Month: June 2020

(Director’s note: Will Stockton is a Professor of English. His latest books include Members of His Body: Shakespeare, Paul, and a Theology of Nonmonogamy (Fordham University Press, 2017) and a translation of Sergio Loo’s Nightmare in Narvarte (Literalia, 2020). Find him at willstockton.com.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

As the U.S. reels in response to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, and others, institutions both public and private have faced significant pressure to make substantive and symbolic changes in the name of equality and inclusion. Clemson University is no exception. The university has recently deleted John C. Calhoun’s name from the Honors College. The Board of Trustees has also requested permission from the South Carolina General Assembly to change the name of Tillman Hall back to Old Main. Both moves are laudable and long overdue. They remove the names of notorious racists from places of honor on our campus. They do not “erase history,” but rather reflect our changing history.

A glance at Twitter or Reddit will suggest that both moves are still controversial. The criticisms are now commonplace: besides charging Clemson with erasing history, some deride the changes as “purely symbolic” or the start of a slippery slope that ends in changing the name of the university itself. Presuming that the views expressed on social media reflect to a great extent the views of our varied student body, I take these criticisms seriously. I do not agree with them, but to the extent they’re raised, they are worth talking about, openly and honestly, in a spirit of good faith. 

Of course, social media fosters precisely the opposite of an open and honest conversation conducted in a spirit of good faith. In a university setting, these conversations are more properly the province of the humanities classroom, where instructors invite students to try out ideas, test them against other ideas, and refine their own thinking. This golden world of shared inquiry and intellectual development requires the instructor to construct a classroom environment in which students can advance most ideas without fear of reprisal.

In the middle of a national conversation about the pernicious effects of structural racism, especially in the areas of policing and law enforcement, it can be easy for us to lose sight of the conditions under which education best takes place. Many of us in the humanities have statements on our syllabi aimed at fostering civil discourse, reminding students to treat one another with decency and respect. These statements usually suffice. In my ten years at Clemson, teaching subjects from Shakespeare to contemporary queer literature, I have been tremendously encouraged by the good will and genuine curiosity with which most of my students engage contentious questions, including the definition of race and racism. 

Yet there’s a difference between encouraging students to be respectful and threatening students for advancing arguments or expressing opinions that run afoul of others’ ethical sensibilities. Last week, the Clemson Faculty Senate crossed precisely such a line. The Faculty Senate’s Statement Against Racist and Violence-Inciting Public Expressions reaffirms policies against discriminatory and harassing behavior already present in the Student Code of Conduct. It then “recommends disciplinary action, persona non grata status, and/or expulsion of any past, current, or future student, faculty, or staff who evoke or incite racism and violence.” The statement concludes: “It is imperative that Clemson University demonstrates that racism, encouraged or actual violence, or any statement/act that undermines our shared principles of inclusion, [sic] and tolerance outlined in ClemsonFORWARD is unacceptable and will be met with severe consequences.” 

The law governing public universities like Clemson makes crucial distinctions between speech and action, and between speech that expresses an unpopular, even reprehensible opinion, and speech that incites violence. This statement thoroughly muddles these differences. “Encouraged or actual violence” can and should certainly be met with severe consequences. The Supreme Court has held that so-called fighting words fall outside the realm of protected speech, as “resort to epithets or personal abuse is not in any proper sense communication of information or opinion safeguarded by the Constitution” (Cantwell v Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296, 309-10 [1940]). But most offensive speech does not rise to this level. Indeed, the ability to offend is precisely what the First Amendment protects: “if it is the speaker’s opinion that gives offense, that consequence is a reason for according it constitutional protection”(Hustler Magazine v Falwell 485 U.S. 46, 55 [1988]). A statement threatening disciplinary action for “any statement that undermines our shared principles of inclusion and tolerance” strikes me as an encroachment on just this type of offensive, yet constitutionally protected speech.  

The Faculty Senate seems to have issued their Statement in response to racist posts on Instagram. I applaud the Faculty Senate for signaling Clemson’s disdain for racist provocation. At the same time, the Statement itself ignores the constitutional remedy for uninformed or bad speech, which is “more speech, not enforced silence” (Whitney v California, 274 U.S. 357, 377 [1927] [Brandeis J., concurring]). Many Clemson students are already afraid to speak publicly about hot-button issues, not because they are naked racists, but because they are scared that they will be understood as such. I want my students to tell me why they feel the need to reflexively respond “all lives matter” when they see a sign saying “Black lives matter.” I want to know why students believe that “purely symbolic” name changes are unimportant, and the extent to which they register the reality and effects of structural racism. The Faculty Senate’s statement will diminish willingness to have these conversations. It will hinder the important work of refining thought through open debate. 

One might defend the Faculty Senate’s statement by arguing that racist speech inevitably constitutes, if not leads to, racist violence. The argument goes like this: the conditions of race in America are such that violence is continually perpetuated against people of color. This violence comes in many forms, but it includes statements that deny our shared humanity and, en masse, underwrite institutionalized white supremacy. Furthermore, people’s humanity should not be up for debate, and any effort to allow such a debate under the umbrella of “civility” amounts to white supremacy in action. It’s a strong argument, one worth hearing. At the same time, few will hear it — in the deep sense of wrestling with it — unless one invites argument and push back. As free speech advocates from John Milton to John Stuart Mill have argued, exposure to and tolerance for the ideas of others is a prerequisite to intellectual self-development and collective betterment. Certain assertions — such as all lives matter, or “black-on-black” crime presents a more pressing problem than police violence — may strike others as denying people’s humanity. To the extent people make these arguments in good faith, however, the debates that follow are precisely the ones that need to be had. There is no world in which we will all come to the same conclusion about every contentious issue. Yet it’s possible to build worlds either more or less open to conversations that make us sharper thinkers and better citizens. 

