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(05/14/20 10:34am)
Middlebury’s official Instagram account recently shared a photo of me protesting an invited lecture from the racist pseudoscientist Charles Murray in 2017, accompanied by the caption “At Middlebury, we don’t just talk about social justice; we also act on it.” The caption did not mention how Middlebury reacted to social justice.
I was among the students punished for participating in these protests. The same photo and others like it were used as evidence in hearings that resulted in discipline for student protesters. Three years later, the college marketed the incident to prospective and current students, recasting their reaction as evidence of a commitment to social justice (the Instagram story was later deleted).
Murray’s visit to Middlebury caused a stir, you may remember. The college hired private security in anticipation of student opposition. My peers and I made signs that read, “F**k White Supremacy” and “No Eugenics.”
President Laurie Patton provided introductory remarks. When Murray took the stage, I was among the hundred or so students who stood up, turned our backs and recited a collective statement rejecting the white supremacist ideas that he holds and seeks to popularize. While I had attended a few coordinating meetings prior to the protest, much of the action that sprung up in response to Murray’s invitation was spontaneous and decentralized.
Middlebury reacted decisively against its dissident students.
The college originally tried to hold individual hearings for student protestors, a well-worn tactic to divide groups acting in solidarity, while a private investigator interviewed professors who had expressed sympathy toward the protests. After much effort, 16 of us who were accused of the same infractions convinced the Community Judicial Board to try us collectively. The college held that this group of protesters was especially delinquent for having remained in the venue to disrupt the video live stream of Murray’s talk after the live lecture became impossible. Middlebury ultimately put me on probation until I graduated in February 2018.
To potential donors, though, the official message remains non-committal. Shortly after student dissidents attempted to de-platform Murray, administrators of Middlebury’s alumni and parent programs trained student employees to talk politely and neutrally about Murray to mostly white, wealthy alumni. I would know. I was one of those employees.
As a reunion host in 2017, several months after the incident, I received instruction on how to handle Charles Murray-related comments from alumni: “Do not give your own opinion.” They supplied us with some token responses to pacify anticipated outrage such as, “Thank you for letting me know that” and “I appreciate that this is upsetting.”
A fundraiser employed by the college during the same alumni reunion told a coworker and me, “The reaction to all that Murray business was very generational, you know. We had some of these old donors saying, ‘Hang ’em up by one of the trees over there’ you know, ‘Expel ’em all.’”
Charles Murray was scheduled to return to campus this spring before the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted the semester. Despite the progressive image Middlebury seems so eager to project, white supremacists continue to enjoy a platform there.
Now Middlebury is showcasing the demonstration it denounced in order to promote the college’s supposed dedication to justice. As Film Professor David Miranda Hardy expressed in a comment on my Facebook post on Midd’s hypocrisy, “The speed at which neoliberalism co-opts protests to regurgitate them as marketing props is becoming mind-numbing.”
Defending a wealthy white man’s right to express a hateful ideology has real consequences for the student population. Black students who come to Middlebury to learn should not have to reject through collective action the patently false notion that they are lesser humans.
The college has recommitted itself to a free marketplace of ideas, where the “good” ones supposedly rise to the forefront of public discourse and the “bad” ones are discarded. This parallels the ideology underpinning our free market economy, which holds that most black people occupy a lower rung of the socio-economic hierarchy in the U.S. because of their supposedly inferior capacity to lift themselves up by their bootstraps. This system projects the self-image of a meritocracy when really the interests of those in power win out, regardless of merit and often in opposition to it.
Middlebury’s ambivalence toward Murray’s racism is not an anomaly.
Middlebury is far more embedded in the socioeconomic and racial status quo than their opportunistic marketing tactics might suggest. The college serves as a recruiting ground for some of the world’s foremost neoliberal and neocolonial institutions, sending many grads to work at companies like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, which were largely responsible for the financial devastation of black, brown and poor communities during the 2008 housing crisis. Others climb ladders at the U.S. State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, institutions with a well-documented history of orchestrating coup d'états across the globe in order to prop up regimes favorable to U.S. business interests in Iran, Chile, Guatemala and elsewhere.
