Category: Regressive Left

HuffPo stupidity of the day

September 28, 2016 • 1:00 pm

The Regressive Left Aggregation site continues its effusive and uncritical worship of the hijab and of Hillary Clinton. Every day, it seems, there’s a new piece showing how awesome it is not only that women wear hijabs, but that various places celebrate that.

In this case it’s Playboy, which of course has a reputation completely inimical to the purpose of hijabs (increasing women’s “modesty” and ensuring that they not be seen as sex objects). Note, however, that Playboy no longer features nude women.

Click on screenshots if you must read the article. It’s odd that Playboy, which while being accused of objectifying women was also consistently on the side of women’s rights, now is celebrating women’s oppression.

Curiously, PuffHo also had an open letter from another Muslim women criticizing the decision of Noor Tagouri to appear in Playboy, and the Washington Post did the same. An excerpt from the Post‘s piece by Asma Uddin:

But the Playboy interview is a step too far. It represents Muslim women, as purportedly represented by Tagouri, not on their own terms but in Playboy’s terms — and, in the process, mocks the very ethics and morals the hijab is religiously intended to reflect.

The hijab, though politicized in a variety of contexts, is at its religious core a symbol of chastity and spiritual connection to God. As one prominent Islamic scholar has explained, the hijab is “essentially a mode of living” that reflects the sanctity of privacy and private spaces. In other words, it is a repudiation of the voyeurism Playboy is fundamentally about.

. . . The presence of a hijab-wearing woman in a magazine known for lasciviously undressing and objectifying women is jarring in a number of ways, and there are reasons to believe that’s what Playboy intended.Playboy’s philosophy celebrates open sexuality and believes that modesty and chastity are a product of a shaming and oppressive culture, which it condemns.

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Finally, I was taken aback by the article below, thinking that its purpose was to show that there are a lot of reasons that people don’t like Hillary Clinton that have nothing to do with her gender. But nope, it says that the only reason people hate her is because of her gender. I wonder, then, how we explain all the young Millennial women who favored Bernie Sanders? An excerpt:

It’s time to stop pretending that this is about substance. This is about an eagerness to believe that a woman who seeks power will say or do anything to get it. This is about a Lady MacBeth stereotype that, frankly, should never have existed in the first place. This is about the one thing no one wants to admit it’s about.

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What does it mean to be a hijabi and a fashionista?

September 27, 2016 • 1:30 pm

This all started when I saw this tw**t from Sarah Haider, co-founder of Ex-Muslims of North America:

. . . which referenced this Facebook post by Haute Hijab, a community of hijab-wearing fashionistas:

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And what happened is shown in part below: Anniesa Hasibuan, a fashion designer who produces incredibly elaborate clothes for the hijab-wearer (see some of her designs here), had a fashion show in New York, and after the catwalk parade there was a standing ovation from a non-Muslim crowd:

 

This, of course, is something that would be—and probably has—been touted by PuffHo. Sarah was saying that the standing ovation was actually a celebration of women’s oppression—oppression in the form of the hijab, a scarf meant to cover the hair as a sign of women’s modesty dictated by some sects of Islam.

And at first I thought, “Maybe Sarah is being too harsh here. Maybe these women don’t wear the hijab to be modest, but simply (as Jews wear yarmulkes) to be “closer to God.”

But then I thought, “But Islamic scripture says that you’re closer to God not simply by wearing the headscarf, but because you’re covering the bits of yourself that could inflame men’s desires.” And if that’s the case, then we have not only hypocrisy—the combination of hair covering to enforce modesty combined with glitzy fashion designed to show yourself off (makeup, outline of the bosom, glamorous fabrics)—but Regressive Leftism, in the form of a liberal crowd applauding the women precisely because they’ve exercised this hypocrisy but kept their all-important hair under wraps.

And I think Sarah is right. Yes, women should certainly have a choice about whether to wear the headscarf, and I’m sure some of them do wear it by choice (though fewer than we think), and some do it not to obey religious custom, but to make a political statement. But even that political statement is deeply entangled with faith, for Islam is the most political of religions.

The fact is that there’s nothing in the Qur’an or hadith about covering the hair (see below), but there’s plenty about being modest (see here and here, for instance), and Islamic scripture is clear that women must be far more modest than men.  But there is no scriptural requirement to cover one’s hair, as noted in Wikipedia’s piece on “Intimate parts in Islam“:

And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what (must ordinarily) appear thereof; that they should draw their khimār over their breasts and not display their beauty except to their husband, their fathers, their husband’s fathers, their sons, their husbands’ sons, their brothers or their brothers’ sons, or their sisters’ sons, or their women, or the slaves whom their right hands possess, or male servants free of physical needs, or small children who have no sense of the shame of sex; and that they should not strike their feet in order to draw attention to their hidden ornaments. (Quran24:31).

You’re supposed to cover your intimate parts, but not necessarily the hair. What has happened in some Islamic countries—and this is recent—is that the hijab worn over the head has been interpreted as necessary for modesty, even if not explicit in Islamic scripture. It’s the interpretation of that scripture that has changed, so that in the last 40 years in places like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and Egypt, hijabs have become more and more common as a sign that a woman is a good Muslim. (Google image “Women Tehran 1970” and then put in “2015” to see the difference. Or substitute “Cairo” or “Kabul” for “Tehran.”)

For most hijabis, then (and I am guessing here from what I know), wearing the scarf is a religious signal, meant to show that you’re abiding by old Islamic dictates of female modesty and newer dictates on how the modesty is instantiated. But all of those dictates, new and old, were and are enforced by men; they’re part of the corrosive patriarchy that pervades Islam. If the hijab makes you feel “closer to God,” then it often does so by making you feel that you’re adhering more closely to an entire code of conduct designed to oppress and marginalize women.

So Sarah is right. Those hijabi fashionistas are simple hypocrites: they’re trying to obey the letter of Islam but violating the spirit. They’d immediately be whacked by the morality police if they appeared on the streets of Kabul in that garb! More important, they can’t have it both ways: hide your beauty under a headscarf in the name of modesty, but flaunt it below the neckline. Well, of course you can do that, as these women have, but let them flaunt their brand of modesty in Kabul or Saudi Arabia!

