BY JENNIFER RUTH

“The neutral ground” is what New Orleanians call the grassy median that runs down streets like St. Charles and Carrollton avenues. The Neutral Ground is also the title of the excellent new documentary on PBS by comedian C.J. Hunt. Hunt’s subject is the controversy over confederate monuments and his title references one of the most important sites of this national struggle — New Orleans, home of the powerful “Take ‘Em Down NOLA” campaign — and simultaneously raises the troubling question that perhaps there is no “neutral ground.” 

Hunt interviews historian and executive director of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation Christy Coleman and, at one point, he stumps her by saying:

I don’t know what timeline we’re on. Are we on the timeline where historians are going to look back and remember, ‘There, that was the turning point. They started taking down monuments. They started questioning confederate symbols with real persistence. They started straightening the road where it went wrong.’ Or is this time now just a flash in the pan?

Coleman answers:

I have no idea. If you look at historical pattern — and, you know, there is no fixed pattern to things — we’re undergoing rapid change. We’re seeing a desire by communities to see themselves in the historical narrative in accurate ways. All of those things have a positive but it is also disruptive. Will it be a situation in which we all back up and go, okay, now, let’s have a real reckoning with what our past is and with what we hope for with the future of the United States or if it becomes so disruptive that new comforting myths emerge?

Has one comforting myth already emerged from the white noise of the culture wars? Is “color-blindness” in some twisted but real sense the new Lost Cause? This is how it appears to me in the vicious backlash to the rapid change Coleman cites, a backlash that takes the form of insisting that talking about racism is the new racism. “Ibrahm, please sit down,” tweets one of my Portland State colleagues, misspelling the first name of the best-selling author of How to Be an Antiracist. “You,” my colleague, who is a tenured political science professor, continues, “have a serious case of vile racism.” The logic, of course, is that by saying race-consciousness is key to antiracism, Ibram X. Kendi views people only by skin color instead of simply seeing us all as “human.”

After witnessing the impunity with which Derek Chauvin believed he could take George Floyd’s life, some significant portion of white liberals began to see that, despite the hopeful formal equality of the Civil Rights legislation of the 60s, systemic racism persists but another significant portion reacted to the protests that erupted by becoming more conservative and championing color-blindness. The issue appears to be dividing liberals right down the center, with some embracing pronoun preferences and antiracism as progress and others defensively viewing these developments as evidence of a creeping new totalitarianism. (Unfortunately, the allegedly nonpartisan but conservative-funded FIRE is throwing in with the latter.) 

A defiant color-blindness lies behind the spate of anti-CRT and “divisive concepts” legislation passed by some states and proposed by others. (We posted about these bills here, here and here. See here and here for sites tracking these bills.) House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy recently wrote, “Critical Race Theory goes against everything Martin Luther King Jr. taught us—to not judge others by the color of their skin.” “Rep. McCarthy, I encourage you to study my father’s teachings & words well beyond the last lines of ‘I Have A Dream’,” MLK’s daughter Dr. Bernice King responded, according to this Newsweek article. “This nation has yet to firmly commit to the intensive, multi-faceted work of eradicating racism against Black people.” The same color-blind logic underwrites attacks on affirmative action. “There is little common ground,” Nicholas Lemann writes in “The Diversity Verdict”, “between people who see explicitly racial remedies as justifiable and necessary and people who see them as morally indistinguishable from Jim Crow laws.” 

Attempts to use the state to erase race from classrooms ask us to pretend that the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s eliminated racism. If racism does persist, we are to believe it is mostly confined to the living rooms of David Duke and Richard Spencer. Liberals know this is a fairy tale so why aren’t they all eschewing the comforting myth of color-blindness? Why are some of them clinging to a classically liberal, content-neutral notion of formal equality that, in this moment of polarized history, does not simply maintain the status quo but is being weaponized to restrict voting rights and censor curriculum?

The independent student newspaper for the University of Wisconsin The Badger Herald reports that UW Professor of Education Gloria Ladson-Billings “believes the controversy around critical race theory is a ‘red herring,’ as the conversation is not really about the academic framework at all but rather the 2022 and 2024 elections.” “She called it a version of McCarthyism,” the newspaper continued. Some of these bills have passed. What will universities do when a parent or student alleges that a critical race theorist is “indoctrinating” her class?

As Ellen Schrecker showed in her 1986 book No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, academic liberals didn’t do too well when the McCarthy years tested their values. Fifteen years after she published No Ivory Tower, Schrecker referred to the “current culture wars” of the 1990s in “Political Tests for Professors: Academic Freedom during the McCarthy Years”. “Could it happen again?” she asked about the blow McCarthyism dealt academic freedom. “Certainly not in the same way. The academic community has long since acknowledged how disastrous its participation in the McCarthy inquisitions had been. . .  But academic freedom can be damaged in many ways. As current culture wars reveal, the demonization of unpopular groups and controversial ideas continues. Homosexuals may be the communists of today.”

Are critical race theorists, or simply people who teach about the history and reality of racism in this country, the communists of today? Will university faculty rise to this occasion and help defeat these bills? Will they organize to defend their colleagues who find themselves investigated under these bills in those states where they pass? The AAUP Statement on Legislation Restricting Teaching About Race offers hope that the AAUP will be more aggressive in defending academic freedom this time around than it was in the 1950s. But each AAUP chapter, each Faculty Senate or University Council, has to do its part by passing resolutions condemning these bills and resolving to defend colleagues who might become the guinea pigs in the right’s new anti-CRT McCarthyism.

Jennifer Ruth, professor of film studies at Portland State University, is a contributing editor to the blog and was the faculty editor of the Journal of Academic Freedom from 2016 to 2017. She is the author of Novel Professions (Ohio State University Press, 2006) and, with Michael Bérubé, The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments (Palgrave, 2015). She and Bérubé have co-written a second book, forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press and entitled It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom.