by Robby Soave
Obama’s remarks were an indirect rebuke of one of the paramount tenets of the intersectional activist framework: that only the marginalized should be permitted to speak about matters pertaining to their oppression. Let’s hope the #Resistance was listening.
— THREE —
OFF TO THE RACES
IDENTITY, CULTURE, AND BLACK LIVES MATTER
It was the middle of October in Ann Arbor, and a particularly long summer had finally come to an abrupt end. The day I visited my alma mater, the University of Michigan, was dreary, rainy, and cold.
The campus felt uneasy: chilly, but not chill. And it wasn’t just the weather. The fall semester had seen a series of racially charged incidents. Someone spray-painted the Rock—a campus landmark that’s exactly what it sounds like—with the message “Fuck Latinos.” (The Michigan Daily reported the message as “anti-Latinx,” using the gender-neutral parlance preferred by activists who think the terms “Latino” and “Latina” make gender-nonconforming Hispanics feel marginalized.)
Just two weeks later, a black student named Travon Stearns returned from lunch to find that someone had scrawled the n-word under the name tag on his dorm room door. What made the incident particularly disturbing, Stearns told the Daily, was that it took place inside West Quad, the dormitory that houses the Michigan Community Scholars Program, in which Stearns is a participant. The Scholars Program is thought to be even more of a safe space than the rest of campus.
“Maybe people do those things as a joke but they don’t realize what psychological impact that can have on a person,” said Stearns, who found it difficult to concentrate on his studies after the incident. “Especially since I am at the University to study and get an education. But then I have to worry about the feeling of oppression and not being accepted. I have to watch my back at all times. And that just puts extra pressure on me on top of regular college life.”1
Next came the flyers, appearing in various corners of the campus. “Make America white again,” read one. Another insisted that black people were less intelligent, on average, than white people.
University president Mark Schlissel condemned these displays of racism but could do little else. Despite threats from activists on social media—“If y’all don’t check West Quad cameras & get to the bottom of this … we rioting,” wrote one person on Twitter—the police failed to apprehend any of the perpetrators. They had no idea who was responsible, and could only guess at the true motives of the vandals. Most students, though, understandably accepted the evidence on its face: these actions were the handiwork of an abominable racist.
This was the backdrop of Charles Murray’s October 11, 2017, visit. Murray, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), is the author of the 2012 book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, and was invited by conservative students at the University of Michigan to discuss his work, which describes the economic and cultural conditions that helped make Trump’s victory possible. But Murray is also a coauthor of The Bell Curve (the controversial 1994 book mentioned in Chapter Two), which argues that intelligence is partially heritable and there are differences in average IQ scores among the races.
In the more than two decades since its publication, The Bell Curve’s findings have provoked criticism from other researchers and thunderous anger from many on the left. There was no question Murray would face a hostile mob at Michigan—the only question was whether things would turn as ugly as they had at Middlebury, when Murray and his debate partner, Allison Stanger, were not just censored by the mob but assaulted as well.
At 4:00 p.m., I headed to the Diag, the campus’s central outdoor green space, for the planned protests. The area symbolically separates Church Street from State Street (get it?). Important buildings—Angell Hall, the Hatcher Graduate Library, and Randall Lab—surround the Diag on three sides; the fourth side is open and offers a view of Rackham Graduate School in the distance. The square at the foot of the library steps contains the famous brass block letter M, embedded in the ground. Chalking is permitted here, and student groups frequently scrawl announcements on the ground, though the rain had washed the area clean of chalk on this particular day. The block M itself is considered sacred—church and state notwithstanding—and fraternity members take turns guarding it to prevent rival football teams from vandalizing it before big games. Three weeks before Murray’s visit, a male student of color, Dana Greene, knelt at the block M for twenty-one hours straight, in protest of racism on campus. Schlissel was out of town at the time but made a statement of support, while the university’s Counseling and Psychological Services distributed yoga mats to Greene and other kneelers who had joined him.
“It really was just like a spontaneous thing,” Greene told me much later. He was sick of encountering racist messages everywhere—messages that seemed to become more common in the wake of Trump’s election. “This stuff happened continuously or has been happening continuously on campus. I kind of just felt like I was tired of feeling tired, if that makes sense. There was this sense of helplessness, like this was something that we had to accept now.”
As I entered the Diag, a student activist affiliated with BAMN—the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & ImmigrantRights and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary—handed me a flyer. “Protest white supremacist Charles Murray: defend our campus community against racism and immigrant-bashing,” it read. But the flyer called for more than mere protesting. It continued: “Statements from the University logically refuting these theories are not sufficient to fight racism. There is no reasonable debate to be had with white supremacists. They must be shut down.”