But what’s even worse is the New York crowd applauding this, not because the fashions are particularly spectacular, but because they’re topped with a hijab.

Yes, Sarah’s right: the crowd is applauding not the women or the designer, but themselves—their liberality, their open-mindedness, their show of support for what they see as an oppressed minority: Muslims. After all, Muslims are people of color. What the enthusiastic crowd doesn’t realize, though, is that it’s simultaneously applauding the oppression of women, symbolized by the very garment that elicited all this approbation.

h/t: Eiynah

The newest microaggression: Mispronouncing someone’s name

September 27, 2016 • 11:45 am

A reader sent me a link to reason.com, a right-wing libertarian website, describing the newest form of microaggression: mispronouncing someone’s name. (They, in turn, took most of their story from a CNS News report (also a conservative site) by Amy Furr. As you’ll see, the reader was dismayed to have to find this stuff on right-wing sites, but it’s simply not reported on Left-ish media sites, which ignore this kind of story for obvious reasons.

At any rate, Furr says this (my emphasis):

Hundreds of school districts across the country have taken a pledge to “pronounce student’s names correctly” to avoid the “microaggression” of mispronunciation.

According to ‘My Name, My Identity: A Declaration of Self,’ a national campaign launched in 2015 by the Santa Clara County, Calif. Office of Education (SCCOE) and the National Association for Bilingual Education, a teacher who mispronounces a student’s name can cause that student “anxiety and resentment”.

“Mispronouncing a student’s name truly negates his or her identity, which, in turn, can hinder academic progress,” according to Yee Wan, SCCOE’s director of multilingual education services.

Rita Kohli, assistant professor of education at the University of California at Riverside, says it is a sign of “microagression” when a teacher mispronounces, disregards, or changes a child’s name, because “they are in a sense disregarding the family and culture of the student as well.”

The Washoe County School District in Reno, Nevada is one of 528 school districts across the country that have recently implemented a campaign to “pronounce students’ names correctly” – including names teachers and administrators find difficult or unfamiliar – in order to be sensitive to the ancestral and historical significance of a child’s name.

Truly, a good teacher should make every effort to pronounce a student’s name properly, though it’s hard to do when you teach 100-200 students, as I often did in beginning evolution. There is simply no time to go around the class during the first session and have everyone say their name, so you have to learn names during either labs or office hours, and you can forget both names and pronounciations for a lot of students. But seriously, does it really “negate a student’s identity” to have their name pronounced incorrectly in a large class?

If that’s the case, then I was negated many, many times—and still am. My name is rarely pronounced correctly (like a “coin”), but more often as Cone-ee, Coin-ee, Cone, and all possible permutations. But of course I am a white male, and so there’s no chance of identity negation. (Nor did it ever both me, but of course I have Privilege: It’s okay to mispronounce my name.) The campaign is most likely aimed at minority students—not blacks, but perhaps Hispanics, Africans, or those from the Middle East, and, of course, Poland, where there are no vowels.

What is the evidence for psychological damage? The National Education Association cites a study showing that mispronounciation of names does this:

The effects can be long-lasting. In 2012, Kohli and Daniel Solorzano examined the issue in a study called “Teachers, Please Learn Our Names!: Racial Microagressions and the K-12 Classrooms.” They found that the failure to pronounce a name correctly impacts the world view and social emotional well-being of students, which, of course, is linked to learning.

What appears to be missing is evidence that, as Furr’s piece suggests, mispronounciation hinders academic progress itself.

Nevertheless, it’s a matter of simple civility to try to pronounce everybody’s name correctly, for it shows you are paying attention to them as a person, whether they be white, black, Asian, or Hispanic. Sometimes it’s harder to pronounce foreign names, so some slack should be allowed, and of course when I lived in France, working in academics, nobody pronounced my name properly.

But “microaggression”? No way—not unless you’re bigoted and boorish enough to call all Hispanic males “José”.  To turn this into a political issue conflates incivility or difficulty with language with being a bigot or racist, inflating the ever-expanding sphere of the Offense Culture. As the reason.com piece, written by Lenore Skenazy, notes:

So far, 528 school districts have taken the pledge to try to get names right—which you’d think most teachers would do without a pledge.

But if they never quite get the accent right? Is that really a diss or simply the fact that with a melting pot like America, some names are going to be (am I microaggressing?) harder to pronounce? My family and I hosted an exchange student here for a year and I don’t think we ever pronounced “Giovanni” like an Italian. We said it with our American accents. This did not seem to stymie him in any way.

It’s interesting that the reader who sent me this link has a name I’d have trouble with, too, but it’s not a name associated with “oppressed people.” He also felt bad being allied with the Right on this issue:

Now, with my genetic and cultural heritage as a Scots-Irish-Anglo-German-Welsh-Cherokee-Jew and with my very Irish, very long last name, I have always had my name mispronounced, as has my son with his traditional, but quite common, Welsh-origin name  that gets mispronounced and misspelled, I had no idea I was supposed to be offended and to have felt abused, but then I’m sure this counts for us; we’re not “ethnic” enough to count as aggressed against, I suppose.
I’m sure getting sick of this Looney-Left regressive stupidity.  I’m also getting sick of finding myself siding with the Right.
I think that many of us, including me, don’t like agreeing with a fair amount of what we see on right-wing websites.

Lionel Shriver defends “literary appropriation” and calls out the Repressive Left

September 23, 2016 • 1:00 pm

Not long ago Yasmin Abdel-Magied, a Sudanese/Australian/Muslim writer, described in the Guardian how offended she became when author Lionel Shriver, speaking at the Brisbane Writers Festival, defended the right of authors to write fiction about “marginalized” characters (i.e., people of color and others seen as oppressed). Abdel-Magied, who came off as someone unable to tolerate even the mildest contradictions of her views, stalked out of Shriver’s talk in tears, virtually accusing the speaker of perpetuating racism by appropriating other cultures in her writing.