The distinction between speech and violence is sometimes difficult to draw, hence the litigation of speech issues on an almost case-by-case basis. But maintaining a basic distinction is foundational for education. When I entered college in 1997, I was an outspoken ex-gay who believed the world was 7,000 years old and racism ended with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Four years later, I was an outspoken, ex-ex-gay atheist who had conceded the earth’s actual age of 4.5 billion years and many of the effects of past institutionalized discrimination in present demographic disparities. That kind of intellectual change could not have happened had the threat of “severe punishment” loomed over my head for what my professors and fellow students doubtless perceived as my many speech crimes. I urge the Faculty Senate to revise its statement such that it condemns racism but reserves severe consequences only for violence-inciting expression. Otherwise, this statement will have a chilling effect on speech at a university that should encourage it.

(Director’s note: Cynthia Haynes is Director of Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design Ph.D program and Professor of English. Her research interests are rhetoric, composition, multimodal pedagogy, virtual worlds, critical theory, computer games studies, and the rhetoric of war and terrorism.  Her recent book, The Homesick Phone Book: Addressing Rhetoric in the Age of Perpetual Conflict won the 2017 Rhetoric Society of America annual book prize. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Unalienable Rites: The Architecture of Mass Rhetoric.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

The upcoming Presidential Election of 2020 will be perhaps the most complex rhetorical skirmish in this country’s history. I use the term rhetorical skirmish to set a tone, to call to mind a set of tactics. In military history, a skirmish involves vanguard troops that would engage in disruptive activities to delay, demoralize, mislead, and otherwise serve as the annoying “gadfly” in a heavily armored wartime conflict. Our presidential election is in grave danger, again. If the 2016 election was fraught, consider the recent worrisome rhetoric (and actions) that will once again put our democratic processes to the test.

The ongoing efforts to disrupt presidential campaigns in the form of social media disinformation is ramping up. Not going away. Record numbers of tweets, Facebook posts/ads, and headlines will trample our collective ability to parse the rhetorical skirmishes word by loaded word, sentence by arguable sentence. And this is why rhetoric is needed more than ever to take up the challenges of 21^st century democratic elections: unpacking the language and disarming the weaponization of political discourse. Who knew that rhetorician-at-large would be a career option? Who knew that rhetoricians would be hired in droves as ‘fact-checkers’ in post-2016? Who knew that words matter? Parmenides knew. Plato knew. Nietzsche knew. W. E. B. Dubois knew. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew. Angela Davis knows. Gloria Steinem knows. Toni Morrison knows. And now you know.

“They” will tell you that mail-in ballots are rigged. Don’t believe it. Look at who is saying what to whom and who has most to gain by this lie. “They” will tell you that polling places are equipped to handle long lines of “socially distanced” voters. Don’t believe it. Look at Georgia’s primary election just this past week. Chaos. “They” will tell you that there are Democratic candidates under investigation, and they might even tell you that due to the pandemic, the election has to be postponed. Don’t believe it. Read the rhetorical tea-leaves, and count the rhetorical lies. You see, rhetoric can be used for good and bad purposes. It’s the main reason rhetoric has gotten such a bad rap in the last few thousand years. Rhetoric is a way to use language and a way to analyze language. That’s the good news. It’s both/and. Not either/or.

In 2016 bots organized by nefarious groups (some say nations) were highly successful in hardening anti-Hillary sentiment among the voting population. “Fake news” became the latest rhetorical tug-of-war phrase as both Republicans and Democrats hurled it at each other. It’s no wonder that everyone has difficulty parsing the language of millions of tweets, Facebook posts, and mainstream media publications and television news programs. I distinctly remember that on the morning of the 2016 election, my mother forwarded a post on Facebook about a friend of a friend’s aunt in Texas who swore that when she voted that morning, a straight Republican ticket, the voting machine changed her vote for Trump to Clinton. And if she hadn’t checked before leaving the voting booth….etc. etc. Trump claimed he got many calls about such “vote-flipping,” which turned out not to be true (according to Snopes).

Fact checking is a lot of work. Reading is a lot of work. Yet we seem to be reading more and more in the 21^st century. What counts as “reading” is the most urgent rhetorical question we face. I had to look up what “tl;dr” meant when I first started seeing it preface some of my Facebook friends’ posts. As an educator, and a rhetorician, I can tell you it made me frustrated. It means “too long; didn’t read” and would usually link to someone else’s long post/rant or to some long article in the news. Words matter. Words add up. Words change attitudes. Words change election results. That is why teaching my students to understand, rhetorically, how language works, to use rhetoric to understand how motives underpin language, and to split the rhetorical hairs all ways if necessary to get to the truth…these are the reasons I am a rhetorician-at-large in the 21^st century. Please read as much as you can, and then please vote this coming November…no matter what “they” say or how hard “they” try to dissuade you with disinformation.

For further reading:

Bizzell, Patricia, Bruce Herzberg, and Robin Reames. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 3^rd ed. Macmillan Publishing, 2020.

“How Donald Trump Answers a Question” video by Evan Puschak. December 30, 2015.

Neely, Brett. “NPR Poll: Majority of Americans Believe Trump Encourages Election Interference” NPR.org. January 21, 2020.

Rowland, Darrel. “What you need to know about the language of disinformation ahead of the 2020 election cycle” USA Today. Feb 24, 2020.

