Eventually Christakis explained to the students that other people have rights too, not just them. And at this point as other students were heard saying ‘He doesn’t deserve to be listened to’, another young black woman – whose rant ended up going viral – started accusing the professor of making ‘an unsafe space here’. He started to respond. She raised a hand and screamed ‘Be quiet!’ She went on. ‘In your position of master your job is to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Silliman. You have not done that. By sending out that email that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that?’ Christakis tries to say, ‘No I don’t agree with that.’ Then at the top of her voice, in fury the student screams: ‘Then why the fuck did you accept the position? Who the fuck hired you?’ He tried again, ‘Because I have a different vision than you.’ It didn’t placate her. The student kept screaming, ‘You should step down. If that is what you think about being a master you should step down. It is not about creating an intellectual space. It is not. Do you understand that? It is about creating a home here. You are not doing that.’ Before storming off she screams, ‘You should not sleep at night. You are disgusting.’13
It is worth remembering that all of this was about Halloween costumes, and whether or not university authorities should infantilize students by telling them what to wear or not. After watching the display at Yale most people who had not gone to the college might wonder how these students were going to get through life if they found it this hard just to get through Halloween.
Unlike with the Weinsteins, in the case of Erika and Nicholas Christakis there was some support from some colleagues. But nevertheless at the end of the year of the imbroglio Christakis stepped down from his position as the Master of the residential college at Yale and his wife resigned her position.
The fact that students at Yale were able publicly to berate and curse at their professors, even getting them to act in exactly the way they wanted them to act – and eventually to hound them from their jobs – was significant. Perhaps this led to emboldening students at Evergreen and elsewhere. But what is striking about the footage of these events is that they are such outrageously clear power-plays. However sincere some of the students might be, there is also a visible disbelief that the adults are so easy to get on the run. That and a certain relief that university (instead of being a period of rigorous study) might be got through by a process of making extreme allegations and unreasonable demands.
In a piece after the case had died down Christakis tried to explain what a university should be and that it was the duty of a university to ‘cut at the root of a set of ideas that are wholly illiberal’. These included that ‘Disagreement is not oppression. Argument is not assault. Words – even provocative or repugnant ones – are not violence. The answer to speech we do not like is more speech.’14
That sentiment did not catch on. A year after Christakis’s written intervention there was a panel discussion at Rutgers University on Identity Politics which included Professor Mark Lilla and the black entrepreneur and libertarian commentator Kmele Foster. In his remarks Foster made a passionate defence of free-speech protections, explaining to the assembled students that in the 1960s minority groups had used free-speech protections to fight for civil rights and that ‘it was essential for them to be able to secure those rights in order to advocate’. Foster pointed out that Martin Luther King Jr had written his letter from a Birmingham jail because he had been imprisoned for effectively violating speech codes. At this point a portion of the Rutgers audience turned on the black speaker and started chanting ‘Black Lives Matter’. One black member of the audience who started shouting at Foster got a simple question in response from Foster: ‘Do facts matter?’ His interlocutor shouted back, ‘Don’t tell me about facts. I don’t need no facts.’ He went on: ‘colonialism is the problem . . . the fact that you have one group of people controlling over another group of people’. During this another audience member waved a sign which read ‘White supremacy is the problem.’15 Eventually the black speaker was allowed to finish.
What these and many other such reactions revealed was part of a much deeper well of thought. This is the idea – which has been swilling around in black politics and black radical thought for years – that since everything is set up by a structure of white hegemony every single thing in that structure is laced through with implicit or explicit racism, and that therefore every single aspect of it must be done away with. If any of the existing system is allowed to remain then racial justice cannot be arrived at. It is why the black community magazine The Root ran a piece by Michael Harriot in 2018 which criticized white people who complain about lack of ‘diversity of thought’. ‘You have to give it to white people,’ the author said, with ‘their penchant for playing the victim’. He went on to explain that ‘The caucasity lies in their immediate dismissal of any object that might pose a threat to the continued primacy of whiteness.’ He then built up to his central insight which was that, ‘“Diversity of thought” is just a euphemism for “white supremacy”.’16
On it goes. In the same year as Kmele Foster was told ‘I don’t need no facts’ the writer Heather Mac Donald was due to speak at Claremont McKenna College. The speech itself was diverted to another room and given by video link because of threatening behaviour from students. But ahead of the event a letter was sent to the university authorities from ‘We, few of the Black students here at Pomona College and the Claremont Colleges’. The signatories claimed that the female conservative guest would, if engaged to speak, ‘not be debating on mere difference of opinion, but the right of Black people to exist’. They described Mac Donald as ‘a fascist, a white supremacist, a warhawk, a transphobe, a queerphobe, a classist, and ignorant of interlocking systems of domination that produce the lethal conditions under which oppressed peoples are forced to live’. Needless to say, none of this is true. The students had clearly heard some version of what Mac Donald had written about in her book The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, but they clearly had not read it. Still they went on in the same vein that giving Mac Donald a place to speak would be ‘condoning violence against Black people’ and would be ‘anti-Black’. But it was the culmination of the students’ peroration which was most revealing. There they wrote:
Historically, white supremacy has venerated the idea of objectivity, and wielded a dichotomy of ‘subjectivity vs. objectivity’ as a means of silencing oppressed peoples. The idea that there is a single truth – ‘the Truth’ – is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain. This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples.17
‘The Truth’ is a construct of the Euro-West. It is hard to think of a phrase which can at one and the same time be so wildly misguided and so dangerous in its implications. If ‘the Truth’ (in scare quotes) is a white thing, then what is everyone else meant to live in and strive towards?