Not long after, Shriver published her full talk online, also in the Guardian,  and it turned out to be passionate, eloquent, and thoughtful, but not at all offensive—except to the overly tender ears of someone like Abdel-Magied. Read it for yourself. But I had no idea that, as Shriver describes in a new New York Times piece, “Will the Left survive the Millennials?“, that the ostracism of Shriver extended farther than the kvetching of Abdel-Magied. It did.

As Shriver describes:

The festival immediately disavowed the address, though the organizers had approved the thrust of the talk in advance. A “Right of Reply” session was hastily organized. When, days later, The Guardian ran the speech, social media went ballistic. Mainstream articles followed suit. I plan on printing out The New Republic’s “Lionel Shriver Shouldn’t Write About Minorities” and taping it above my desk as a chiding reminder.

Viewing the world and the self through the prism of advantaged and disadvantaged groups, the identity-politics movement — in which behavior like huffing out of speeches and stirring up online mobs is par for the course — is an assertion of generational power. Among milliennials and those coming of age behind them, the race is on to see who can be more righteous and aggrieved — who can replace the boring old civil rights generation with a spikier brand.

When you read Shriver’s address, I suspect, you’ll be horrified that the festival disavowed it—and after having approved the topic in advance! And have a look at the New Republic column by Lovia Gyarkye, which basically says that cultural appropriation is okay, but only a minority group does it (“A Mexican in a Tyrolean hat is not the same as a group of college kids partying in sombreros.”)

But Shriver’s point is one we take up frequently here: the Left is under assault by college kids, many of whom adhere to “purity standards” so absurd that that parts of the Left are consuming other parts. I needn’t point out the sad saga of Peter Tatchell, or the way some feminists ignore the deep misogyny of Islam because many Muslims are brown. And now Shriver is in the center of the hurricane:

Viewing the world and the self through the prism of advantaged and disadvantaged groups, the identity-politics movement — in which behavior like huffing out of speeches and stirring up online mobs is par for the course — is an assertion of generational power. Among milliennials and those coming of age behind them, the race is on to see who can be more righteous and aggrieved — who can replace the boring old civil rights generation with a spikier brand.

When I was growing up in the ’60s and early ’70s, conservatives were the enforcers of conformity. It was the right that was suspicious, sniffing out Communists and scrutinizing public figures for signs of sedition.

Now the role of oppressor has passed to the left. In Australia, where I spoke, Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act makes it unlawful to do or say anything likely to “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate,” providing alarming latitude in the restriction of free speech. It is Australia’s conservatives arguing for the amendment of this law.

As a lifelong Democratic voter, I’m dismayed by the radical left’s ever-growing list of dos and don’ts — by its impulse to control, to instill self-censorship as well as to promote real censorship, and to deploy sensitivity as an excuse to be brutally insensitive to any perceived enemy. There are many people who see these frenzies about cultural appropriation, trigger warnings, micro-aggressions and safe spaces as overtly crazy. The shrill tyranny of the left helps to push them toward Donald Trump. [JAC: or toward Milo Yiannopoulos.]

I used to question that last sentence—that the Regressive Left was pushing people toward the right. But now that I’ve heard so many Trumpheads mention “political correctness,” and seen the Left refuse to have an honest conversation about Islam, I’m not so sure Shriver is wrong. And yes, classical liberalism—the brand that defends minority rights and free speech at the same time, the people who promoted the Free Speech movement at Berekeley—is endangered by the antics of people like Abdel-Magied, who can’t even bear to hear her opinions contradicted.

Just like it’s salutary for nonbelievers to declare publicly that they’re atheists, so as to give courage to nonbelievers in the closet, so should we, as did Shriver, call out the bullying tactics of the Regressive Left, which might now be renamed The Repressive Left. Nick Cohen has been warning us about this for years, but few read him in the U.S. Perhaps they’ll read Shriver in the New York Times, whose peroration is this:

In an era of weaponized sensitivity, participation in public discourse is growing so perilous, so fraught with the danger of being caught out for using the wrong word or failing to uphold the latest orthodoxy in relation to disability, sexual orientation, economic class, race or ethnicity, that many are apt to bow out. Perhaps intimidating their elders into silence is the intention of the identity-politics cabal — and maybe my generation should retreat to our living rooms and let the young people tear one another apart over who seemed to imply that Asians are good at math.

But do we really want every intellectual conversation to be scrupulously cleansed of any whiff of controversy? Will people, so worried about inadvertently giving offense, avoid those with different backgrounds altogether? Is that the kind of fiction we want — in which the novels of white writers all depict John Cheever’s homogeneous Connecticut suburbs of the 1950s, while the real world outside their covers becomes ever more diverse

. . . Protecting freedom of speech involves protecting the voices of people with whom you may violently disagree. In my youth, liberals would defend the right of neo-Nazis to march down Main Street. I cannot imagine anyone on the left making that case today.

Maybe Shriver will become the American Nick Cohen. Ceiling Cat knows we need one!

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Lionel Shriver, wearing a fine pair of red cowboy boots

Lionel Shriver’s full speech on literature and cultural appropriation

September 19, 2016 • 10:30 am

On September 11 I wrote about an article in the Guardian by black Australian Muslim author Yasmin Abdel-Magied. Her piece, “As Lionel Shriver made light of identity, I had no choice but to walk out on her,” describes how Abdel-Magied was deeply triggered by a speech by novelist Lionel Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin and other books) at the Brisbane Writer’s festival.  In fact, Abdel-Magied was so offended that she walked out of Shriver’s talk. She was offended for two reasons: the pervasive “cultural appropriation” of white writers (Persons of No Color) dealing with the lives and experiences of minorities, and the fact that by writing about such minorities, PONCs were in fact denying minorities the right to publish their own novels. Abdel Magied:

Rather than focus on the ultimate question around how we can know an experience we have not had, the argument became a tirade. It became about the fact that a white man should be able to write the experience of a young Nigerian woman and if he sells millions and does a “decent” job — in the eyes of a white woman — he should not be questioned or pilloried in any way. It became about mocking those who ask people to seek permission to use their stories. It became a celebration of the unfettered exploitation of the experiences of others, under the guise of fiction. (For more, Yen-Rong, a volunteer at the festival, wrote a summary on her personal blog about it.)