Savoy, Jacques. “Analysis of the style and the rhetoric of the 2016 US presidential primaries” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Volume 33, Issue 1, April 2018, Pages 143–159.

(Director’s note: Brookes Brown, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Program in Law, Liberty and Justice, writes on civic obligation, corporate ethics, and is beginning a book project on the ethics of loneliness.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

Like many of you, I have not interacted socially in person with anybody outside of my household since early March—no barbeques, no dinner parties, no weddings, no coffee-dates, no board-game nights. I expect I will not do so for many months. I am fortunate—my quarantine household includes three adults and a child. Even if the number of people with whom I can engage are greatly reduced, I can have an in-person conversation, trade household duties, receive a hug. For millions of people, this is not an option. An estimated 35.7 million Americans reside in single person living arrangements (28% of households.) For such persons, quarantine often entails severe social isolation. For the rest of us, the consequences of Covid-19—the need to stay at home, tele-working, unemployment, mean far lower levels of social interaction. This increased physical isolation is likely to be accompanied by an increase in loneliness. Loneliness is not the same thing as social isolation. As great literature often reminds us, it is possible to be alone without being lonely, and to be deeply lonely without being physically alone. Yet there is certainly a correlation. The less we interact with others, lonelier we are likely to feel.

Philosophers do not typically treat the sensation of loneliness as relevant to justice. Instead, it is viewed as a matter of personal concern. I might want more friends, just like I might want to go on vacation in Tahiti, have twins, become a dermatologist, or learn to Salsa. But unlike food or shelter or healthcare or money the fact that I do not have these desires is not a moral concern.

In a project at which I am currently at work, I argue that this common way of thinking about loneliness is a mistake. Loneliness is concerning for the exact same reason that lack of access to healthcare or money are concerning, and thus should be equally considered a concern of justice. In many ways, the argument is simple. Resources like wealth or healthcare are especially important because they underlie our ability to achieve all of our different personal aims, whatever they might be. You cannot start a judo company, succeed as a trucker, or become an artist if you are dying of cancer, or cannot afford mats, brushes, or a driver’s license.

Unlike failing to make it to the South Pacific, loneliness has consequences every bit as devastating to our general ability to pursue our personal projects as lack of access to healthcare or income. Lonely people are twice as likely to develop dementia or suffer losses in executive function.^[1] Lonely individuals have higher blood-pressure, poorer sleep quality,^[2] more harmful stress hormones,^[3] and experience greater bodily pain.^[4] Women who require breast biopsies are at nine times the risk of developing breast cancer if they lack social support.^[5] Social connectedness is important for genomic expression and immune-regulation.^[6] Caring relationships give us other people that we can rely on for help in everything from moving to paying for college. Our relationships to others are even an important part of how we maintain ourselves as people who care about justice. lack of social connections has been shown to heighten self-centeredness and makes it more difficult to envision the challenges faced by others.^[7] If we are sick, have fewer people we can count on, or have trouble maintaining our dispositions we will find it harder to succeed at our aims, just as we would if we lacked money or healthcare.

This suggests that in thinking about who we as a society need to help in the coming months and years, we will not only need to consider those who will lose income, or who find themselves infected. We will also need to think about what we owe to those who are facing a loss of social connection in our global quest to survive this pandemic.

(Director’s Note: Todd May teaches in the Department of Philosophy and Religion.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

“the prison, apparently ‘failing’, does not miss its target; on the contrary, it reaches it, in so far as it gives rise to one particular form of illegality in the midst of others, which it is able to isolate, to place in full light and to organize as a relatively enclosed, but penetrable milieu.”  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 276.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault notes that the history of critiques of the prison is co-extensive with the history of the prisons themselves.  They are always failing and thus always in need of reform.  But perhaps, he wonders, we’re asking the wrong question.  Instead of asking why the prisons are constantly failing, perhaps we should ask a different question:  what are they succeeding at?

That, I believe, is the question—the first of two questions—we should be asking about the police.  Year in and year out, decade in and decade out, police behavior cries out for reform.  The calls are as predictable as they are painful.  So, instead of asking ourselves why the police constantly fail, perhaps we should ask another question:  what are they succeeding at?

Once we ask this question, and do so without the blinders of a superficial and easily disproven ideology (“they’re here to prevent crime”; “they’re here to protect the citizens”), we are free to recognize their social role.  And to recognize it, we need only look.  Look at the murders of countless African Americans.  Look at the increasing militarization of the police.  Look at the city budgets that neglect social services in order to fund police activities.  Look at the wider and wider set of activities that the police, while regularly failing, are constantly required to perform.

The police have a role to play in this deeply inegalitarian society.  That role is to preserve the social order and the hierarchies it involves.  It is to ensure that the privileged are protected and that those without privilege don’t get any fancy ideas, individually or collectively.

The police may seem to perform a necessary role in any society.  After all, somebody needs to ensure that people aren’t robbed or raped or murdered.  And this is the peculiar genius of the setup.  There are roles that police play that in any society would need to be played.  But those roles are folded into the larger one of keeping the social hierarchy intact.  If there is to be a social order that preserves the privilege of the few, it must also ensure that there aren’t robbers and rapists and murderers running around.  And it can do that while at the same time ensuring that, for instance, enough fear is instilled in poor and African American communities that things won’t get out of hand, that African American mothers and fathers won’t forget to have those “talks” with their sons and daughters.  These roles are inseparable from one another in the current structure of policing.

That is why asking whether particular police officers are racist misses the larger issue.  The police is (singular verb) racist.  It is an inescapable aspect of the role of the police is to be racist.  That is because it is an inescapable aspect of their role to preserve a social order that privileges the wealthy and (for the most part) the white.

