by Robby Soave
“Although unintentional, there is no excuse for the pain that was caused to members of our community,” said Swanson in a statement. “I have much to learn and look forward to doing such and encourage all members of our community to do the same.”
Another accidental bias incident unfolded at Michigan State University in the fall of 2017, when someone allegedly hung a noose on a stairwell door handle. This was taken as an attempt to remind black students of extrajudicial lynchings. The police leapt into action, and MSU president Lou Anna Simon (who has since resigned in the wake of the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal) released a statement.
“I want to be clear: This type of behavior is not tolerated on our campus,” she said. “No Spartan should ever feel targeted based on their race, or other ways in which they identify. A noose is a symbol of intimidation and threat that has a horrendous history in America.”
But the “noose” was actually just a misplaced shoelace. The person who hung it on the door handle was hoping its owner would claim it. That was all.
Another alleged noose, hung from a tree at Duke University in the spring of 2015, was similarly debunked. The student who hung it was foreign-born and unaware of the symbol’s racist connotation. His explanation made perfect sense: he had tied a piece of yellow cord around a tree branch, snapped a photo of it, and texted his friends a picture of it with the request to “hang out.”
“If there was ever a pun with unintended consequences, this was certainly one,” said the student, who came forward to explain the noose’s origin and profusely apologize.22 Duke administrators initially expelled the student, but after he provided the explanation, they relented and said they would allow him back on campus.
At least one activist student was perturbed by the light punishment. Henry L. Washington Jr., a male student of color, complained about the “astonishingly lax sanction” and said it was a slap in the face of “black students and their allies.” He continued: “You may have delegitimized the claims of our outcries. It may appear that you have actually disregarded black students’ concerns.… As a community, we need you to decide that black lives matter, and to do so expeditiously, unreservedly, and permanently, for we still cannot breathe.”23
But all these cases were accidental bias incidents. There’s another category: outright hoaxes.
In late October 2017, Andrew Hammond, a journalism student at Kansas State University, noticed a vehicle covered in painted-on racial slurs like “White’s Only” and “Date Your Own Kind.” The car belonged to a black man, Dauntarius Williams, who filed a report with the police. The police swiftly caught the perpetrator: it was Dauntarius, who had defaced his own vehicle as some kind of Halloween prank. Authorities decided not to charge him with filing a false report.24
A worse hoax struck the U.S. Air Force Academy Preparatory School in Colorado Springs in the fall of 2017, when someone wrote racist messages—“Go home niggers”—on the doors of the rooms where five cadets of color lived.25 The incident shook the school; Lt. General Jay Silveria, the superintendent, delivered a fiery speech instructing anyone who could not treat others with dignity and respect to “get out” of the school. His remarks quickly went viral and were viewed on YouTube more than a million times.
The school was again shaken after investigators discovered that the perpetrator was one of the five victims, whose goal had been to distract from misconduct charges pending against him.
At Eastern Michigan University, the person who spray-painted “KKK” and “Leave niggers” on the wall of a building was … a twenty-nine-year-old student of color. He was charged in connection with a separate crime, and is serving one to five years in prison. At the University of Maryland, people initially suspected a spray-painted swastika was the handiwork of a genuine racist, but unexpectedly, police arrested a fifty-two-year-old ex-employee in connection with the crime. (He was black.) And at the University of Michigan, a student claimed a man had threatened to set her on fire for wearing the Muslim hijab. She later admitted to police that she had invented the story.
The hijab hoax occurred just a few days after the election, and was unraveled some weeks later. Kinsey, the Michigan Daily’s editor in chief, remembered hearing about the alleged hate crime during the night of her own election to the top editorial position. At the time it seemed to fit with the feeling among minority students that they were under attack.
“I was in this class on the history of Africa,” Kinsey told me. “Everyone in that class was black, except for a few people. The class was canceled the day after the election.” Black students, according to Kinsey, wondered how anyone could vote for Trump “‘while also saying that you’re my friend or that you have no malice towards me.’ People really felt personally attacked, and their identities attacked. Then there were these literal attacks, or alleged [attacks].”
Two other incidents stuck in Kinsey’s mind: a dark-skinned non-Muslim young woman was allegedly pushed down a hill by men who thought she was Muslim. Kinsey believes this crime, unlike the hijab hoax, was genuine—it even inspired her parents to buy her pepper spray. The police failed to identity the perpetrators.
Another incident involved a twenty-one-year-old student, Halley Bass, who claimed a stranger had attacked her with a safety pin and cut her face. Bass said the assailant was retaliating against her for making a statement of support for immigrants. She filed a police report and penned a widely shared Facebook post about her ordeal. Later, Bass admitted that she had scratched her own face. “I was suffering from depression at the time,” she said in court.26
“It ended up being self-inflicted and she lied about it, but at the time it was scary,” Kinsey recalled.
In recounting these hoaxes, I do not mean to suggest that all or even most hate crimes on college campuses are made up. The frustrating truth is that we have no idea what the relative percentages are. The most outrageous cases make the news. But usually the authorities don’t catch the perpetrator, and are therefore unable to discern true motivations.