It was a poisoned package wrapped up in arrogance and delivered with condescension.

As the chuckles of the audience swelled around me, reinforcing and legitimising the words coming from behind the lectern, I breathed in deeply, trying to make sense of what I was hearing. The stench of privilege hung heavy in the air, and I was reminded of my “place” in the world.

. . . In making light of the need to hold onto any vestige of identity, Shriver completely disregards not only history, but current reality. The reality is that those from marginalised groups, even today, do not get the luxury of defining their own place in a norm that is profoundly white, straight and, often, patriarchal. And in demanding that the right to identity should be given up, Shriver epitomised the kind of attitude that led to the normalisation of imperialist, colonial rule: “I want this, and therefore I shall take it.”

. . . The kind of disrespect for others infused in Lionel Shriver’s keynote is the same force that sees people vote for Pauline Hanson. It’s the reason our First Peoples are still fighting for recognition, and it’s the reason we continue to stomach offshore immigration prisons. It’s the kind of attitude that lays the foundation for prejudice, for hate, for genocide.

Those are strong accusations, bordering at last on Shriver’s being complicit in racism and bigotry. But did her speech justify these accusations? Was it so offensive that Abdel-Magied was justified in walking out?

The answer is no, as you can see by reading the transcript of Shriver’s full speech just published in the Guardian, “I hope the concept of cultural appropriation is a passing fad.” Here you see a thoughtful defense of writing about others different from you, as well as an awareness that so doing will step on some toes and raise criticism. But the arrogance and condescension described by Abdel-Magied aren’t evident, nor is there any notion that Shriver is trying to deny minorities a place in literature.

I’m aware that people like sound bites and short pieces these days, but I urge you to read Shriver’s full speech and think about it. It’s not only thoughtful but eloquent. Here are a few excerpts:

The author of Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law, Susan Scafidi, a law professor at Fordham University who for the record is white, defines cultural appropriation as “taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission. This can include unauthorised use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.”

What strikes me about that definition is that “without permission” bit. However are we fiction writers to seek “permission” to use a character from another race or culture, or to employ the vernacular of a group to which we don’t belong? Do we set up a stand on the corner and approach passers-by with a clipboard, getting signatures that grant limited rights to employ an Indonesian character in Chapter Twelve, the way political volunteers get a candidate on the ballot?

I am hopeful that the concept of “cultural appropriation” is a passing fad: people with different backgrounds rubbing up against each other and exchanging ideas and practices is self-evidently one of the most productive, fascinating aspects of modern urban life.

But this latest and little absurd no-no is part of a larger climate of super-sensitivity, giving rise to proliferating prohibitions supposedly in the interest of social justice that constrain fiction writers and prospectively makes our work impossible.

For who is the ultimate arbiter of whether and what an author can write about groups different from themselves? Is Abdel-Magied the one to give permission to write about blacks, women, or Muslims—or all three at once? Certainly she can protest what she sees as appropriation or racism, but what if others don’t? As I mentioned earlier, The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel by a white man (William Styron) about a black man, was criticized by some blacks but lauded by others.

Shriver then mounts a spirited defense of “fictional appropriation”:

This same sensibility is coming to a bookstore near you. Because who is the appropriator par excellence, really? Who assumes other people’s voices, accents, patois, and distinctive idioms? Who literally puts words into the mouths of people different from themselves? Who dares to get inside the very heads of strangers, who has the chutzpah to project thoughts and feelings into the minds of others, who steals their very souls? Who is a professional kidnapper? Who swipes every sight, smell, sensation, or overheard conversation like a kid in a candy store, and sometimes take notes the better to purloin whole worlds? Who is the premier pickpocket of the arts?

The fiction writer, that’s who.

This is a disrespectful vocation by its nature – prying, voyeuristic, kleptomaniacal, and presumptuous. And that is fiction writing at its best. When Truman Capote wrote from the perspective of condemned murderers from a lower economic class than his own, he had some gall. But writing fiction takes gall.

. . . What stories are “implicitly ours to tell,” and what boundaries around our own lives are we mandated to remain within? I would argue that any story you can make yours is yours to tell, and trying to push the boundaries of the author’s personal experience is part of a fiction writer’s job.

Now minorities might demand that stories about their culture must “be authentic,” but if you think about it that is bogus. As Shriver notes, there is no uniform “authentic” experience within an ethnic group, just as you can’t tell a lot about a person based on their ethnicity alone. And what “authenticity” is there in the magical realism of Alice Walker or Salman Rushdie?

What Abdel-Magied is insisting, I think, is that “minority” literature must be a literature of oppression, and others who were oppressed cannot write about it with authenticity.  But I doubt that, for after all there is such a thing as research (the kind Steinbeck did before writing about “Okies” in The Grapes of Wrath), and if the writer fails to convey some semblance of reality—one that would draw the reader into the book—that book will fail.

The insistence that a sense of authenticity derives only from the “lived experience” of the oppressed goes against all fiction, and, says Shriver, leads to a form of noxious “identity fiction” that demarcates certain areas as off limits to others (Shriver has, after all, been strongly criticized by some reviewer for writing about others, like Armenians):

Thus in the world of identity politics, fiction writers better be careful. If we do choose to import representatives of protected groups, special rules apply. If a character happens to be black, they have to be treated with kid gloves, and never be placed in scenes that, taken out of context, might seem disrespectful. But that’s no way to write. The burden is too great, the self-examination paralysing. The natural result of that kind of criticism in the Post [Shriver’s novel The Mandibles was criticized in The Washington Post for portraying a black character as degraded] is that next time I don’t use any black characters, lest they do or say anything that is short of perfectly admirable and lovely.