Truthfully the worrying thing about such cases is not that young people would regurgitate such positions. The disturbing thing is that they have been taught them.
Of course one of the oddities of campus politics – including campus activism – is that it is easy and tempting to dismiss. Anybody of a certain age can look back and say that the students were always revolting, ignoring the fact that until the 1960s university was not seen as a place to start a career in activism or indeed foment a local, let alone worldwide, revolution. But the rapidity with which the most bizarre campus claims have swept out into the real world is now clear. As people at safe liberal arts colleges in America have started to believe or pretend to believe that racism is ever-present where it is demon
strably absent, so in the wider world an obsession with race – and the ability to say racist things in pursuit of an alleged anti-racism – has become utterly normalized. And so, as Andrew Sullivan has noted, when surveying the craziness of campus and looking at the rest of society, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that ‘We all live on campus now.’18
Crazy Shit
Like so many things, some of this starts from a perfectly reasonable place, such as a desire to atone for undeniable past mistakes. But even these acts of atonement often feel less like an act of healing and more like an act of re-infecting. For instance, most people probably do not view National Geographic as a particularly racist magazine. But for anyone who missed its past racism, in 2018 the publication felt compelled to issue the magazine with an editorial consisting of a formal apology. In a whole issue devoted to the issue of race the magazine editorial was headlined ‘For decades, our coverage was racist. To rise above our past, we must acknowledge it.’ The apology from the magazine – which started publishing in 1888 – covered a wide range of things. In her editorial the editor-in-chief, Susan Goldberg, said that she had commissioned someone to review the back issues of the magazine and that ‘some of what you find in our archives leaves you speechless’. The magazine found its past editions guilty of many things. They discovered that until the 1970s the magazine had ‘all but ignored people of color who lived in the United States’. Elsewhere in the world it had pictured ‘natives’ as ‘exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages – every type of cliché’. In short the magazine ‘did little to push its readers beyond the stereotypes ingrained in white American culture’. A piece from 1916 about aboriginals in Australia was found to be especially racist.19 As a demonstration of how far the magazine had come the editor pointed out to readers that she was not only Jewish but also a woman.
Aside from drawing attention to things nobody could have remembered, there was something else strange in all of this. Almost any student of history is familiar with the truth summed up in the opening line of L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between: ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ It requires a level of naivety to imagine that a piece from a magazine published in 1916 would meet the precise social criteria of 2018. In 1916 women in Britain and America did not have the right to vote, you could still be sentenced to hard labour in prison for being gay, and an entire generation of young men were being gassed, blown-up, shot at and shelled in the fields of Flanders and France. Things were different then.
A lesson that might have been learned was that in any event the apology from National Geographic did not satisfy. In The Guardian the historian David Olusoga declared the apology ‘well meant but slow in coming’.20 Perhaps it is not surprising that this level of scouring of the past should lead not to a helpful critical attitude but to a neurotic fear about what people should or should not be allowed to do or say in the present. If people got things so wrong in the past, how can you be sure you are acting appropriately today?
Just before National Geographic’s apology the film Black Panther was released. In the run-up there had been a lot of comment about the predominantly black cast and the opportunity for the film to be a moment of hope for black Americans and others. A lot appeared to be riding on the critical and commercial success of the film. A senior editor called Emily Lakdawalla at something called The Planetary Society asked Twitter to help her with what was clearly a sincere question. When would be the appropriate moment for a white woman such as herself to go to see Black Panther? Obviously the opening weekend was inappropriate, but when could she go? The 42-year-old woman wrote on Twitter: ‘So I carefully did not buy Black Panther tickets for opening weekend because I did not want to be the white person sucking Black joy out of the theater. What’s the appropriate date for me to buy tickets? Is next weekend ok?’21 ‘Sucking Black joy’ has quite a ring to it, suggesting that white people are not just monsters and racists, but vaguely vampiric to boot.
Again it sounds deranged to think that the mere presence of somebody of one skin colour could suck the joy out of an experience for another group of people. But much lampooned for her tweet though Lakdawalla was, the ideas she had imbibed were absolutely everywhere. She had breathed them in, and now was merely breathing them out.