Nor am I implying that being the victim of a bias incident is trivial; I have no doubt that it does indeed cause some emotional pain. But the campus racial justice movement’s overemphasis on purported hate crimes doesn’t quite hold up as evidence of a rising tide of racism. The case for sacrificing free speech norms in order to combat the oppression of hateful rhetoric is thus less strong than intersectional activists claim.
Black Bodies and Anti-Whiteness
It’s worth remembering that the civil rights movement was highly inclusive. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech depicted a vision of the future in which not just black people and white people but “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners” would live together in harmony.
The modern intersectional left, though, is not quite so interested in winning over the center with overtures to equality and is less inclined to imagine a future where skin color doesn’t mean anything. Their goal is to fight the interrelated oppressions visited on black people under our white, patriarchal, cis-centric, capitalist society.
“We, as black bodies, are tired of debating about our right to exist, about our right to humanity, about our right to be human beings,” Columbia’s Kayum Ahmed told me.
I have often heard activists of color refer to the oppressed as black bodies rather than black people. I asked Ahmed to explain it, and he obliged.
“The invocation of black bodies is a reference to the dehumanization of black people into black bodies,” he told me. “The black body is therefore considered as a thing rather than a human being. There is an existential dimension to this idea that is deeply embedded in the historical treatment of black people through slavery, colonialism, and apartheid—we see the current struggle that black bodies face as a continuation of this historical struggle.”
One can easily imagine why the enemies of the activists might prefer “bodies”: it’s dehumanizing, and reduces people to objects. Slave owners thought of their property
as a collection of black bodies rather than black people. Less obvious, though, is why black people would use such terminology.
But the field of sociology has made it so: an increasing focus on the physical—on the seen—within the discipline helped give rise to “bodies” as a substitute for people. This was not always the case. According to Chris Shilling, a sociologist at the University of Kent, early sociology—in the person of Karl Marx—gave the concept of the body short shrift.
“It was the mind, rather than the body, which served as the receptor and organizer of images concerned with, and deriving from, social stratification,” wrote Shilling in his book The Body and Social Theory.27 “In its most enduring form, this approach is evident in the Marxist tradition’s focus on ideology, false consciousness and reification.” The body was merely a receptacle for the metaphysical characteristics that made people people. But from about 1980 on, sociologists began paying more attention to the body as a “central object of study,” as Shilling puts it. After all, sociology is the study of how groups of people interact with one another, and the most obvious kinds of interactions are primarily sensory: reactions to the different ways other people look, feel, and smell. In this light, it’s easier to see why modern sociology might regard the physical presentation of the body as more fundamental to the human experience than the unique set of beliefs and personality traits that characterize the self.
This trend has certainly caught on. Talk to activists and read their thoughts, and you too will pick up on their obsession with people as bodies.
I suspect “bodies” has become a popular term for two reasons. One, it’s an ultimate form of virtue signaling. What better way for a young activist to indicate learnedness in the field of social justice than to speak the expert’s lingo? An activist who uses the word “bodies” signals that he or she has read the literature, taken Marx to the next extreme, hangs out with the right people, and is thus sufficiently woke.
Two, drilling the word “body” into the public’s heads is a subtle way of reinforcing the idea that emotional harms can also be physical harms: they are being done not to people but to people’s bodies. This seems like a great strategy for gradually redefining hate speech as literal violence. Ideas, experiences, forms of expression—these are facets of being a body, and bodies can bruise.
Ironically, activists often accuse their opponents—particularly their white opponents—of being the truly fragile ones. (Not without reason when it comes to the alt-right, as we will see in Chapter Eight.) “White fragility” is another subject of frequent discussion. The originator of the phrase—Robin DiAngelo, an author and lecturer at the University of Washington who specializes in “critical racial and social justice”—theorized that white people in America are systematically protected from ever having to reckon with the fact that they possess a racist, institutional power over black people. DiAngelo, who is white, believes white people can become uncomfortable and even hostile when confronted with their privilege; they are so blind to the institutionalized racism from which they benefit that they can react with extreme emotional negativity when the subject of race is broached.
For example, picture an out-of-work fifty-year-old white man who never attended college and lives in the Deep South in a town where jobs are disappearing, and imagine he is being told that he is complicit in white supremacy, from which he benefits. He refuses to see this, of course, instead blaming his lot in life on affirmative action, immigrants, and other factors.
“White fragility,” though, doesn’t just apply to folks who are truly racially insensitive. This should come as little surprise to readers at this point, but DiAngelo reserves some of her harshest criticism for—you guessed it—white liberals.
“White moral objection to racism increases white resistance to acknowledging complicity with it,” DiAngelo wrote.28 That sort of sounds like she’s saying people who aren’t racists are the real racists, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. She continues: “In a white supremacist context, white identity in large part rests upon a foundation of (superficial) racial toleration and acceptance. Whites who position themselves as liberal often opt to protect what they perceive as their moral reputations, rather than recognize or change their participation in systems of inequity and domination.”