At the outset, I said there were two questions that needed to be asked.  We have answered the first one.  The second one is this:  what is a better way to approach the question of robbery and rape and beatings?  And here I ratify something that has been said before but recently with increasing urgency.  The question is not how to reform the police.  The question lies further back.  How do we build safe and healthy communities for people?

We know the outlines to the answer to that question:  education, jobs with living wages, universal health care, community fellow feeling.  The question of violence should be addressed within that context.  Whether, at the end of that questioning, anything that we might want to call “the police” emerges, it should be a result of the answers to those previous questions, not an answer presupposed at the outset.

(Director’s note: It’s just one week ago today that the Clemson University Board of Trustees voted to un-name the University’s Honors College.  To help contextualize and better understand the complicated legacy of John C. Calhoun, I invited Susanna Ashton, Chair of the Clemson Department of English who specializes in the literature and history of nineteenth century America, particularly the writings of enslaved people,  to share her reflections.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

Removing the name of John C. Calhoun from Clemson’s Honors College was a long overdue act that never should have been necessary in the first place.  To anyone who knows about Calhoun, he was never just a preeminent South Carolina politician who happened to be a slave owner (although, heck , that’s certainly reason enough to rethink how to honor him).  He was known as a brilliant man with an interest in education and with an especial interest in deploying education and its capital against others.

At a time when South Carolina had made African American literacy illegal, punishable by law, John C. Calhoun was reported to have commented at a dinner “that if he could find a Negro who knew the Greek syntax, he would then believe that the Negro was a human being and should be treated as a man.”  As a scholar of African American Life Writing, literacy history, and, in particular the writing of people who survived bondage during the 19^th century, I’ve long assigned in my American Literature classes the stinging rejoinder to Calhoun offered in 1834 by Black classicist and intellectual, the Reverend Alexander Crummell who was the son of a man who had survived enslavement:

“Just think of the crude asininity of even a great man! Mr. Calhoun went to Yale, to study the Greek Syntax, and graduated there. His son went to Yale to study the Greek Syntax, and graduated there. His grandson, in recent years, went to Yale, to learn the Greek Syntax, and graduated there. Schools and Colleges were necessary for the Calhouns, and all other white men to learn the Greek syntax. And yet this great man knew that there was not a school, nor a college in which a black boy could learn his A.B.C.’s. He knew that the law in all the Southern States forbade Negro instruction under the severest penalties. How then was the Negro to learn the Greek syntax? How then was he to evidence to Mr. Calhoun his human nature? Why, it is manifest that Mr. Calhoun expected the Greek syntax to grow in Negro brains by spontaneous generation!”

Our Clemson Calhoun Honors college was therefore named to honor the man who not merely was the architect of the strategy to subsume Federal jurisdiction over the bondage of human beings and to expand slaveholding power across the continent. It was named also for an enslaver of men, women and children. But–and this is yet another reason why removing his name from an honors college matters so very much–it was named for a man who used his own cultural and political capital to advance the argument that Black people lacked the ability to prove their humanity by mastering “the Greek Syntax.”

Calhoun’s invocation of Greek Syntax was, of course, a nonsensical trope, offensive in its suggestion that mastering grammar as the essence of civilization (qua Western Civilization as understood by Calhoun) was a way to measure and demonstrate one’s humanity.  We can easily unpack the troubling assumptions that mastering the supremacist’s language is a liberatory step. And yet: the irony here is a tool – irony always is a method to measure the distance and difference between what is and what should be. In this case, we at Clemson can see that the distance between *our* values of nurturing intellectual growth and the limitless potential of all people from the value of honoring someone who dedicated his career not merely to demeaning and enslaving Black people, but who invoked all the tools at his tremendous command to teach that only certain people would even have the ability, much less a right to participate or be seen as fully human in the world.

The distance between those values about who we are, who we wish to be as a community, and who we publicly honor could not be more stark.  As a scholar, teacher, colleague, and resident of the City of Clemson, I have found it particularly helpful to remind students when discussing the Fort Hill Plantation labor camp that injustice was never a given, never “just the way things were.” There were always people who called it out.  If you listen and look at the record we have of American history, we can see courage in voices across centuries that dissented. We can see the dissent here in the fact that the witnesses to the comment, Samuel Sewell and David Childs, prominent white Abolitionist lawyers, thought the comments so vile and inhumane that they repeated them in presumably aghast terms in the presence of young Alexander Crummell who was working as a teenage errand boy for the Boston Anti-Slavery Office in 1833.  But we can, too, see dissent in the way in which Crummell went on to lead his own life. Calhoun died in 1850 and Crummell’s comments weren’t drafted until 1898. Yet we can see that Crummell led his entire life as a scholar and as a race leader as a defiant rejoinder to the words of Calhoun.

And, of course, any lazy assertion that “that’s just how things were” when seeing cruelties that might be unimaginable today is assuming the people actually actually enslaved and held captive under threat of torture here on what is now our campus were somehow complacent and complicit in their suffering which was, of course, never the case. There was always dissent and we should never relax, I tell my Clemson students, in assuming that “that was just how things were.” We make choices, looking back, about who we choose to listen to.

We can be empowered by knowing, as a tool of the analytical humanities,  that we can always look for dissent in history because mores were always challenged and cruelty was always clearly understood by the people on the receiving end of it, for exactly what it was.

I hope by working with undergraduates to unpack and parse the legacies of language, of educational values, and the specifics of site memory, I honor the true mission of the university without buying into the false goals of mastering Greek Syntax.

