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(11/29/17 11:35pm)
We’ve all heard about the Salem witch trials. If you go into the scholarship, it turns out there were no witches in Salem — only victims of sorcery accusations. If Salem’s problem with witchcraft did not include actual witches, could Middlebury College’s struggle against racism not include actual racists?
Well, we might have a few racists, or more than a few. But both witchcraft and race have an equal basis in human biology — none. Animosity does not add up to sorcery and genotype/phenotype interactions do not add up to race. But once witchcraft beliefs turn into accusations, and racial beliefs turn into accusations, they share a frightening capacity for justifying intimidation.
Racial accusations in the U.S. have long revolved around conspiracy theories that black people pose a threat to white people. Americans might be less enamored of this and many other conspiracy theories if we realized that they are an updated version of witchcraft accusations.
Accusations of sorcery and of conspiracy have long found receptive audiences for the same reason — they concentrate blame in somebody we already detest. While disasters tend to be produced by many hands, conspiracy theories divert blame away from ourselves and send it in a single, satisfying direction — to a scapegoat. This is why, wherever you go in human affairs, scapegoating will always be a tempting activity.
In Donald Trump’s America, conspiracy accusations ricochet here, there and everywhere. At Middlebury College, they are peering around the corner at our community forums. The administration summons us to these all-campus events so that we can respond to the latest racial emergency.
The most recent are a Title IX allegation of racial profiling and a racist graffiti on a blackboard. The forums are billed as conversations and they are intended to build community. But the subject of racism, and the scale of the gathering, turns them into theatrical occasions. Students denounce their pain and suffering. Caring administrators announce dramatic new measures — to the surprise of other students, faculty and staff who haven’t been consulted.
Over the last two years, administrators have gotten more apologetic, student activists have gotten more accusatory, and the conversation has taken on the air of a tribunal.
The most recent community forum, Nov. 9 in Mead Chapel, focused on President Laurie Patton and Title IX coordinator Sue Ritter, as well as communications veep Bill Burger and a public safety officer (unnamed) who may not have been present. Students asked Patton and Ritter if they were in denial about white supremacy at the college. They also demanded apologies for alleged racial profiling.
As the questions became more personal and insulting, a student leader presided with the assurance of a hanging judge. The core of the audience, mainly students, broke into periodic applause. The margins of the audience, mainly faculty and staff, did a lot less applauding. With the exception of denials and assurances from Patton and Ritter, as well as from general counsel Hannah Ross and a few other administrators, no other sides were voiced.
None of what follows is to deny that local instances of racism require our attention. I’m especially concerned about increasing man-in-the-street animosity toward Middleburians with dark skin. There is also the longstanding problem of classroom and social life majorities that create a hostile milieu for minorities. The college can certainly do more.
What I wish to challenge are racial accusations that are so open-ended that they presume the guilt of the accused. For example, to refute one of the specific accusations against Sue Ritter, I wish to point out that an office staffed by white people is not evidence of white supremacy. If this were the case, then an office staffed by liberals would be evidence of a plot against America. That’s the kind of reductive accusation employed by rightwing conspiracy theorists.
Why would Middlebury student activists, who wish to oppose rightwing conspiracy theorists, employ the same kind of logic as they do? The most obvious answer: a wide range of Americans are entranced by conspiracy theories. What is the most easy-to-swallow version of conspiracy theory for both left and right? Racial classification! What scapegoat is easier to grasp than a bunch of black people or a bunch of white people?
Racial classification presumes that a person’s skin color tells us something important about who they are. It also presumes that a person belongs in the same behavioral category as other people with the same skin color. Both are far from the case.
Consider the following example of how simplistic and localized racial classification is. A Dominican who considers himself white gets on an airplane and flies to New York City, where he is judged to be black and/or Latino. If he then flies to Los Angeles, he will continue to be black, but not Latino in the eyes of this city’s Mexican-American population. If he then flies to Vermont, he will become a person of color. Four different places have four different racial systems.
What counts as blackness or whiteness appears and disappears as a function of assumptions and power differentials that vary enormously from one situation to the next. Everyone has the right to identify yourself as black or white, of color or not. In earlier days, who counted as black or white was enshrined by legal boundaries. Nowadays, who is designated by these labels has become far more unstable. This makes them a treacherous basis for administration and due process.
