POSTED BY JENNIFER RUTH

This is the first in a series of posts attempting to articulate lessons from the last decade of polarization. The series is entitled “What Have We Learned?” but I’m keenly aware that the “we” is highly ambiguous and mostly fictional. We are not one group and there is no consensus on what is meant by the “common good.” So let me clarify: I do not speak for the AAUP, however involved I am in the organization, and I am not speaking to those of “us” who have concluded that a new strain of left totalitarianism has descended on academia.

Some of the posts in this series will be reposts of work I’ve found useful in making sense of our moment. I begin by highlighting the work of students at Princeton who have been contributing thoughtful commentary, such as this, to The Daily Princetonian. Brittani Telfair in particular got my attention with a piece on racial speech and when “You’re not entitled to ‘civility’” came out in late October, I asked for permission to repost it here. It makes one lesson abundantly clear: It’s past time to retire the snowflakes trope. Brittani and her co-thinkers are rocks not snowflakes. They have to be, because they have to be relentless in reminding their peers and their professors that, as the title of Philip Alcabes’s 2016 essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education explains, “Our Idea of Tolerant Isn’t.” Speaking to boomer academics, Alcabes wrote:

Once, when we were students and then junior faculty, we agitated for openness as a way to lever out the old and intolerant worldviews of the powerful . . . .  The open-minded campus was itself, at least partly, an aspirational myth. It excluded the poor, the dark-skinned, the disabled, and others from higher education. It was a dream of the academic liberal-left at a time when their interlocutors were likely to differ from them only in ideas, not in life experiences.

The first Black Studies department was established in 1968 at San Francisco State College. The first Women’s Studies department followed on its heels in 1970 at San Diego State College. Over the 70s, 80s, and 90s, scholarship from these departments and other new ones, in synergy with work coming out of traditional departments, has affected all disciplines in one way or another. Such work has sparked new schools of thought and been disseminated to the general public by way of the students learning it and the press reporting on it. As a result, the narratives shaping mainstream liberal discourse have the potential to become more historically honest and more honestly democratic.

In What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Truth, and Equality on Campus (2019), Ulrich Baer writes, “Widespread caricatures of students as overly sensitive, vulnerable, and entitled’ ‘snowflakes’ fail to acknowledge the philosophical work that was carried out, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, to legitimate experience—especially traumatic experience—which had been dismissed for decades as unreliable, untrustworthy, and inaccessible to understanding.” One insight enabled by such work is that speech and its effects are inseparable from power. The term “snowflakes” has been a misdirection from the start, corresponding to what Baer calls “an atrophied or even weaponized conception [of free speech] meant to stifle the next generation’s courageous expansion of equality and freedom for ever more Americans.” The term has allowed people to sidestep important realities. I have in mind realities such as the way that, as Telfair puts it below, “civil discourse does not always have symmetric asks of everyone involved”—a point made on this site from a different angle but also very convincingly a few weeks ago by Cathryn Bailey in “Race, Gender, and Civility as a Silencing Tool.

—Jennifer Ruth, Academe Blog contributing editor

You Are Not Entitled to ‘Civility’
BY BRITTANI TELFAIR

In high school, I had a better relationship with civil discourse. I was part of my school’s We the People team, and we competed in competitions centered on debating pressing constitutional issues. At Princeton, though, I noticed that things changed. I began dreading certain classes’ lectures and precepts. It wasn’t until recently that I realized why. My relationship with civil discourse wasn’t fracturing because I was becoming more radical or college-level discussions were more complex (I got deep into constitutional law in high school, studying everything from Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to the definition of speech). It was because, in my department at least, I’ve found that “civil discourse” is “no holds barred.” Anything is up for debate, and that includes my right to be in the classroom at all.

The reality is, civil discourse does not always have symmetric asks of everyone involved. For instance, a student of color may be asked to defend why marginalized communities should have equal rights if their oppression pleases white people and makes the latter better off. If they respond with frustration, they may be accused of being “uncivil.” However, this would be a misplacement of blame. To demand that some students defend their presence, their identity, and their very existence is an uncivil act, regardless of how politely the demand is posed. Anger or frustration in a student’s response does not invalidate their argument, as they are responding to an act of aggression.

Ultimately, students of color should not have to deal with a lower-quality educational environment simply so their white peers can frolic around in thought experiments that carry no valence for them. Racist remarks should have no place in classroom “civil discourse”; they inflict trauma and degrade a significant portion of the student body.

I have encountered classmates who justified racial degradation and disenfranchisement on the basis of continued white prosperity in one class. In another, I was asked if Brown v. Board of Education “should have happened.” Over the years, I’ve heard innumerable racist stereotypes recounted as though they were fact. My academic experience has not been enriched by any of this. I carefully monitored the tone of my responses, but the expectation to do so shouldn’t be on me: my classmates should be expected to treat students of color with respect.

Students of color don’t have a responsibility to educate and correct their peers. Read a book. Consult the internet. Take a class centered around understanding race and difference, such as those offered within the African American Studies department. Princeton students have many resources at their disposal. At this point, if they remain ignorant about the pervasive effects of race and racism and instead seek to belittle their classmates, it is willfully so.

The concepts of civil discourse and mutual respectability ask us to treat every idea as though it is worthwhile, holding them up to the light and investigating them carefully and unemotionally. Plainly put, this is nonsense. Some ideas are not worth discussing; the basic and fully-answered question of whether or not racism is real is a distraction from talking about how to handle its innumerable impacts. This is not to say that civil discourse is entirely bankrupt.

As James Baldwin said, “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” We can discuss many things calmly and politely. My worth is not one of them, and no one is entitled to conversation, civility, or respect if they think otherwise.

Brittani Telfair is a junior from Richmond, VA, concentrating in the School of Public and International Affairs. This op-ed, reproduced here by permission, originally appeared in The Daily Princetonian.