is being asserted is that all such responses
are reasonable, but when we assert that something must be reasonable whatever
its content may be, what we are actually doing is placing it outside of the
realm of reason altogether. Some may think it obvious that the experience of
emotional pain is outside the realm of reason; but there is in fact a large
literature on emotional responses as a species of value judgment, and thus
subject to standards of reasonableness - one of my professors, Robert Solomon,
who passed long before his time, did much outstanding work on this topic.
Second, it preempts much needed conversations about the genuine reasonableness
of extreme responses in extreme circumstances - most notably the reasonableness
under currently obtaining circumstances of expressing outrage through rioting,
including property damage. As unpopular an opinion as this is, I think that
such a response is not only understandable, or excusable (which is the
strongest position I've seen even in the progressive media), but under
circumstances which do actually obtain today, genuinely reasonable and
justifiable - though I fear that to expand on this point would take us deeper
into Marxist territory than most are comfortable with. Third, it preempts much
needed discussion on a general level of the precise goals of social justice.
Central to one such discussion is the concept of cultural appropriation, the
contemporary interpretation of which is called into question in the email.
Consider the following thought, which I arrived at independently but have since
seen articulated by thinkers as profound as Adolph Reed, Jr., who has become
one of my own intellectual heroes: the contemporary concept of cultural
appropriation, in its radical expansion of the older notion of harmful cultural
misrepresentation, has reduced the institutions, traditions, and artifacts of
all the world's cultures to the category of property subject to theft, as this
is understood in the Anglo-Saxon common law tradition. That reductive
categorization demands an answer to the question of who owns this sort of
property, a question which is designed for an answer with fine bright lines,
and the only plausible candidate answer which purports to have sharp enough
boundaries is that cultures are the product of "races" (the scare
quotes indicate my own belief that this is a fictive construct), and thus
"races" are the owners of the cultural property which may be
"appropriated"--i.e. stolen. Reed cites the outstanding work of
Walter Benn Michaels in this connection –
- and quite correctly,
in my view, casts the "identarianism" of which this understanding of
appropriation is a symptom as the left-wing of neoliberalism.
Thus, far from being an essential component of social justice, concern for
cultural appropriation as it is currently understood turns out to be a symptom
of conceptual imperialism, all the more insidious for the inability of those
who wield the concept to recognize this. This is my own view; but I do not
claim to know it for a certainty. Rather, it is an example of a conversation which
I believe is desperately needed, but which is excluded from conversation by an
ideology which does not allow the reasonableness of offense to be scrutinized
under any circumstances. Such an ideology blinds us to what is problematic
about the very concepts being used to interpret the offense, which may
themselves be far more harmful than the actual actions which count as offensive
under that conceptual regime. And fourth, it preempts a much needed
conversation about whether these students have been failed by their
universities, their highschool and primary teachers, their parents, their
purported role models in the struggle for social justice, and society at large,
in being prepared for adulthood. The real and serious experience of these
students in response to this email, the experience of not being able to eat,
sleep, or work, in response to the expression of three reasonable and
respectful (but by no means inarguable) opinions - we must ask the question of
whether it is the experience of fully functioning, psychologically healthy
adults, even against a background of systematic social oppression. Not having
that discussion means missing multiple opportunities to address real problems
in our society, problems related to the pressures of childhood and young adulthood
under neoliberal capitalism, the demand for academic perfection coupled with
the complete lack of basic security in life even following on the attainment of
that alleged perfection, and the economic policy landscape that has created a
world in which the children of the middle class must push themselves to the
breaking point and beyond in order to have any hope of remaining middle class.
The second normative
question is the public-level one of whether the response - the demand for
resignation or firing - is reasonable. Here again, there is no obvious claim to
epistemic authority; instead, there is a debate which needs to be had, and the
dangers of an ideology which cannot see that, which cannot see where epistemic
authority is not present while it fights for recognition in those arenas where
it is.
All of this is to say
that these students are not simply fighting for a basic right in the language
of "safe spaces". The language, and the idea, of safe spaces is more
powerful, pervasive, and pernicious than they are often made out to be. There
are real issues, relating to questions of the appropriate limits on authority,
the means and ends of social justice, and the concepts we use to interpret the
world and our interactions with each other. In some cases, I see worrisome
answers being given by this generation; and in others, I see a dangerous
failure to engage in, or even recognize the appropriateness of, passionate -
and as passionate as you like, you won't hear any criticisms of tone from me -
but still reasoned debate.
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