The superficiality of racial classification isn’t just a trap for racists. It’s also a trap for anti-racists when they make sweeping assumptions about who they represent and who their enemy is. Five days after Charles Murray’s famous visit to our halls, in March 2017, four Middlebury College departments and two programs hosted philosophy professor George Yancy of Emory University. Yancy’s theme was white fear of the black body. His evidence included excruciating details of Jim Crow-era lynchings, hate mail that he’s received after publishing provocative op-eds, and white fascination with black sexual prowess.
As for white people who struggle with racism and claim to overcome it, Yancy informed us, they’re wrong. So what are white people supposed to do? Their only hope, he told us, is to take their clothes off, look in the mirror and fall apart. An alternative approach, he said, is to vomit for two hours. But the best white people can hope for is to become “anti-racist racists” because, he concluded, “to be white is to be racist.”
Part (not all) of the Middlebury audience gave Yancy a standing ovation. What some of us were applauding is arguably a new form of religion organized around race, in which whiteness becomes an ineradicable stain. Like the Christian doctrine of original sin, and John Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, white people are stuck with it. All Yancy can suggest for white people is a mental health crisis — but even that isn’t going to liberate them from the curse of whiteness.
Traditional race systems in the U.S. were organized around the stigmatization of dark skin. Yancy seems to be urging us to reorganize ourselves around the stigmatization of fair skin. Judging from the opinions page of The Campus, plenty of people here agree with him, and they have lost patience with objections. If whiteness proves racism, after all, then any protestation of innocence means that you are in denial.
Here returns the parallel with accusations of witchcraft in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, as well as with accusations of liberalism in some of today’s congressional districts. What makes racism, witchcraft, or the liberal conspiracy against America an irrefutable premise is deep distrust and anger, not empirical evidence. Once human beings regard such premises as irrefutable, the only proof needed is suspicion. Anyone who objects is soon under suspicion as well. Formulaic repudiation of witchcraft, liberalism or racism becomes the political litmus test for deciding who is a good person and who is a bad one.
Perversely, the logical result of George Yancy’s “anti-racist racism” will be, not transcending race or leaving it behind us, but a new racial system that reverses the polarity of the old ones. This new system will probably be confined to the college’s prosperous economic niche, but it will continue to provide sinecures for the most clever among us, who will tend to come from the middle and upper classes just as they do now.
Another logical result of our current campaign against race will be more layers of bureaucracy. In social science we call this state-building. The rationales for state-building are always seductive. Conservatives insist that we need protection from external enemies; liberals insist that victim groups need protection from victimizers. Whether you’re obsessed with enemies or victims, the shared idiom is vulnerability, protection, security. In social science we call these dangerization scenarios, and what they produce is audit or surveillance culture.
Both dangerization and surveillance have quite a capacity for spiraling upward in the same paranoid manner as sorcery and racial accusations. The more fears you express, the more investigations of these fears will be required. The more procedures you have, the more violations of these procedures there will be. The more people you hire to fight witches, the more witches they will find.
This is how our anti-racism activists could, contrary to their intentions, be generating rationales for a new regime that will be a larger and more cumbersome version of the one they oppose. It will not be as different as they want it to be.
David Stoll is a professor of anthropology at Middlebury College.
(03/10/17 1:40am)
On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I would like to thank the protesters who prevented other people from hearing Charles Murray’s last week. The Trump administration is under siege by investigators and subpoenas. But you provided a welcome distraction. From Steve Bannon’s point of view, it couldn’t have turned out better. As for myself, I would really like to hear how different protest groups and options interacted up to the critical moment, around 4:45 p.m. on Thursday March 2, when a bunch of you decided not to walk out. If this group included newcomers pushing for a fight, and if this was still the Nixon administration, my next question would be, any chance they work for the FBI? Nowadays, the next question would be, any chance they work for an Alt-Right sting that persuaded you to do stupid things on camera?