Near the end, Shriver talks about the falsity of assuming a homogenous identity of any group, and the presumption that members of that group not only are the best ones to write about it, but, when others do, push minorities to the margins (I take strong issue with that given the popularity of recent novels as well as nonfiction books about minorities):

Membership of a larger group is not an identity. Being Asian is not an identity. Being gay is not an identity. Being deaf, blind, or wheelchair-bound is not an identity, nor is being economically deprived. I reviewed a novel recently that I had regretfully to give a thumbs-down, though it was terribly well intended; its heart was in the right place. But in relating the Chinese immigrant experience in America, the author put forward characters that were mostly Chinese. That is, that’s sort of all they were: Chinese. Which isn’t enough.

I made this same point in relation to gender in Melbourne last week: both as writers and as people, we should be seeking to push beyond the constraining categories into which we have been arbitrarily dropped by birth. If we embrace narrow group-based identities too fiercely, we cling to the very cages in which others would seek to trap us. We pigeonhole ourselves. We limit our own notion of who we are, and in presenting ourselves as one of a membership, a representative of our type, an ambassador of an amalgam, we ask not to be seen.

You may disagree with the above, or with other things that Shriver said, but I don’t think you can characterize her talk as “a tirade. . reeking with the stench of privilege.” It is a thoughtful analysis of the role of a fiction writer in a culturally diverse world.

And Abdel-Magied? She couldn’t even stand to listen to Shriver, and stomped out of the auditorium in tears.  Abdel-Magied’s victim narrative had already been formed before Shriver’s speech, and she couldn’t bear to hear anything that contravened it. That’s a pity, for there’s a conversation to be had. Instead, Abdel-Magied wrote an overheated screed in the Guardian accusing Shriver of fomenting racism and bigotry. Without listening to her entire talk!

Well, Abdel-Magied has the right to express her views as she wants, but the kind of literary world she wants is bowdlerized, with people setting themselves up as authorities about who is authorized to write about what.

And, by the way, let me take this opportunity to tout one of my own favorite novels, which deals with the situation of the British in India, and their treatment of Indians right before Partition, with sensitivity and grace. It’s The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott, which, along with its Booker-Prize-winning sequel Staying On, I consider the greatest unappreciated novel in English of the last century. (Christopher Hitchens seems to have agreed.)

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College orientation as described by the New York Times: good, questionable, and bad

September 8, 2016 • 10:45 am

Increasingly I see, in the New York Times as well as other major media, articles taking a Regressive Left point of view, or at least reporting uncritically on that ideology without criticizing it elsewhere to provide some journalistic “balance”.

An example of a problematic article was one by Stephanie Saul in the Times two days ago: “Campuses cautiously train freshmen against subtle insults“.  Reporting on the training (some would say “indoctrination”) that many incoming university get about microaggressions, diversity, sexual behavior and so on, Saul offers a mixture of good, questionable, and bad stuff.

Let me first say that while some kind of orientation is necessary for students, many of whom were sheltered and are now away from home—for good—for the first time. And yes, that training should help students not only navigate the confusing maelstrom that sweeps up new students, but helps them deal with others who are different from them. All too often, though, it does involve a kind of indoctrination in behavior that they should learn on their own. For example, in some places students are asked to play the role of minority students, and then are vilified by other students (yes, yelled at and called racist epithets) so they can experience what ostracism or oppression is like. Or they are exposed to lists of “microagressions”—some truly offensive, some bizarre (see below)—and told not to commit them (remember the “social justice” placemats handed out at Harvard that the University, embarrassed, later revoked).

In other words, in many places first-year orientation is directed towards inculcating students with certain ideologies and behaviors, although the effort is meant well. Yet I see this as somewhat is demeaning, for the college is continuing the role of parents whom the student has just left behind. As Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have suggested, perhaps orientation should include some information about Cognitive Behavior Therapy to help students deal with the many psychological challenges they’ll face (see their discussion here).

Saul’s article is a mixture of good, bad, and questionable advice, much of it dispensed by Sheree Marlow, the new “chief diversity officer” at Clark University (many universities are hiring for such positions now) and an African American.  I’ll divide up the advice, and the guidance purveyed in the article, into the good, questionable, and bad bits.

GOOD

While the concept of “microaggressions” can be overly broad, there’s little doubt that an onslaught of unthinking comments made to minorities, which may be well meant but are actually demeaning, can erode their well being. The article gives a list of these comments (below), and I find them all offensive and to be avoided:

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All of these are cringeworthy, and some bespeak bigotry while others bespeak simple thoughtlessness. The question is whether students need to be given lists of these, or whether they should learn instead to call other students out if they say something hurtful. The latter, after all, is the way we learn to avoid offending others in a normal, non-college context.

But not all “microaggressions” should be accepted uncritically. Here are two.

One are “microaggressions” like the utterance, “I don’t see color”—said by someone who is claiming that they don’t consider someone’s ethnicity when talking to them. That might, in fact, be true, and reflects Martin Luther King’s famous dictum that we’re supposed to judge people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Now, however, we’re told that we always not only see color, but change our behavior when we do—that all white people (but not others) are bigots, at least to a degree.

Here’s one more, an “environmental microaggression”:

“What’s an environmental microaggression?” Ms. Marlowe asked the auditorium of about 525 new students. She gave an example. “On your first day of class, you enter the chemistry building and all of the pictures on the wall are scientists who are white and male,” she said. “If you’re a female, or you just don’t identify as a white male, that space automatically shows that you’re not represented.”

I see this every time when I go to the hospital where the Dean’s office is located. Lining the walls are pictures of every medical school class from the 1940s on, and you can see the mixture changing over time. Early classes comprised all white males; there were no blacks, and few Jews or women. Now things are improving, and it’s heartening to see that. Still, if the famous chemists from your university, who are commemorated on the walls, are all white, is that really a microaggression? Yes, that whiteness surely reflects biases of earlier times, but still. Take it as a measure of how far we can still go, but not—as Marlowe seems to be telling the students—as an insult to your identity.

Other good stuff:

In addition to diversity sessions, many campuses train students on exactly what constitutes sexual consent as well as how to intervene when they see fellow students drinking excessively or poised to engage in nonconsensual sexual behavior.