White supremacy, according to this thinking, “rests upon a foundation of superficial racial tolerance and acceptance.” Therefore, even if a society appears tolerant and accommodating, it could still be racist to its core. In fact, the more accepting the society appears, the more likely it is to be a white supremacist society! Tolerance is thus understood as a characteristic of white supremacy—someone should call this the tolerance paradox 2.0—and liberalism, which holds tolerance as one of its crowning values, as the ultimate expression of white supremacy. It is this thinking that undergirds the slogan deployed by activists at William and Mary who shouted “liberalism is white supremacy.”
People who react to this characterization with scorn are proving it to be fundamentally sound, in the eyes of the activist. Such a characterization makes liberals uncomfortable, not because it’s wrong but because they’re suffering from white fragility, a side effect of their complicity in white racism. As one Twitter activist, a woman who describes herself only semi-ironically as a full communist, put it, the goal is to “shut down more white liberals.”29 Her tweet to this effect included an image of three brown fists.
Student activists occasionally blur the lines between being against white supremacy and being against whiteness itself—and, by extension, all white people. Rudy Martinez, a Texas State University student, wrote an op-ed claiming that white people are “an aberration” and that “white death will mean liberation for all.” The piece was explicitly racist; Martinez claims, “When I think of all the white people I’ve ever encountered—whether they’ve been professors, peers, lovers, friends, police officers, et cetera—there is perhaps only a dozen I would consider ‘decent.’” At the end of the piece, Martinez writes, “I hate you because you shouldn’t exist. You are both the dominant apparatus on the planet and the void in which all other cultures, upon meeting you, die.”30
Martinez lost his job as a columnist as a result of the provocative screed, and various college officials condemned his remarks. But somewhat subtler criticisms are routinely leveled at whiteness itself by activist students and professors. Sometimes these generate a backlash—especially if the conservative media catches wind of them—and other times they don’t.
Some examples: Every year for the last fifteen years, California State University San Marcos has hosted a “Whiteness Forum.”31 The forum kicks off a class taught by Dreama Moon, a white communications professor, called Communication of Whiteness. At the 2017 forum, a student performed a spoken-word piece with the lines “Whiteness thrives on the hate of everyone.”
Ekow Yankah, a professor of law at Cardozo Law School, penned an op-ed for the New York Times confessing that he will teach his young sons “to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible”—an admission of racism that would surely be career-ending if the races of the concerned parties were reversed. “I will teach them to be cautious, I will teach them suspicion, and I will teach them distrust.”32
A Michigan State University student, Maggie DeHart, was walking to class when she spotted a sign that said simply, “It’s okay to be white.” In response, she fired off a letter to the State News, Michigan State’s student-run publication. “This seemingly simple statement is aggressive and it’s false,” she wrote. “It’s not okay to be white.”33 That DeHart herself is white is beside the point. It’s true that “it’s okay to be white” is sometimes deployed as an alt-right talking point, and in this context it could be seen as an appeal to white superiority. But, as DeHart pointed out at the end of her letter, alt-right racists thrive off claims that whiteness is under attack.
Readers may recall the tragic death of Otto Warmbier, a white American college student who journeyed t
o North Korea and was arrested by the government on trumped-up treason charges. He was compelled to confess his crimes, and by the time he was released to American authorities, he had slipped into a mysterious coma from which he never recovered. The U.S. government rightly condemned North Korea’s disrespect for human rights; outrage on behalf of Warmbier was universal—or nearly universal. Katherine Dettwyler, an anthropology professor at the University of Delaware, wrote on Facebook that Warmbier “got exactly what he deserved” for being a “young, white, rich, clueless, white male.” (Yes, she emphasized “white” twice.) Affinity, a social justice–themed online magazine for teenagers (known for interesting articles like “In Today’s Society, Is It Reasonable for Women to Hate Men?”), retweeted a comment about Warmbier’s death with the following additional commentary: “Watch whiteness work. He wasn’t a ‘kid’ or ‘innocent’ you can’t go to another country and try to steal from them. Respect their laws.”34
In the wake of the Las Vegas mass shooting, George Ciccariello-Maher, a professor of political science at Drexel University whose vocal support for the antifa movement and communism in general has given him a relatively high profile among far-left activist academics, said that whiteness itself is responsible for mass killings. “Whiteness is never seen as a cause, in and of itself, of these kinds of massacres,” lamented the professor during an interview on Democracy Now! Ciccariello-Maher, who occasionally jokes about guillotining the bourgeoisie, continued: “Whiteness is a structure of privilege and it’s a structure of power, and a structure that, when it feels threatened, you know, lashes out. And so, that’s the kind of thing that we really need to think about, not only why is it—and I think there’s a lot of attention to the fact that we demonize often Muslims or, you know, other people of color when these attacks occur.”35 It would seem that Ciccariello-Maher is not opposed to demonization—he just thinks the wrong group is being demonized.