Read more here:
https://www.blackpast.org/…/1898-alexander-crummell-attitu…/

Or here: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sta…/allow-me-enlighten-you

NOTES:

If anyone is interested in learning more about how Calhoun inadvertently launched the careers of other Black Classicists, check out the career of William Sanders Scarborough as well https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2005/2005.05.12/

(Director’s note: Orville Vernon Burton is the inaugural Judge Matthew J. Perry Distinguished Chair of History and Professor of Pan-African Studies, Sociology and Anthropology, and Computer Science at Clemson University, and the Director of the Clemson CyberInstitute.  A recognized expert on race relations and the American South, and a leader in Digital Humanities, Burton served as vice-chair of the Board of Directors of the Congressional National Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation, 2009-2017.  In 2007 the Illinois State legislature honored him with a special resolution for his contributions as a scholar, teacher, and citizen of Illinois.  Elected to the Society of American Historians and was one of ten historians selected to contribute to the Presidential Inaugural Portfolio (January 21, 2013) by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies.  Burton received the Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities from the South Carolina Humanities Council in 2017.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

On June 9, voting in Georgia was frustrated and infuriating.  Long lines, some with five hours wait time, and malfunctioning machinery were only part of the problem.  Because of the pandemic, fewer precincts were open for the election, and the problem was more pronounced in minority neighborhoods in the metro-Atlanta area.  Absentee-mail in ballots also went awry.  According to Stacey Abrams, “voter suppression has gone beyond Jim Crow to these labyrinthine administrative rules that trip up anyone who doesn’t have a law degree and a phalanx of lawyers at their side to help them get through the process if they are one of the intended targets.”  Official Jim Crow may have ended with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  But that legislation has been misinterpreted and unenforced as of late.

Two things have changed the modern South:  air conditioning and the Voting Rights Act.  Sadly, Americans understand better how air conditioning operates than how the Voting Rights Act works.  Partly this is due to the better science education than the Humanities in our public schools.  The Voting Rights Act is especially interesting for Historians of democracy and public policy because it was enacted to address a specific evil in our history, that is the evil of slavery, segregation, the lingering effects of racism and discrimination, and especially the abridgement of the franchise to African Americans.  The Voting Rights Act began as a non-partisan measure, pushed by both Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

When South Carolina, first in nullification and first in secession, challenged the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court upheld the law in 1966.  Chief Justice Earl Warren explained the new departure:  “Congress felt itself confronted by an insidious and pervasive evil.”  The Supreme Court dismissed the complaint, “Hopefully, millions of non-white Americans will now be able to participate for the first time on an equal basis in the government under which they live.”  The Court summarized the history of disfranchisement, including disfranchising constitutions, grandfather clauses, and white primaries, all accompanied by wholesale fraud and violence.  The Chief Justice noted the long history of racial discrimination in the voter registration process in South Carolina, directly quoting some of the more outrageous remarks of “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman. Tillman had declared, “The whites have absolute control of the government, and we intend at any hazard to retain it” and “the only thing we can do as patriots and as statesmen is to take from them [black voters] every ballot that we can.”

The new Act was precision-targeted at the worst-behaving states.  In those states, the chief dirty trick was the bad-faith use of the literacy test to reject African Americans no matter what the test result was –  just as intended.  For example, in 1940, one local registrar in South Carolina explained to a newspaper reporter, “If a coon wants to vote in the primary, we make him recite the Constitution backward, as well as forward, make him close his eyes and dot his t’s and cross his i’s.  We have to comply with the law, you see.”

The heart of the new law, therefore, stripped away from those states their right to use literacy tests at all.  The Act contained an objective formula to identify these states, which were called “covered states.”  Under the formula, the covered states turned out to be seven of the eleven states of the former Confederacy (as well as certain counties throughout the nation).  In other words, the Act accurately singled out states that were guilty of the most egregious voting discrimination.

The Voting Rights Act went into effect on August 6, 1965, and was effective from the start.  More than a million African Americans registered to vote in just two years.  Black registration doubled in Georgia and Louisiana, tripled in Alabama, and multiplied by almost ten times in Mississippi – from 28,000 to more than a quarter of a million.

White officials did not sit idly by; they shifted tactics.  Unable to keep African Americans from voting, they manipulated the rules and election machinery to maintain control and to keep African Americans from exercising influence or winning office.  In heavily black counties, offices were changed from elective to appointive. In Charleston County, South Carolina, for example, the school board of trustees changed from elected to appointed positions, but only in predominantly African American districts.  White school districts continued to elect their board members.  Majority black cities suddenly annexed white suburbs to keep white residents in the majority.  Gerrymandering was rampant.  A Mississippi legislator introduced one of these bills with the words, “This is needed to preserve our southern way of life.”  These methods went by the collective term “vote dilution,” i.e., making black votes worth less.

The Voting Rights Act, however, recognized that the tactics would change.  The “preclearance” remedy of the Voting Rights Act was Congress’s way of trying to anticipate future discriminatory tactics.  The covered jurisdictions had to get prior approval of changes in their voting procedure.  Over the next 45 years the pre-clearance remedy enabled African American voters to elect candidates of their choice and to be a real part of the political process in states where they had for so long been kept away from the ballot box.

In 2013 the Supreme Court took it back.  Shelby County v. Holder struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, ending the pre-clearance remedy.   That very day, Texas instituted a voter ID law that had previously been declared discriminatory.  Now we are back to old tricks like closing precincts in minority districts and tactics we have not yet even seen.  We have to ask if Georgia’s election debacle is part and parcel of the new plan to keep minorities from voting.