Students do need to learn, I think, what constitutes sexual harassment and rape, both from the University standpoint and from the legal standpoint. Many first-years are sexually inexperienced, and do need to learn about consent. Things that they might think are fine could actually be infringements on somebody else’s autonomy, illegal, or Title IX violations.

QUESTIONABLE

Here’s some advice that I’m not completely down with:

And don’t say “you guys.” It could be interpreted as leaving out women, said Ms. Marlowe, who realized it was offensive only when someone confronted her for saying it during a presentation.

. . . Ms. Martinez, a sophomore transfer student, also realized that she, too, was guilty of microaggressions, because she frequently uses the phrase “you guys,” she said. “This helped me see that I’m a microaggressor, too.”

I hear “you guys” most often coming from women, not men. If one person considers it offensive but the majority of other people find it innocuous, are we supposed to accept and defer to the one person who finds it offensive? That’s a matter for discussion. But it’s clear that Marlowe, by uncritically branding relatively innocuous phrases like “you guys” as microaggressions, wants to imbue many students like Martinez with a sense of guilt and undeserved entitlement. We simply cannot police every word that people utter.

And this:

Another subset of microaggression is known as the microinvalidation, which includes comments suggesting that race plays a minor role in life’s outcomes, like “Everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough.”

The role of race in life’s outcomes is undeniable, but I’m not sure it’s a college’s duty to inculcate in their students the narrative that oppression is universal and will affect everyone in a minority group. In other words, I’m not sure I want a constant emphasis on ethnicity, race, gender, or whatever, so that students, both white and nonwhite, both male and female, become conditioned to view the world through competing narratives of oppression and victimhood.

Here’s something that’s always puzzled me:

But, Ms. Marlowe said, while it is sometimes difficult to identify a person’s racial or ethnic background based on appearance, she does not believe that gives license to people like Rachel A. Dolezal, the white woman who claimed to be African-American while working for the N.A.A.C.P. in Spokane, Wash. “You can’t say you’re black if you’re not, historically.”

This seems to fly in the face of liberal views about gender: that if someone feels as if they are members of a gender that doesn’t correspond to their biological sex, you should accept their own designation. A man, for example, even if bald and bearded, can claim that “he” feels as if he is a woman, and should be called a woman and treated like a woman. The same goes for trans men.

In general I agree with this. But why are races different? Dolezal, as far as I can see, really did feel she was African-American, and even darkened her skin and fixed her hair to fit in as a black woman (that’s analogous to the surgeries and other changes that trans people undergo). Why can’t she be regarded as black? What is the difference between feeling you’re a woman if you’re a man, like Caitlin Jenner, which is laudable, and feeling that you’re black if you’re white, which is seen as reprehensible. Perhaps someone can explain it to me in the comments. What does “historically” black mean as opposed to “historically female”?

Finally in the “questionable” category, the Times argues that universities that don’t give students this kind of orientation may lose funding:

Fresh on the minds of university officials are last year’s highly publicized episodes involving racist taunts at the University of Missouri — which appear to have contributed to a precipitous decline in enrollment there this fall.

“That closes your doors,” said Archie Ervin, the vice president for institute diversity at Georgia Institute of Technology and president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. “If you have sustained enrollment drops and disproportionately full-paying students such as out-of-state, the state legislature can’t make up the gap.”

I think it’s a valid hypothesis to claim that Missouri’s decline in enrollment came from the bad reputation it got for overly paternalistic behavior and over-the-top social justice activism, not from fear of racism. The Melissa Click episode, for instance, in which a faculty member was fired for trying to “muscle” a photographer away from a demonstration, put Missouri in particularly bad odor (she just found another job).  The “bad odor” didn’t come from the perception of racism, but from the perception by parents and students of regressive and extreme protests against racism that might diminish a student’s learning experience in college.

BAD

Two things here:

A freshman tentatively raises her hand and takes the microphone. “I’m really scared to ask this,” she begins. “When I, as a white female, listen to music that uses the N word, and I’m in the car, or, especially when I’m with all white friends, is it O.K. to sing along?”

The answer, from Sheree Marlowe, the new chief diversity officer at Clark University, is an unequivocal “no.”

Seriously? The university wants students to feel like racists because they’re singing along to songs (often by themselves), written and performed by blacks, that contain the word “nigger’? Are you supposed to not sing along, or simply remain silent when the “n-word” is sung? I can see some hyperoffended students calling out this behavior as “cultural appropriation”—I do not agree, as it’s an appreciation of culture—but not as an enabler of racism.

Finally, this:

Ms. Marlowe said she questioned the validity of the concept of reverse racism, arguing that racism is a system in which a dominant race benefits from the oppression of others.

This is the shopworn assertion that “racism equals power plus privilege.” Ergo, blacks can’t be racist towards whites, nor Hispanics towards blacks. I don’t agree. Racism is simply bigotry towards people who belong to another “race” (or, if you reject the concept of “race”, towards members of another ethnic group). Anybody can be a racist, and the concept of “reverse racism” has little meaning to me. To claim that only white people, for example, can be bigots against members of other groups is not only empirically untrue, but an attempt to change the meaning of a term so that “the oppressed” are immune to accusations that tar others. It’s paternalistic.

You can argue this stuff out in the comments below; as for me, I’m going downtown to have a big steak for lunch.

In defense of the University of Chicago and its letter to first-year students

September 5, 2016 • 10:45 am

On August 21, I publicized the following letter that the Dean of Students at the University of Chicago sent to all incoming first-year students. I was delighted by it, but since then there’s been considerable discussion on the Internet of the letter (see here, here, and here for criticism and here, here, and here for support). All the controversy centers around the letter’s third paragraph:

“Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”

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There are three things at issue, and I want to discuss them in turn: trigger warnings, treatment of invited speakers, and safe spaces. I will argue that while perhaps the letter could have been a bit more detailed, especially in defining “safe spaces” and being more explicit about the University’s existing policy, it is a good letter that has been widely misunderstood. Other colleges should follow Chicago’s lead.