These are trends, not rules, and the Middlebury student population has expressed resistance and collective power. In an incident last fall, students studying Arabic at Middlebury Language Schools voiced criticism at a CIA recruitment session and denounced the agency’s record of foreign interventions and state-sponsored torture programs.
Middlebury’s marketers want to appropriate anti-racist actions organized by dissident students to advertise the college’s commitment to justice. Simultaneously, Middlebury’s fundraisers and administration have avoided taking a “political” stance in order to maximize fundraising capacity and avoid stepping on donors’ toes. But there is no escaping the political. Justice requires opposition. Revisionism necessitates truth-telling.
Austin Kahn is a member of the class of 2017.5.
(10/11/17 10:06pm)
There is nothing more celebrated at Middlebury College than a student-led business venture. Middlebury dedicates an enormous amount of its financial and human resources to entrepreneurship. This meticulously animated video perfectly demonstrates the way our school tries to attract prospective students with its focus on business. About two years ago, Middlebury lauded the emergence of another one of these student-led entrepreneurship projects: Fiasco (then, Late Night Fiasco).
It’s hard to miss the blatant cultural appropriation that characterized this project. In “J-term Gourmet,” another well produced video on Middlebury College’s official Vimeo account, the business’ founder discusses the inspiration and history of Late Night Fiasco — “an after-hours kitchen” serving “globally-influenced street foods”— as he and a friend (also a cis white man) roll up to the Middlebury Food Co-Op in a Subaru SUV where they source their ingredients for an array of dishes “inspired” by cultures from around the world. Since its inception, Fiasco’s menu has included items such as butternut squash pupusas, kimchi pork fried rice burritos, steamed pork buns, grilled avocado tacos, sweet potato tacos and cochinita pibil tacos.
To cite a very relevant article written by Rachel Kuo at Everyday Feminism, “One of the questions that both chefs and diners should ask themselves is, who is laboring and profiting? Where are these recipes from? Who is this cuisine profiting off, but not supporting – a group that is historically and currently oppressed?”
I should not and cannot claim that all students who identify with Salvadoran culture, for example, were similarly outraged at seeing pupusas on Fiasco’s menu (corrected from initial spelling: “papusas”), or that folks who identify with Mexican and/or Korean culture viewed Fiasco’s “kimchi pork fried rice burritos” with similar disdain. What I can attest to, however, is that Fiasco’s culinary colonialism is not at all exceptional. It represents a widespread phenomenon that is particularly visible in many gentrifying cities across the U.S. Monied white people, and particularly white men, have been emerging as pioneers in an increasingly inaccessible industry of gourmet eateries which liberally take culinary traditions from cultures around the world, the territories of which have been colonized or at least occupied by European and/or U.S. powers over the course of history. Similar to the process of colonialism that extracted labor and raw materials from occupied territories, culinary colonialism is largely driven by men. It seems important to emphasize how this problem is gendered because cooking has been consistently devalued over the course of human history when women have been relegated to domestic work. (Of course most domestic work today is still undervalued and made invisible). I would argue that this fusion food is also being grossly overvalued, in part because cis white men are in the kitchen, which, to a white supremacist patriarchal society, seems really exceptional.
Again, I want to return to Rachel Kuo: “Enjoying food from another culture is perfectly fine. But, food is appropriated when people from the dominant culture — in the case of the U.S., white folks — start to fetishize or commercialize it, and when they hoard access to that particular food. When a dominant culture reduces another community to its cuisine, subsumes histories and stories into menu items — when people think culture can seemingly be understood with a bite of food, that’s where it gets problematic.”
The issue of culinary colonialism takes on even more meaning in the context of Middlebury College, an institution which has largely served the interests of white people and of capitalism since its foundation. Most of Middlebury’s student body is white and wealthy. Maybe Fiasco and its success on our campus foreshadows the ways we (particularly white people with class privilege) go out into the “real world” to become gentrifiers. Throughout my time here, I have seen friends and peers leave this campus to settle in cities across the country, which have become sites of displacement on a massive scale for working class people of color.