However this happened, the shut-it-downers acted out the inhumanity you say you oppose. Shut-it-downers preempted other strategies, that would respect a speaker’s right to be heard and make the protest look good, so that you could rhythmically stomp on free speech. The rest of us do not understand how, in the name of fighting hate-speech, you could hate-speech a speaker for two hours, then attack him and his escort as they tried to leave. But there’s a possible explanation for why you could do this with a clear conscience — is it because of how you think about race?
The reason I ask is that you used race to justify your actions. Racial epithets played all too well in this liberal enclave. The Southern Poverty Law Center uses pull-quotes to accuse Charles Murray of racist pseudoscience and white nationalism, which you escalated by calling him a white supremacist. Now I’m hearing protesters defend their actions by saying it’s okay to punch Nazis. So Charles Murray is equivalent to a Nazi? Rhetorical escalation often backfires; if it sends you into a rage, your opponent will look more reasonable than you do. That’s certainly how Murray looked, standing patiently at the podium for half an hour, as the halo of free speech descended upon his brow.
Calling Murray a white supremacist is like calling an abortionist a baby-killer. Eighth- month abortions kill viable infants. But if you label abortion providers as baby-killers, you make a false generalization and dehumanize them. This is to be avoided if you want to avoid violence. In the case of Murray, his use of psychometrics to characterize broad populations has made him popular with Republicans who feel that government handouts encourage anti-social behavior among low-income Americans. This puts him on a slippery slope that can quickly lead to white supremacy; it is possible that Murray enjoys being on this slippery slope; but neither this nor white nationalism nor scientific racism are positions that he articulates. Murray is better defined as a bio-determinist or genetic fatalist, the limitations of which are easy to explain.
Those of you who race-baited Murray as a white supremacist put yourselves on your own slippery slope. You dehumanized him, which made it easy to justify violence against him, which is exactly what happened. You are also on a second slippery slope, which I care about just as much because I do not want to see Donald Trump win a second term in the White House. If having conservative attitudes about poverty is tantamount to racism, are you now going to label all the American voters who think this way as racists?
Cultural conservatives, whose attitudes strike liberals as backward, include tens of millions of Democratic voters in the last election, and they are not all white. You can accuse as many people as you want of being racists, but don’t expect them to vote for you in the next election. Of course, maybe you’ve stopped caring about elections. Look how badly the last one turned out. If American elections are inextricably linked to white privilege, what do they matter? If free speech is inextricably linked to white privilege, what does that matter either?
About ten years ago, Charles Murray came here to talk about the controversy over “The Bell Curve”. There was no campaign to disinvite him and faculty members held a debrief the next day, to ensure that any interested parties understood the weak points of his argument. What has changed to make him so unacceptable now? Is the difference Donald Trump in the White House? Certainly Trump’s use of invective has inflamed the atmosphere, but how about our own local production of racial classification?
Ever since the Nazis fed anthropology texts into their bonfires, my profession has argued that race is a cultural fiction with no more basis in genetics than being French or Morrocan. There are no genes that make the behavior of a black race differ from the behavior of a white race. Far more important in shaping behavior and outcomes are cultural programming and social conditioning. And so as far as anthropologists are concerned, race is little more than a fetish or disguise for social class, ethnic or cultural differences.
Our arguments won over many American liberals, but we were not as successful with American conservatives. One conservative rejoinder was … what? What do you mean there’s no such thing as race? As far as they can see, racial determination of behavior and outcomes is common sense. For evidence they still appeal to the IQ scores that Charles Murray and his co- author deployed in their 1994 book. A second conservative rejoinder also became popular … you’re saying race is fictional? Wonderful! Now that we’ve outlawed discrimination, let’s treat everyone equally, so we can stop worrying about race.
This second conservative rejoinder put liberals in an awkward position. Our only possible response was … wait, wait, wait! We can’t stop thinking about race because racist attitudes are still strong. Think about all the inherited inequalities — structural racism. And so the same liberals who argued that race is a cultural fiction now also had to argue that race is the hidden reality behind other forms of injustice. And so we learned to sing a complicated tune about race — or perhaps we sing two different tunes at the same time. Some of us (including myself) stress that any form of racial classification is a way of misleading ourselves. Others of us (including many who study race for a living) focus instead on uncovering its insidious impact in many realms of life.