(Director’s note: When I wrote to Clemson English colleague, Jonathan Beecher Field about contributing to this series, he said he was interested, but had already been contacted by several other venues for his insights, which I take to be a good sign in itself for Clemson Humanities Now.  A few days ago, Jonathan circled back and proposed that I share this, his contribution for the Boston Review, on the politics of commemorative statues. This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

Bio: Jonathan Beecher Field is an associate professor of English at Clemson University. He was born in New England and educated in the midwest. He is the author of Errands into The Metropolis (UPNE, 2009) and Town Hall Meetings and the Death of Deliberation (Minnesota, 2019).

(Director’s note: Lee B. Wilson, an Assistant Professor in the Clemson University Department of History, specializes in colonial British America and the early modern Atlantic world.  She received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and her J.D. from Fordham University School of Law.  Her book, Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1669-1783, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

In responding to last week’s groundswell of protests over police brutality, President Donald Trump took the opportunity to anoint himself America’s “law-and-order” president. Dusting off Richard Nixon’s dog-whistle campaign slogan, he paired an appeal to our baser rather than our better angels with a naked threat.  If local officials failed “to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents,” he would “deploy the United States military” to “solve the problem for them.”

Trump has the legal authority to do this under the Insurrection Act of 1807, a federal statute that empowers the President to use federal troops for domestic law enforcement purposes under certain specific circumstances. Indeed, Trump’s Rose Garden pronouncement sent journalists scrambling for information about the Act, a somewhat obscure statute signed into law by Thomas Jefferson. The Act does not make for riveting copy on first glance. With roots in early American debates over the military’s proper role in a federal republic and the President’s legal authority as Commander-in-Chief, the Act carves out an exception to an overarching principle of American law: that the military should not intervene in civilian policing.

As a citizen, Trump’s allusion to the Insurrection Act provokes moral outrage. As a legal historian, it commands my attention because tracing its undulating uses allows us to pinpoint the particular set of values that Americans prioritized at any given moment. American presidents — from Thomas Jefferson to George H.W. Bush — have invoked the Insurrection Act at times of acute social or political crisis, but for different reasons and with different objectives. It is the legal historian’s job to ask who benefitted from each of these extraordinary acts of military intervention, and more importantly, at what cost.

The Insurrection Act began as a practical acknowledgement of the new American republic’s fragility. Because the founding generation had a deep mistrust of standing armies, the framers of the Constitution built in safeguards to prevent presidents from using military power to infringe upon the rights of citizens or (taking a cue from Julius Caesar) overthrow the republic. These checks and balances were good in theory, but a string of small-scale insurrections in the republic’s early years revealed that some were unworkable in practice. From the Whiskey Rebellion to the Burr Conspiracy, America’s first presidents were hamstrung by their inability to use federal forces to suppress domestic disturbances, even when these disturbances seemed to threaten the republic’s very existence. In 1807, therefore, Congress remedied this deficiency by passing the Insurrection Act.  The Act empowered the President to use state militias or federal troops “in all cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws,” rather than merely to defend against a foreign enemy.

From its origins in the political and constitutional conflicts of the early republic, the Act morphed into a tool for enforcing white supremacy. In Jacksonian and antebellum America “insurrection” took on a decidedly racialized meaning as chattel slavery became more deeply entrenched in the South. This was not an uncontested process. Enslaved people actively resisted bondage in manifold ways, belying the legal fiction that people were property. Rebellion was the most dramatic of these acts of resistance, and in the Jacksonian era, the federal government arrayed the full force of U.S. military might in support of slave owners. For example, when enslaved preacher Nat Turner rallied Virginia slaves to revolt in 1831, President Jackson invoked the Insurrection Act to quash the uprising. Ultimately, Turner and his compatriots were hunted down and judicially executed with the assistance of federal troops.

In welcoming federal military involvement to quell the Nat Turner revolt and protect their “domestic” institution, white Virginians managed to overcome their states’ rights scruples. Over fifty years later, American corporations likewise set aside laissez-faire principles when they sought federal military aid to suppress labor disturbances. For example, when Pullman factory workers struck for better wages and labor conditions in 1894, President Cleveland used his authority under the Insurrection Act to bust the strike. Deploying federal forces to Chicago — ostensibly to ensure the safe delivery of the mail via train — Cleveland only exacerbated the dispute, which resulted in the deaths of at least 30 strikers.

We can roundly condemn these uses of the Insurrection Act, but characterizing the Act as an instrument of terror and repression is simplistic. Indeed, in other hands and in other social and political contexts, Presidents have used the Act to promote a more inclusive vision of America, one in which the federal government acts as a guarantor of rights. In the wake of the Civil War, for example, President Ulysses S. Grant relied upon the Act to suppress the Ku Klux Klan and to prevent the racialized violence that ravaged African American communities. Likewise, during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, President Eisenhower invoked the Act to enforce the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education.  Federalizing the Arkansas National Guard, Eisenhower wielded his power as Commander-in-Chief to protect black children and integrate Little Rock High School. This trend continued during the Kennedy administration, when the President, using federal troops, forced the University of Mississippi to enroll James Meredith, the school’s first black student.

In these instances, the Insurrection Act allowed Presidents to momentarily jump the constraints of our federal system, to override the state and local authorities who sought to maintain white supremacy. The Act became a powerful tool that enabled the federal government to fulfill its obligations as the enforcer of the new covenant embodied in the Reconstruction Amendments; to render factual Thomas Jefferson’s aspirational statement that “all men are created equal.”

