The Complexity of our Thing With Race
A while back I was tasked with diffusing a live nuclear weapon in the midst of a densely populated urban area. No instruction manual. Fortunately I was successful. No big bang.
Later that same day I was asked to describe America’s Thing With Race and how to fix it so that we can all focus on and fix the many real issues that confront us. I failed. I was unable to answer the question other than mumble something about having well informed, enlightening, civil conversations about race. Hard to move the needle with only passion, anger, and ignorance.
Ok, the above didn’t really happen. Or at least the part about the nuclear weapon. I just used it to comment on the complexity of race in America.
The below was written a week or so ago by John McWhorter, a Columbia University linguistic professor and NYT columnist who often explores how race and language shape our politics and culture.
As often as not, I disagree with McWhorter and I’m not too sure I agree with his conclusion this time either. But this piece about a racist professor at UPenn does a good job in succinctly describing the complexity of America’s Thing With Race. I’d be interested in your thoughts and comments which you can post below.
Photo by Pablo Delcan
For years now, Amy Wax, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, has attracted attention for her statements about race and gender. You might have heard some of them:
“Our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.”
“Women, on average, are less knowledgeable than men. They’re less intellectual than men.”
Black people from the United States and people from non-Western countries feel shame about the “outsized achievements and contributions” of Western people.
There are not too many Black people in prison but too few.
For me, watching Wax go farther and farther down this path has become almost a spectator sport, though a glum one.
In response to complaints from students and faculty members, in 2018 the University of Pennsylvania said she would no longer teach required first-year classes. Last week it increased the penalty, suspending her for a year, removing her from her endowed position and ending her summer pay permanently.
Wax’s contributions to public discourse have been stunningly numb to compassion, courtesy and sometimes even to coherence, often recalling those of a certain former president. But though her statements (some of which she has attempted to distance herself from) are egregious and then some, so is her punishment.
I say this even though, as a professor at a comparable elite university, I know firsthand how her statements jeopardize the trust that must exist between students and their professors, as well as the institutions they attend. She has blithely stated, for example, that she has almost never seen a Black student perform in the top quarter of her classes. That seems almost an ideal way to inflame a pernicious view of higher education that is widely held among Black and Latino students — the view that despite all the diversity counselors, Black dormitories, Black and Ethnic Studies departments, etc., universities are fundamentally racist spaces.
When I was a graduate student at Stanford in the late 1980s and early ’90s, I heard that claim a lot. The main basis for it was an incident in which white pranksters had colored Beethoven in as Black on a flier. Some Black students alleged a larger pattern. But when a scholar conducted interviews with dozens of minority students and asked them about other examples of racism, they often had trouble specifying any. When I taught at Berkeley in the 1990s, I spoke with a Black student who had attended a protest against the banning of racial preferences in admissions. He told me that attending Berkeley meant constantly encountering racism. I asked him what kinds of things he was referring to, and he responded as if he had never been asked such a thing before. After a pause he mumbled that white students regularly gave him “looks.”
Nationwide, incidents of hate crimes in higher education have indeed risen in recent years. But it is misguided to characterize a whole university as racist based on a few outlying experiences, especially if they are subject to many different readings. It’s easier to pretend change hasn’t happened than to admit that it happens slowly.
In the spring of 1984 I was an undergraduate at Rutgers University. I will never forget a student at an open mic event casually delivering the joke “What do you call 100,000 Black people at the bottom of the ocean? A good start!” There was no phone on which to record her and no tradition of suspending or expelling a student for such a thing. But even then, I would not have called that campus fundamentally racist. The mostly white audience was mostly appalled. Forty years later I cannot imagine anyone even trying that joke in a setting like that. College culture, like American culture as a whole, is profoundly different.
The reality is that today, elite universities like the University of Pennsylvania are among the least racist places on the planet. But what are Black students to think, for example, when on top of everything else, Wax brings in the avowed white supremacist Jared Taylor to a seminar? Taylor’s specialty is statements such as “We have Africa in our midst, that utterly alien Africa of roadside corpses, cruelty, and anarchy that they thought could never wash up on our shores.” To the extent that having Taylor guest-lecture a class qualifies as engaging in debate, the proposition is that Black people are white people’s inferiors.
A 2017 Philadelphia Inquirer essay that Wax co-wrote extolled the virtues of a bygone America. But the circumstances the essay elevates as an ideal, in which single parenthood is considered abnormal, admissions policies make no adjustment for differences in opportunity, Asians are a much smaller minority, and Black people are openly classified as a subordinate caste, is never coming back. Arguing that anything like it should is pointless — and thus, simply mean.
But upholding the ideals of free speech means living with the discomfort — or even anger and injury — that offensive ideas can cause. Of late, universities have experienced this kind of discomfort firsthand amid ongoing protests against the legitimacy and actions of Israel. Identifying the line between legitimate protest and threats or harassment has been difficult. Student clubs have been suspended, demonstrations have been pushed off campus and at least one professor has been fired for sharing anti-Israel sentiments. But no university has categorically prohibited criticism of Israel. That’s because, as uncomfortable as the debate about Israel can be, and as close to home as it hits for many students, letting them encounter ideas that differ from their own is an important part of their education that prepares them to take their place in a democracy.
The idea that racism is so uniquely toxic that it should be an exception to the ideal of free speech is not self-evident. It is specific to this moment, and will probably seem unwise and arbitrary to future chroniclers. Especially for universities, if exposing people to potential discomfort is permissible when it comes to geopolitics, then it must also be permissible when it comes to race.
Amy Wax loudly espouses views that most reasonable people find repellent. This does not justify punishing her for expressing them. Her suspension, with the other penalties, is a kind of ritual act, an unconvincing performance of moral purity. She should be exonerated.
I have a cell phone. I have a computer. So like you, I get a billion request a day to donate to some political campaign. So I know what a lousy time this is to ask for your money. But here I am…asking. Please consider donating to The Civil Conversations Project.
McWhorter 's column is an example of why I say, with friends like the NYT, who needs enemies?
Two points of contention. 1) She should not be exonerated! Debate and disagreement should be allowed at any academic institution. But debate and disagreement should be based on facts and reason--and facts and reason can be challenged with facts and reason. Simply allowing otherwise is not acceptable in general and certainly not acceptable in a place of learning.
2) “outsized achievements and contributions” of Western people. This is absolutely false, related only to the century of the speaker. And who knows what the next century or two may bring. Egypt of 5000 bce, Mesopotamia of 500 bce, Hindu India of ???, or China unitil c. 1500 ce would not even comprehend such a statement. In 1400 ce China produced and used modern porcelain, while British kings ate their meals on plates of stale bread! There's evidence that the Aztecs and Incas, and perhaps the Mayans before them, lived better as complete populations than the Europeans who conquered them in the very late 15th-early 16th century. The European conquerors only had advantage of gunpower and horses--which were invented and domesticated in China.
For me, I cannot accept any justification for academic pretense for this lady. She's entitled to whatever opinion, even bias, she has--as a (somewhat despicable) private person. But she should expect rejection when she uses an academic position to share, to teach, opinions that have no support from acceptable facts or good reason.