At elite colleges like Middlebury, the challenge of making underrepresented minorities feel welcome has prompted many initiatives organized around the concept of race. This includes hiring faculty who, quite understandably, interpret their mandate to include identifying hidden racial agendas in a prevailing white environment. Judging from what some of our students now publish regularly on the oped pages of The Campus, race saturates every issue at Middlebury College. But does it really?
Long ago in 2001, in “Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensititivity Training and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution,” Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn pointed out that race activists increasingly perceive “a world of endless slights. Here racist crimes and social faux pas are one and the same — all inspired by a monolithic, unabated white racial hatred. All whites must confess to their inherent racism, or they are, in the words of the recovery movement, ‘in denial.’” Yet if racial classification is a cultural fiction, if it is always a disguise for what’s really going on, can anti-racism scholars and activists fall into the trap of propagating it rather than undermining it?
That they indeed can is argued by the sociologist Frank Furedi in “What’s Happened to the University?” Interestingly, campus episodes that Americans might attribute to our penchant for racial divides, lawsuits and psycho-babble are, according to Furedi, also very common in Canada, Australia and Britain. What’s shared by universities in each of these countries is the rapid spread of the “vulnerable groups” concept. This leads to what Furedi calls “the weaponization of emotions,” that is, the public display of fragility and anger as political bargaining chips. Becoming offended has become an irrefutable rationale for ending discussion, which makes it a claim to entitlement. What’s being demanded is administrative paternalism, Furedi concludes, which guarantees further cycles of infantilization.
Could a spiral of dependency and anger explain how, on our campus, the demand for inclusion and safe space has become a demand for intolerance? Is this why our anti-racism activists last week were hurling racial invective? I heard racial insults, not just against Charles Murray, but against white women, white liberals and students of color whom shut-it-downers accused of racial disloyalty. Racialism is what I think I was hearing. Racialism is the insistence that one’s primary loyalty should be to one’s own racial group. If this is really what you think, white supremacists agree with you.
(11/17/16 9:42pm)
Has Middlebury College developed a case of lockjaw? Following Shaun King’s talk in Mead Chapel two weeks ago, Campus reporters asked students what they thought of his ideas and Black Lives Matter. Many said they were reluctant to be quoted by name. The Campus was able to publish only opinions favorable to King and BLM.
Last week, as a stunned crowd in the Crossroads Café watched Donald Trump win the presidency, the celebrations apparently were confined to dorm rooms. In public spaces, the only permissible expressions seemed to be forced levity, consternation or grief.
When someone wrote Black Lives Matter on a blackboard, prompting someone else to cross off the word “Black” and revise it to “All Lives Matter,” our new Community Bias Response Team felt obliged to issue a communique.
The bias response team, the rest of the college administration, the Campus, the Student Government Association, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, the Anderson Freeman Resource Center, and other diversity campaigners all seem to be on the same page, but is this impressive alliance of inclusionists excluding a significant share of the college community?
Personally, I have yet to find the silver lining in Trump’s victory. I share the cringing and anxiety of most of the people around me. But we cannot blame Donald Trump for our case of lockjaw.
Elite colleges like Middlebury are a bit like Christian monasteries in the Middle Ages. Our tax status and ability to pass on endowments undivided by inheritance makes us wealthier and wealthier in relation to the surrounding population. Some of our working-class staffers have less privilege than any professor or student--regardless of your skin color, gender status or current social class. If you don’t think this applies to you, let’s add up your tuition benefits and likely future earnings. Without privilege, you wouldn’t be reading books about it.
Middlebury College also resembles Christian monasteries in that we have a noble mission but, day to day, are competing with each other. Who will win the election for abbot? Whose agenda will prevail? Over time the shifting agendas, disagreements and deals of administrators, faculty, students, alumni and trustees have produced multiple discourses and claims that don’t necessarily mesh very well:
We’re a liberal arts college (so we take the time needed to develop subtlety and nuance in understanding complex issues).
We’re as competitive as possible (so we seek to admit and hire the best and brightest).
We’re also a big family (so we claim to have enduring loyalties).
We’re inclusive (which means we welcome new kinds of students and faculty).
We could get sued over that (which requires the constant addition of new forms of surveillance to control risk and assure compliance).