I think we, particularly people like me who will be leaving this institution with white privilege and class privilege in addition to a powerful diploma, need to be asking ourselves some critical and difficult questions about life after Midd: Is my presence and my money contributing to the displacement of city residents? How can I see myself as an agent in a process that seems much bigger than myself and the decisions I make? Does my comfort come at the expense of other people’s safety? How can I support working POC’s struggle to resist gentrification without stepping on the toes of those most directly impacted?
This article originally appeared on Beyond the Green.
(03/10/17 2:50am)
As soon as word got out that Middlebury College would host a lecture by Charles Murray (CM), students gathered and began organizing to ensure that he would not have a platform to share his ideas on our campus. Why did a large and diverse group of students put their lives on hold to plan and participate in organized dissent (knowingly breaking college policies and putting their education in jeopardy)?
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), one of the most reputable civil rights organizations in the U.S., takes a firm stance in defining Murray’s political position as one of white nationalism that promotes eugenics. According to SPLC, Charles Murray, “has become one of the most influential social scientists in America, using racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.” The SPLC goes on to say that “Murray, a statistically minded sociologist by training, has spent decades working to rehabilitate long-discredited theories of IQ and heredity, turning them into a foundation on which to build a conservative theory of society that rejects equality and egalitarianism.” Murray’s ideas and research were fundamental in driving a political agenda that we believe to be more mainstream on this campus than many admit. Opposed to addressing the lasting damages done by centuries of racist laws enacted by a culture that privileges whiteness, many people on this campus believe that people of color in the U.S. simply do not work hard enough.
On Thursday, demonstrators held signs that read “Resist White Supremacy,” “No Eugenics,” and “Expect Resistance Here” as they collectively read a statement that touched upon the deep history of eugenics programs in the state of Vermont throughout the 1930s, when Native Abenaki people were targeted for state-sanctioned forced sterilizations. In articles and open letters circulated before the event was scheduled to take place, students and alumni declared that under no circumstances should the College provide a platform for CM’s white supremacist ideologies.
Yes, freedom of speech is important and should be upheld in an academic setting; however, there are clearly fallacies within the administration’s interpretation of this constitutional provision. Not all opinions are worth amplifying or legitimizing. There are some theories that fabricate statistics and are rooted in hate.
And let us notice the context in which we choose to invoke free speech. There would be no cries in defense of the first amendment if student groups had brought a holocaust denier; no one would be yelling free speech if students were opposed to a climate change denier coming to campus. Neither the administration nor any department would have any issues denouncing these potential lecturers for their faulty science or hateful views. Yet as we saw on Thursday, our professors made an exception to offer a platform to racialized genetic inferiority, in the name of “rhetorical resilience” over academic honesty.
The Political Science Department endorsed Charles Murray as a fellow leader in academic thought. Why do we only care about free speech when it calls into question the genetic inferiority of our fellows students. What is the point of academia, if our political science professors can’t discern between conservatives and hate speech extremists?
We are deeply sorry that Professor Stanger was injured and hope that she gets well soon. Regrettable acts of violence aside, this protest was absolutely essential. If the rise of Donald Trump has taught us anything, it’s that the world beyond Middlebury College is not a classroom. If racist sh*t comes up, “rational” debate cannot dismantle it or effectively combat its growing power. The idea that bigotry will collapse under academia’s enlightened rationality is false. We must name it and deprive it of power. Robbing Charles Murray of one platform for his racialized pseudoscience is a small but important part of that resistance.
PS: Here are the two URLs that are hyperlinked in the piece
Eugenics in VT: http://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/VT/VT.html
Southern Poverty Law Center: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/charles-murray
Anna Jacobsen ’16.5, Joshua Claxton ’18 and Austin Kahn ’17.5 consider the implications of last week’s protest.