It is easy to laud Presidents like Eisenhower and Kennedy for using the Insurrection Act to promote racial justice and to support the principle of equality before the law. It equally easy to highlight the hypocrisy of Virginia slave holders or Gilded Age tycoons, who sought to restrict the ambit of federal authority, but ultimately relied upon federal military might to buttress their authority. It is much harder to acknowledge that our legal system holds the potential for both outcomes. We like to think that we have engineered a constitutional order that will hold against the most egregious abuses of power, but history teaches us that this is not so. We do not need to look to European or ancient examples to learn that republics are fragile. American history is rife with moments that show us how the flexibility of our constitutional order – the very thing that gives it strength – also renders it vulnerable to weaknesses and failings of our elected officials. Indeed, studying the Insurrection Act lays bare both the possibilities and limits of law in our federal republic. Although law shapes the ways in which Americans engage with the world and with each other, our legal system is not purely autonomous. It depends upon the good will of elected politicians, and of our willingness to hold them to account in the streets and at the ballot box. American society is only as righteous as the citizens that comprise her body politic choose to make her, when they transform potential energy into kinetic through acts of civic participation.

Bio:  Lee B. Wilson is a historian of colonial British America and the early modern Atlantic world. Her research interests include the legal history of early American slave societies, colonial property law, and legal discourse. Dr. Wilson received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and her J.D. from Fordham University School of Law. Her book, Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1669-1783, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

(Director’s note: Joseph Mai, Associate Professor of French, with an affiliation in World Cinema, team teaches with Angela Naimou, Associate Professor of English, a Creative Inquiry group,“Stories of Refuge, Detention, and Hospitality,” dedicated to understanding the stories of immigrants, the conditions of detention, and creative practices of hospitality.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

If you are as privileged as I am, the current pandemic has meant inconvenient but bearable modifications to daily life: wearing a mask, more time at home, Zoom meetings, perhaps an ill-starred attempt to cut your own hair. But for immigrants held in US mandatory detention centers, the freedom to make such basic choices in healthcare does not exist. For some, the situation has been catastrophic.

I have been thinking of this because, over the past year, my colleague, Dr. Angela Naimou (English), and I have been mentoring a group of students conducting research on the stories that immigrants tell about detention. One of their central activities is to participate in a visit, organized by the El Refugio hospitality house, with people detained at the Stewart Detention Center, located in Lumpkin GA. Stewart is the second largest ICE detention center in the United States, a country with the largest immigration detention system in the world. During our conversations, which take place in English, French, Arabic, and Spanish, we learn a great deal about life in detention, including much about medical distress.

Here is one alarming recent story, though only scarce details are available. On May 24, Santiago Baten-Oxlaj, a husband and father to three children, became the first person to lose his life to COVID-19 in the Stewart facility. Santiago had been arrested at home in Marietta, Georgia on March 2. By March 26 he had requested and been granted voluntary departure to his home country of Guatemala. By April 17, the 34-year-old was sick enough to require a month-long hospitalization, at the end of which he died. Santiago was clearly not a flight risk. His unnecessary death exposes much of the dysfunction and callousness inherent in immigrant detention.

Like most ICE detention centers, Stewart is operated by a private company (CoreCivic), whose main priority is to increase returns for its shareholders. Much of the company’s cost cutting directly affects people’s health and living conditions: low-quality food, sometimes dirty drinking water, extremely overcrowded sleeping and washing facilities, and a lack of medical technology, medicine, and health-care personnel. When immigrants complain of poor conditions or illness, the undertrained staff often respond with punishment such as solitary confinement. Even mental health incidents receive punitive responses, and two men with documented mental health issues have committed suicide at Stewart after being left in solitary confinement.

Given this structural neglect during routine times, the inability of Stewart’s staff to manage this pandemic has been sadly predictable. Just two days before Santiago was granted voluntary departure, immigrants held a hunger strike to demand more protection and possible release. But still most CDC guidelines have been ignored (staff reportedly do not use personal protection equipment, living conditions have changed little, and ICE continues to transfer people from one center to another). To make matters worse, Stewart County has such a spike of COVID-19 that it has declared a state of emergency. Unsurprisingly, the virus has penetrated deep into the facility. Of some 300 employees, over 50 have tested positive. ICE claims that 16 detainees have been infected but there are reliable reports that many cases go untested.

Indeed, it is not easy to know precisely how far conditions have deteriorated inside. The one “safety measure” that ICE has consistently enforced throughout the country has been the suspension of personal visits. This means that the only communication detainees may now have with the outside is through their attorneys (the vast majority do not have one), letters (if delivered), or telephone accounts. Those who have been detained for up to two years and have come to rely on visits from family or community members have grown more isolated.

Thinking about Santiago Baten-Oxlaj can be overwhelming at a time when we are already worried about tumultuous current events. This is especially true when we consider how Santiago and his family’s story touches upon contexts beyond the walls of the detention center: immigrants who are essential workers and who lack health care; undocumented people who fear arrest by ICE or local police participating in 287(g) agreements; people living in tents and kept just beyond our border due to the ironically named “migrant protection protocols” (better known as “remain in Mexico”); at risk incarcerated people throughout the US…

But despite this burden, our research group has continued to explore forms and practices of hospitality that struggle to affirm dignity within this system. Groups such as El Refugio, Project South, SPLC, and the Tahirih Justice Center have sought new ways to support immigrants (through providing telephone accounts, for instance) and demand accountability, transparency, and the release of vulnerable individuals. This summer our students have been thinking of how to aid these efforts and educate those around them.