Not only can these commitments collide—every year the administration announces new improvements to manage the collisions. But the improvements can also collide. For example, what happened to our campaign against stress? How long did it stop us from announcing tempting new opportunities to stress each other out? And so I wonder if this college’s vulnerability to lockjaw originates in our attempt, following the advice of the Apostle Paul, to be all things to all people.
Nowadays, being all things to all people requires diversity and inclusion. Over the years, Middlebury College has defined this primarily in racial terms, rather than in terms of social class. There were good reasons to do this, but there were also good reasons not to—one of which is that focusing on race has led to our current fixation with privilege as a function of skin tone, when it actually has stronger roots in social class.
If I’m correct about this, I wonder if we could unlock our jaws with more discussion of how we’re using pregnant terms like race and racism, microaggression, cultural appropriation, and safe space. I say “pregnant” because, while you may expect one thing from these terms, you have a good chance of getting the opposite.
Let’s start with the biggest and scariest word of all, especially in a liberal enclave like Middlebury College. Race is a structural form of inequality that needs to be addressed in a liberal arts education. It is also a cognitive error. Skin tone is not a reliable guide to privilege or lack of same, nor is it a reliable guide to much of anything. My impression is that some Midd faculty encourage students to believe that race is the root of all social evil and that every issue should be racialized, that is, analyzed in racial terms. This is a serious mistake in my view; race is a recent invention, human beings never have lacked other rationales for mistreating each other, and it is rarely a good mono-causal explanation.
Microaggression is intended to describe how a classroom can be stacked against a minority. Judging from an administration-sponsored webinar last year, a microaggression is any perceived slight. But what if the perception is wrong, and how can any difficult issue be discussed without arousing emotions? Calling out students or faculty for microaggressions is more likely to shut down discussions than improve them.
Cultural appropriation is another concept intended to prevent slights to minority students. The problem is that anyone’s culture is, by definition, our assemblage of appropriations from the people around us. Culture is appropriation. What campaigners wish to prevent is cultural misappropriation, but if they are serious about defining what is and is not appropriate, they will have to classify individuals into pre-determined cultural groups and judge what styles of personal expression belong to each group. Good luck!
Safe space is, like campaigning against microaggressions and cultural appropriation, intended to protect minority groups from racial slights. Safety is a word like apple pie and motherhood—no one objects to it. But if the very idea of President Donald Trump makes many of us feel unsafe, should the college rope off areas where he shall not be named?
An underlying problem runs through all three of these concepts. Given that any argument is back-and-forth microaggressions, given that anyone’s culture is a sum of cultural appropriations, and given that our contemporary world is a threatening one, these concepts can be invoked to shut down any exchange of disturbing information.
That’s not what proponents want. What they do seem to envision is that certain people will have the right to label an interaction as a microaggression or a cultural appropriation, and that certain people will have the right to demand safe space. But not everyone. Thus white students will not have the right to demand safe space from a discussion of the slave trade, nor will they be able to claim cultural ownership of Alpine ski gear and business suits.
What the three concepts require, in practice, is classifying everyone on campus into potential victims and potential victimizers. Currently, the most popular label for this category of potential victims is “students of color.” “Of color” is an expression with a long and honorable history. It enables you to situate yourself outside the usual categories. It also builds solidarity between different groups who might otherwise compete with each other, making it very useful in broadening political platforms.
But should Middlebury College use skin color as an administrative category? I will argue no, because when color becomes an administrative category, it requires the institution to classify us on the basis of our skin tone. Exactly who has color? Asian-American and Asian students? Everybody from the Mideast and Latin America? Everybody with an Hispanic surname? And what about the assumption that students of color lack privilege whereas white students have it? Thanks to international student flows, immigration, and intermarriage, as well as Vermont’s class structure, skin tone on this campus is far from an accurate indicator of privilege.
This is why I think we’ve developed a case of lockjaw. With the best of intentions, our administration is mandating concepts that are so racially charged that, in the name of broadening conversations about race, they are instead shutting them down. If race is a cognitive error, we can’t escape it by constructing a new racial system. If we do construct a new racial system, it will empower some people at the expense of shutting other people up, just like the old racial system did.
Professor David Stoll writes in about racial discourse following the election.