In most years Thanksgiving is simply the time for people in America to come together with their families and loved ones. But by 2018 even this could be racialized. Here is how The Root magazine chose to line up its readers for Thanksgiving 2018. ‘Dear Caucasians’, the publication lectured its online followers, ‘If you’re attending Thanksgiving with black families, remember that our Thanksgiving has nothing to do with the colonization and genocide of Native Americans. Ours is a semi-religious ritual based on food, family and sweet potato pie.’22 A few weeks later into the holiday season and Vice released a video about an exciting new type of vacation. It was about a group of women who needed a break, ‘from white people’. Or as Vice headlined the video when they sent it out, ‘What it’s like to take a vacation away from white people’.23 About the vacation itself and the ideas behind it, the publication and participants had only good things to say. The participants made it plain that it was important for women of colour to find time to get away from white people, that there was nothing wrong with this and that you would have to be sinisterly racist to take any exception to the vacation in question.
Over the northern border it turned out that Canadians were not even able to die without demonstrating systemic racism. In April 2018 a terrible bus crash occurred in Saskatchewan in which 16 young people were killed and another 13 injured. The tragedy was only made greater when it was discovered that the bus involved in the collision had been filled with the Humboldt Broncos. In a hockey nation the death of so many people in their late teens was a source of unprecedented national mourning. Canadians left their hockey sticks outside their front doors as a mark of respect and a campaign to raise funds in memory of the young men yielded a record-breaking amount of money. But even this tragedy was not immune from the new racialization of absolutely everything. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy the Quebec City writer and self-described ‘activist’ Nora Loreto took to social media to complain about the attention paid to the dead hockey team by proclaiming, ‘The maleness, the youthfulness and the whiteness of the victims are . . . playing a significant role.’24
By 2018 it seemed as though whether you looked forward or backward, in tragedy or in comedy, always the same lens was looked through: the lens of race. It was the year in which Disney released a remake of their classic film Dumbo – the story of a young elephant. Reviewing not even the film but the trailer of the live-action remake, Vice chose to refer to the original 1940 Disney cartoon of Dumbo as ‘easily one of the scariest things Disney has ever made’ because of various characters who were alcoholic, ‘creepy’ and ‘also generally pretty racist’. Yet ‘In spite of all of that, the movie has still managed to become a beloved cartoon, cherished and periodically feared by children for generations’. Fortunately all of this had now been fixed in the updated version. Having watched a trailer of this children’s cartoon, Vice felt licensed to report to its adult readership that Disney’s remake of Dumbo appeared to be ‘cute and heartwarming and seemingly neither racist nor terrifying’.25 What made them think that it would be? In what sort of world does a remake of a children’s cartoon about a flying elephant have to be given such a health warning? The answer is – a world in which everything had become completely obsessed not by racial blindness but by racial obsession. And if campus race theorists are the obscure genesis of some of these ideas, nowhere are they more visibly played out than in the most public mediums of all, where hundreds of millions of people imbibe the idea that this newly revived obsession with race is absolutely normal.
Casting Aspersions
In February 2018 Netflix released its adaptation of Richard K. Morgan’s novel Altered Carbon. To anyone but the most dedicated scie
nce fiction aficionado it was almost wholly indecipherable, albeit stunningly and expensively shot. Without getting too enmeshed in the weeds, the central plot occurs in the year 2384 and revolves around a character called Takeshi who has been killed and is then reborn in another body (or ‘sleeve’) – which is the sort of thing you can always do in the future.
The moment that Netflix announced the casting – even before the series was released – the central decision was condemned. For the role of the reborn Takeshi has been given to the Swedish-born actor Joel Kinnaman who had become famous playing a political opponent of Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood in the Netflix adaptation of House of Cards. On the day of Altered Carbon’s release Time magazine was among those publications that decided to run straight at the target. As its headline put it, ‘Altered Carbon takes place in the future. But it’s far from progressive.’
In fact, as the piece went on to argue, the series felt ‘downright retrograde’ because of its treatment of ‘race, gender and class’. The central problem was the casting of the Swedish Kinnaman. According to Time (which seemed to have forgotten that the whole thing was science fiction), it was wrong to cast a ‘white guy’ as the person in the reborn body of a character who in a previous life had been ‘an Asian man’. While conceding that the adaptation does accurately follow the scenario as written in the original book, Time’s critic found (deploying the favoured lexicon of social justice) that nevertheless ‘onscreen it’s especially problematic’. By her lights:
The creators would have done well to instead cast an Asian actor as the reborn Takeshi, avoiding the same controversy that plagued last year’s Ghost in the Shell. In that adaptation, Scarlett Johansson played an Asian woman’s consciousness inside a white android.
The Madness of Crowds Page 17