Before I begin, let me give a statement that the University issued to the press and others as a clarification of the letter. I got this simply from calling Jeremy Manier, the University Spokesman, who told me that this was given out to reporters and other people who wanted more information.

Academic freedom is a fundamental value at the University of Chicago. Among other things it means that faculty members have broad freedom in how they accommodate concerns that students may express, including advising students about difficult material. The University does not mandate a specific approach to these issues. Student groups and University departments also will continue the important work of creating welcoming venues for conversation and Dialogue.

Separately from the intellectual values expressed in the letter, the University encourages students to make use of the many support resources that exist on campus. The University provides numerous resources for students’ well being, including private counseling and other forms of support. There are also many campus groups that offer mutual support for students and other members of our community.

In light of that and the paragraph, as well as my own interpretation (based on my own experience) of what the letter was trying to say, let’s take up those three topics. I emphasize that I speak here only for myself, I had nothing to do with the Dean’s letter nor with University policy, and am speaking not as an official representative of the university but as an emeritus faculty member who taught here for nearly three decades.

Trigger warnings:

I have been aware of these for some years, and also knew that there is no official policy about these at the University of Chicago.

To me, the letter does not mean that the University bans trigger warnings, but simply that they are not mandatory, and no faculty member will be punished for failing to issue them. Be aware that there are some universities in the U.S. where trigger warnings are mandatory.

I think what the University was trying to say here—and those who maintain otherwise should seek clarification from University officials—is simply what it said initially (“we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings'”) and what it clarified in the subsequent statement (“Faculty members have broad freedom in how they accommodate concerns that students may express, including advising students about difficult material. The University does not mandate a specific approach to these issues.”) The letter, then, means that the University neither requires nor bans trigger warnings, and that issue is left to faculty discretion.

I think that’s a wise policy, but there is a note about advising students about “difficult” material. The University is not mandating callousness here, but is, according to its tradition, leaving classroom matters to the faculty’s discretion.

Would I give trigger warnings? I never have, as I taught courses that didn’t require them—or should I have said “Content note: Evolution, which may disturb Biblical literalists”? If I were to put up a picture of ISIS beheading someone, or of a gruesome accident, yes, I’d warn the students first. That, after all, is what I do on this site. Would I give a trigger warning if I were teaching literature in which there was violence or abuse? I doubt it, for there are so many things seen as triggering on student lists (including “eating and drinking”) that one couldn’t warn about them all. If I weren’t teaching biology but humanities, film, art or something else, I’d probably make an announcement to the students at the beginning of the course that if there are any issues that give them severe problems, they should come to me privately and discuss them. But I would make every student read and confront all the material, and not omit stuff (for either a single student or the class) because it was seen as “triggering”.

But I would not penalize professors who didn’t give warning and then became the object of student complaints. That would have a chilling effect University teaching. The present policy dictates that if a student complains that you didn’t warn them, or conveyed material that “offended” them, the University would support the teacher—unless, of course, he or she harassed students or said something so bizarre that it would warrant investigation (see below).

Treatment of invited speakers:

The statement is simple: the University of Chicago does not “cancel speakers because their topics might prove controversial.” That’s all it says. It doesn’t say about what speakers will or will not be invited, nor does it lay out a policy about disrupting talks. The University has, however, made it clear that it will not tolerate heckling or disruption of speakers, and has set up a committee to decide what sanctions will be applied to those who abrogate this policy. But note that the University has never prohibited (and never will, I bet) PEACEFUL demonstrations outside a building, or anywhere else on campus, against an invited speaker.

So, for example, the cartoon below by Jen Sorensen at the Daily Kos (click screenshot to go to the article) is just dead wrong about speakers in the panel at upper right and on both panels on the middle line. Sorensen implies that the University will not support peaceful protests (wrong), and will also invite speakers who, by and large, are generally offensive. That last bit is bogus, though of course we have invited some speakers that have offended black students, gay students, anti-Israel students, and so on. Too bad—that’s life! Any speaker who says anything controversial will offend someone, but that’s what college is all about! For example, I would consider it perfectly proper to invite a Holocaust denialist, or someone opposing affirmative action. Those talks, which would undoubtedly be protested, could nevertheless inspire useful discussion among those whose minds aren’t completely closed.Sorensen

This is what Sorensen said as an update to her invidious cartoon:

(Update: I see some commenters suggesting that I am arguing that students should be shielded from points of view they may disagree with. I have not said that at all. I do think that when a university brings in, say, a known internet harasser who uses his public profile to intimidate and abuse women online, students have the right to protest the legitimacy being granted by the university. If anything, the letter suggests that the leaders of U. Chicago are trying to make a “safe space” for themselves so they can frame criticism they don’t want to hear as anti-free speech.)

What’s she beefing about? Students already have the right to protest the legitimacy of any speaker. What they don’t have is the right to disrupt their speeches. I suppose she’s talking indirectly about Milo Yiannapoulos here, but he’s never spoken at this University. But if he was invited, I’d defend his right to speak. Sorensen’s last sentence is beneath consideration since it’s nasty and untrue.

When the reporter from Reuters talked to me about why some U of C students felt that they were justified in heckling speakers (see this piece, in which I’m quoted), he told me that he had two reactions from students justifying disruption. First, they felt that elected officials should expect to be interrupted and heckled because it is simply behavior expected by those officials. Well, those students are wrong. Election doesn’t carry the expectation of heckling and disruption.

Second, they said that the University doesn’t pay attention to student demands, or for requests to meet with students, and so students are justified in interrupting speakers. I can’t speak for the University here, but I haven’t seen a pattern in which administrators refuse to meet with students. Yes, if students show up at the Administration building, locking themselves to the doors (as they have done), and then refusing to leave until they speak with the President or Provost, then the University has refused these “point of the gun” meetings. But, as I read in the student newspaper, there are and have been plenty of opportunities for students to meet with administrators at all levels. And even if that weren’t true, why should invited speakers be punished by being harassed and interrupted?