I asked Kate Stenvig, a local BAMN coordinator who has been active at UM for at least ten years (I remembered her from my time as an undergrad), whether she would like to see Murray shut down. “Yeah,” she replied. “With the threat of violent, racist attacks on [students of color], immigrant students, Muslim students, we’ve been demanding that this campus be a sanctuary for immigrants, and also that the university will stand against racism in action. And that means not giving a platform.”
BAMN was not the only group organizing a protest. The local anti-fascist club, Young Democratic Socialists of America, and Science for the People’s UM chapter had arranged for several faculty members to give speeches on the Diag inveighing against Murray. John Vandermeer, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, criticized some of Murray’s work. Notably, Vandermeer did not go overboard; he pointed out that The Bell Curve actually made fairly weak claims about the heritability of intelligence. One of the organizers of this particular event told me they had no intention of shutting down Murray. Their only goal was dialogue.
Other protesters were less circumspect. “Charles Murray, get out of town! By any means necessary, shut him down!” chanted one activist. Others soon joined him. They led a march to a different area of campus—closer to the building where Murray would be speaking—and passed out sign-making materials. (Most of the finished signs bore some version of the message “Charles Murray is a white supremacist.”) “Let’s go get him,” shouted another activist as the appointed time drew near.
I watched an argument between a protester and a student in a Washington Capitals jersey—the only student, it seemed, who thought Murray should be allowed to speak without interruption. The protester, also a student, disagreed. He referenced the “paradox of tolerance”: the idea, first described by philosopher Karl Popper in 1945, that in order for a society to remain tolerant, it might have to place restrictions on intolerance, lest the intolerant gain too much power and overthrow the tolerant. As Popper wrote in The Open Society and Its Enemies: “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
It’s easy to see, based on this passage, how one might conclude that revoking the rights of intolerant people is
justified under Popper’s worldview. However, Popper hedged it just sentences later, saying, “I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise.”
Popper probably never meant to suggest that we ought to suppress intolerance via illiberal means; rather, he believed liberal society could choose violence as a last resort if that’s what is required to battle the intolerant.
“To Popper, intolerance is not to be deployed when the utterance of intolerant ideas might make you uncomfortable, or when those ideas seem impolite, or when they get you really mad,” wrote Jason Kuznicki, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, in an article expounding Popper’s views. “It was only in a footnote that he considered the possibility of using violence, and he did so with obvious disdain.”
I struck up a conversation with the student protester who had referenced the tolerance paradox as justification for shouting down Murray. I’ll call him Stanley. He was white, with short brown hair and the scraggly beginnings of a beard. He wore a red jacket over a plaid shirt, and he smoked a cigarette as we talked. He told me he had recently transferred to the University of Michigan from a college in the Pacific Northwest. (This might have explained why he apparently didn’t know that smoking was prohibited on university property, as it had been since the start of my senior year, in 2009; one of my earliest triumphs as a professional libertarian was persuading my colleagues on the Daily’s editorial board that the paper should come out against the smoking ban.) I asked Stanley if he thought the protesters had the right to shut down Murray.
“I think they have a right to go in there and make a big fucking noise until nobody can hear him and he leaves,” he said.
His one caveat, he said, was that he hoped the protest didn’t turn violent. But that was only because he didn’t consider Murray extreme enough to be deserving of violence. The alt-right, on the other hand, was different. By endorsing explicit white supremacy, this group was already attacking people of color—any violence in response would be self-defense.
“If I say I’m going to fucking beat your ass unless you leave this country, you can punch me in the fucking face,” he explained.
I asked Stanley what he, specifically, was doing at the protest. He said he was waiting for antifa to show up: he “loves” what they are doing and was hoping to get involved with them. He hated how the media was covering antifa and equating the movement’s actions with the alt-right. The two groups couldn’t be more different, he said, and antifa wasn’t engaged in nearly as much destruction as reported. Even so, I asked whether he thought antifa’s extreme behavior—overstated though it may be—ran the risk of scaring away the moderate majority of Americans.
Stanley shrugged. “They weren’t winnable, anyway,” he said.
Perhaps a hundred protesters marched to Palmer Commons, where Murray was slated to speak. Event organizers had limited attendance to students only, but I was permitted entrance as a member of the media. While in line, I overheard a protester explaining to his friends that free speech hadn’t been of any use to German citizens confronting Nazism in the 1920s.
No one was allowed inside the auditorium with a water bottle, the fear being that someone would throw a liquid at Murray. That wasn’t a problem, but the cops also stopped attendees from carrying in umbrellas, and nearly everybody had one. The process of checking umbrellas at the front desk took forever, but at least two hundred people stuck with it, because every chair in the auditorium was filled.
A student named Ben Decatur—the short, sunny-dispositioned student coordinator for AEI’s Michigan chapter, who looked a tad too young to be in college—took to the podium. He began by reciting a “free speech pledge” and asked the audience to respect Murray’s right to speak, reserving questions and remarks for the question-and-answer period. The audience, which consisted of perhaps one or two dozen conservative students, genuinely curious neutral parties or reporters, and about 180 sign-wielding activists from BAMN, Black Lives Matter, Students of Color of Rackham, and the DSA, laughed.