Bio: Joseph Mai is an Associate Professor of French with an affiliation in World Cinema. He teaches courses on French society and French cinema and literature, and is currently completing a volume on the post-genocide cinema of the Franco-Cambodian filmmaker, Rithy Panh. “Stories of Refuge, Detention, and Hospitality” is a Creative Inquiry group, dedicated to understanding the stories of immigrants, the conditions of detention, and creative practices of hospitality.

(Introduction to a series, “Clemson Humanities Now,” by Humanities Hub Founding Director, Lee Morrissey, who teaches in the English Department.)

By April 2020, as the nation went into the Covid-19 lockdown, I was dismayed: a devastating and mysterious illness was painfully debilitating its sufferers, and even, apparently, presenting a new way of dying—suddenly, from a lack of oxygen, caused, apparently, by a new kind of pneumonia. The world needed so many skilled people—EMTs, nurses, doctors, immunologists, virologists, farmers, grocers, medical equipment manufacturers, supply chain logisticians, social scientists, public health experts.  Overwhelmed at the time by the demonstrable value of the sciences in the moment (and the increasing disregard for it in the infomercials then broadcast nightly from the White House), I also worried, what did the world need from the humanities?  What were the humanities going to do in the new world then emerging?  In May, when I virtually attended the annual meeting of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, we directors of Humanities Centers discussed our priorities for the coming academic year.  The focus of those conversations tended to be on budget pressures, rescheduling, and whether to have face-to-face events in the fall.  All fine questions, but shouldn’t directors of Humanities Centers, I thought, also be asking themselves what we mean by the humanities now?

By early June, however, the social and political consequences of the novel coronavirus, and the national response(s) to it, revealed the continuing importance–and even the increased value–of the humanities.  Systemic needs had become visible, and acute: for effective, consistent communication; for the evaluation of sources; for attention to logical and rhetorical implications; for a sense of historical perspective; for the quality of thinking that can sift for ethical, moral, and political consequences; for deliberative, but fast-moving analysis of great volumes of information; and for imagining other peoples’ lives and imagining new possibilities.  The humanities reflect on and develop each of these, helping people increase their capacities for each of them.

After President Trump began to egg on largely white protesters, often armed, who were opposed to the shutdown he had asked for and had not lifted, I realized that the three ways we were simultaneously being asked to respond to the pandemic—stay home, follow the science, and rise up in armed outrage at the previous two—mapped on to dynamics I had tracked in my book manuscript about seventeenth-century English poetry, which I had just revised and returned to a press for review in January.

More recently, as videos of the deaths of, first, Ahmaud Arbery and then George Floyd emerged (in the former case months after shots were fired into the unarmed jogger), the nation was reminded of another persistent, virulent disease with which it has unfortunately learned to live, and for which vaccines are also regrettably in short supply—racism and anti-black violence.  As I write this, in early June 2020, the US has experienced over a week of daily protests, nationwide, lootings and burnings, and nightly examples of militarized police using batons, shields, tasers, tear gas, paint balls, rubber bullets, and stun grenades against diverse groups of their fellow citizens, maybe even their neighbors.  The protests have gone global, as people around the world chanted “Black Lives Matter,” and took a knee in solidarity.

With George Floyd being at least the second African American man, that we have heard of, in just the last few years to die while telling the police officer choking them, “I can’t breathe,” and with so many videotaped deaths by such a variety of means, too, I have been wondering why it took yet another such death to have the impact George Floyd’s has.  There are lots of factors, of course: the galling callousness of Officer Chauvin as he knelt for 9 minutes with one hand in his pocket, and one knee on a neck; the awful repetition of death by police asphyxiation necessitating a bigger response; a demographically changing America, now about 60% non-Hispanic white; and the internet facilitating decentralized local expressions of sympathetic frustration.  But I believe that the massive response to George Floyd’s death is also part of the Covid-19 story, not only because there are suddenly over 40 million unemployed and frustrated Americans (also, and again, more likely people of color).

In addition to all those factors, “I can’t breathe” resonates today, again today, and maybe more today, when over 111,000 Americans have died of a disease whose signature symptom is respiratory distress, and for which, in the early going, ventilators, or the lack thereof, had been a predominant national topic.  By the time people saw the video of the death of George Floyd, they were attuned to breath, to breathing, and to people taking their last breaths, alone.  By the time George Floyd died, people had also tuned in, one way or another, to task force briefings in which the proposed solutions were themselves sometimes deadly, and in which the principle presenter seemed to comprehend neither the risks in the new conditions nor the proposed ‘treatment.’  When George Floyd died, most people probably knew someone who had had Covid-10, and thus many more people worried that they too might soon be saying, “I can’t breathe,” also through no fault of their own, and also maybe because of a lack of governmental concern for them, an absence some of them could see in Officer Chauvin’s nonchalant demeanor.  In short, maybe there was an opening where more people were feeling their shared vulnerability, which means, in part, a shared humanity.

At this point, I realized that if my research in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature was helping me think about what was happening now (and that what was happening now might inform my research), then the same must be happening for my Clemson Humanities colleagues, too, and maybe even more so for those who work in, say, American history, or American literature, or political philosophy, or, well, you get the idea.  So, with this realization in mind, I wrote to many of my colleagues in the humanities at Clemson, and I asked them if they would like to write a brief, accessible post about how what is happening now informs their research, and vice versa, as part of a series I would call “Clemson Humanities Now.”  I am delighted to say that many colleagues offered to contribute to this series.  Come to think of it, actually, I am honored that they said yes—it is an honor to work with generous colleagues who are so actively thinking about the implications of their work, and the consequences of what is unfolding around them.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.

The series will be updated as Clemson Humanities’ faculty posts arrive, starting this Wednesday afternoon.