Finally, the students have sometimes shown a bizarre but expected attitude towards invited speakers: they affirm the principle of inviting speakers with “challenging” opinions, but then object when their own views are challenged! Here, for instance, is a quote from the Reuters article:

Maurice Farber, a senior who is president of the university’s Israel Engagement Association, supports getting tough with disrupters but would not rule out heckling someone who denied the Holocaust, for example.

“It’s very difficult for me to say that I wouldn’t try to shut someone down who was spreading a message of hate,” he said.

This shows the difficulty of Sorensen’s characterization of offensive speakers as “war criminals/online harassers/extreme bigots/antiscience kooks.” In fact, a Holocaust denialist could be fit into the last two categories. Yet hearing them speak gives us stuff to ponder: “what exactly, is the evidence for the Holocaust and for the gassing of Jews, gays, prisoners of war, and so on?” I’ve recently finished Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman’s book on Holocaust denialism, in which they go into great detail about the evidence for it. (There’s little that explicitly connects Hitler or his high officials to the Holocaust, which denialists love to mention. But there’s plenty of evidence that the Holocaust occurred in the way most people think.) But after reading that book I’m now armed with an evidence-based counterargument. That’s one reason why we should read views we consider offensive. The other, of course, is because we might change our mind or modify our opinions.

Safe spaces:

This is the most difficult issue to discuss, as nobody, including both the University of Chicago nor its critics, defined “safe spaces.” Are they groups of like-minded people who meet to seek mutual support and affirmation, are they rooms where people can watch puppy videos and use Play-Doh in traumatized reaction to Christina Hoff Summers? Or are they something else?

Note that the characterization in the initial University letter is intellectual safe spaces, which gives you a clue about what I think they mean. First, note the University’s clarification:

The University provides numerous resources for students’ well being, including private counseling and other forms of support. There are also many campus groups that offer mutual support for students and other members of our community.

And indeed, the University already has an explicit  LGBTQ “safe space” program to train people and then allow them to put signs on their door proclaiming certain areas as “safe spaces.” (Sorenson alludes to this in the panel at the lower right of her cartoon.)

The idea that the University doesn’t want to protect certain classes of individuals from harassment about their ethnicity, sexuality, and so on is just wrong. What the letter means is what it says: “intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.” Now it could have been written more clearly, but note that the University already has explicit written policies about students harassing other students as well as about professors saying things in the classroom which constitute harassment and have nothing to do with the academic content of their course. This is what I, as a professor, was asked to adhere to:

Please note that our policy contains a special provision on classroom content: “Expression occurring in an academic, educational or research context is considered a special case and is broadly protected by academic freedom. Such expression will not constitute harassment unless (in addition to satisfying the above definition) it is targeted at a specific person or persons, is abusive, and serves no bona fide academic purpose.”

And I think this is where the idea of “safe intellectual spaces” is challenged: classrooms and other places of academic discourse should not have restrictions on expression unless that expression constitutes harassment under university policy. It’s a call for full and free discussion.

Granted, the dean’s letter could have been clearer by explaining what “intellectual safe spaces” mean, but a bit of inquiry, as I’ve done here, clarifies the issue.

Finally, one last question: What do students and ex-students think of this policy? 

Reaction is of course mixed, but surprisingly many students and ex-students support the trigger warnings/safe space statement. Jen Sorensen, in her Daily Kos cartoon, implies otherwise when she gives another update:

Update 2: Another great article providing background on this issue: “What University Of Chicago Students Think Of Their School’s Campaign Against ‘Safe Spaces.’”

But if you go to that article, you’ll find only two students quoted, both activists who oppose the University’s letter. That’s an attempt to quote opponents, not to survey what most students think, and Sorenson is wrong to characterize this as a summary of student opinion.

In fact, there’s one survey of what students think, the Uchicago Safe Spaces Sentiment Survey conducted by Nicholas Xu, an alumnus of the College (economics degree, 2009, MBA, Booth School of Business, 2013). Now this isn’t a professional survey, and of course could have response bias, but it tells us something. Xu got about 500 responses to his Facebook request to answer the question in bold below:

Results On a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), how do you feel about the Administration’s position on safe spaces and triggers? (Recognizing that safe spaces and triggers can be hard to define and parse, do you agree with the spirit of the position on the relative value of ‘academic freedom/censorship’ versus ‘comfort/discomfort’)

Xu also tells us how to read the chart. The upshot is that he divided the data into three groups: students who graduated this summer or will graduate within four years (>2015), students who have graduated already within the last four years before 2016 (2011-2015), and students who graduated more than five years ago (<2011). He got about 500 responses.

  • How to read this chart: I’ll use pretty much the same framework throughout, the left side is just a count of responses by different groups of class year, and then the bar is split by 1-5 scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. The right side, puts all three bars on the same 100% scale, so you can directly compare the % of people answering 1-5, even though there are a lot more people who were 2016 and later than 2010 and earlier for instance

The operant graph is on the right, giving percentages rather than absolute numbers. What you see is that about 50% of current and recently graduating students agree or strongly agree with the Administration’s policy on trigger warnings and safe spaces (the policy referred to in Ellison’s letter, though Xu’s survey was not about the letter itself). Among older ex-students, about 80% agree with that policy—the higher percentage is expected.

class

In general, then, most students aren’t upset with the University policy, though we still have about 40% of students who disagree, strongly or not, with the University’s policy on safe spaces and trigger warnings. A general problem with these data is that I’m not sure how many of these people actually know what the policy is!

Again, this is my interpretation of what the University of Chicago letter meant, and it’s a personal interpretation based on my experience of 29 years as a professor here, and on investigating University policy that’s in the public domain. Anybody could have done the investigation I did, by looking online or contacting University spokespeople. They didn’t, and so we get unfair criticisms such as Sorensen’s that rest on the critic’s ideological biases and a kneejerk reaction to Dean Ellison’s letter.

I remain proud of my University and its commitment to free speech. I think we’ve struck a very good balance between fostering open discourse and protecting students from harassment.