Next up was Murray himself. Keenly aware of what was likely to happen, he implored the mostly hostile audience to hear him out. The response was not an explosion but a slow boil. These villagers constructed quite the pyre before setting their witch on fire.
First a cellphone alarm went off. Then another, and another. Several were going off at once. The smirking faces of the young activists revealed that the prank was planned well in advance.
Then a student flipped the light switch and the room fell dark, revealing text on the wall behind Murray’s head—someone in the audience was using a projector. “White supremacist,” read the message. So there could be no mistake, the text included an arrow pointing at you-know-who. Another protester began playing the “Imperial March” from Star Wars (the Darth Vader music). As the din reached a crescendo, a student wearing a bright red turtleneck and jean jacket leapt out of his seat.
“I’m a child of Iranian immigrants,” he declared. “Charles Murray wants me dead! He wants me dead!” He continued: “They are killing us! They are killing us! Anyone who has a suit and is a Republican is killing us! You, sir,” he said, pointing at Murray, “you are killing us.” I counted ten police officers standing in the room; none took any action to deter or eject the heckler.
Murray then spoke uninterrupted for a minute and a half before another student, a young Asian woman wearing a Michigan sweatshirt, stood up and declared that the audience would rather hear her speak. She then shouted a prepared statement denouncing Murray’s work. Afterward, the dam broke, and students began to chant, “Charles Murray, go away! Sexist, racist, KKK!” Murray was drowned out, and it seemed likely the remainder of the event would be canceled.
But it wasn’t over yet. Rick Fitzgerald, a member of the university’s public affairs department, ascended the stage and spoke into the microphone.
“I am going to ask you to please be quiet,” he said.
This irritated a student, a black woman with long braided hair, who shouted at Fitzgerald, “Stop silencing students of color!”
A brave audience member seated near this woman, a young man who identified as Muslim, stood up to argue with her. He asserted that he had come to the event to hear from Murray and make up his own mind whether he agreed with what the scholar had to say. After arguing with him for a time, the woman with the braids finally gave in, asserting that she was being put through “too much emotional labor,” and she and her friends took their seats.
What followed was a solid ten minutes of actually thoughtful discussion and debate. A graduate student with knowledge of statistics and Murray’s work was invited to present his argument against The Bell Curve, and then Murray responded. It was an actual exchange of ideas—the audience could make up its own mind about whose points were more persuasive.
It didn’t last long. Exactly forty minutes into the evening’s programming, the activists engaged in a coordinated mass walkout. This had been the backup plan: if they failed to shut down the event entirely, they would simply jump ship at the chosen time. From a free speech perspective, a walkout isn’t nearly as destructive as a shutdown, since it doesn’t prevent the rest of the audience from continuing to enjoy the event. The problem, however, was that the auditorium could only fit two hundred, and many interested students who had failed to find a seat had gone home long before the walkout. By taking up space in the room, despite having no intention of sticking it out, the protesters had in some sense denied other students the opportunity to hear Murray speak.
The event was a disappointment but not a total disaster. The administration asked the protesters to be civil, and one or two vocal students challenged them to let Murray speak; those tactics actually worked, forestalling a complete shutdown. By challenging the power of the hecklers, they reduced it.
After the walkout, the group of protesters
gathered outside the building. Tensions were running high, and that’s when the only act of true aggression took place: Nathan Berning, a conservative student representing the right-leaning Leadership Institute, attempted to record video footage of the protesters on his phone, and one protester snatched the phone out of his hands and tossed it off a balcony.
Someone announced the next phase of the evening: activists were invited to head to the Rackham Graduate School building for a post-protest pizza party. Curious, I followed the crowd to a room in the basement of Rackham.
The Iranian man in the red turtleneck was there, as was the black woman with the braids, and a few dozen others—mostly though not exclusively students of color. A graduate student remarked that this was a place to “take a breath and de-stress.” Someone turned on some music—soul music—and pizza was served.
There were enough new faces present that I wasn’t immediately singled out, but eventually a young black woman came up to me and politely asked if I was a graduate student. Later I struck up a conversation with a bearded graduate student. He had evidently caught wind that I was a journalist, and appeared slightly unnerved by my presence; I said I would leave willingly, but his manners got the better of him, and he invited me to have a slice of pizza. We started chatting about the Murray event and what was happening on campus. I told him I thought the walkout was preferable to a shutdown, because Murray’s free speech rights would have been violated much more manifestly in the latter case, and also because a full shutdown would make the students look fragile and afraid of disagreement. I asked the graduate student whether he agreed with me that outright censorship of a speaker deemed offensive was likely to backfire, create a martyr, and engender sympathy not for the student protesters but for their opponents.
