Tag: CAAH

(Director’s note: Elizabeth Rivlin, teaches in the English department, and her research interests include the history of Shakespeare in American literature and culture, especially cultures of reading; theories of adaptation; and early modern drama and prose. Her current book project is titled Shakespeare and the American Middlebrow, for which she won a NEH Summer Stipend.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

With the stay-at-home orders that arrived in March came a slew of advice about what to do with all the unexpected, homebound leisure that some Americans found themselves with. Reading seemed to be high on the list, judging by a flurry of media pieces with titles like “The Lockdown List: Books to Read During Quarantine.” While some of the recommendations were for new and contemporary literature, the “classics” and “the great books” also had their cheerleaders. Take, for example, the well-publicized “Tolstoy Together,” a project in which the writer Yiyun Li read and discussed War and Peace, book club-style, with members of the public.

Shakespeare, too, has gotten love during the lockdowns. Patrick Stewart read the Sonnets aloud to us daily on Facebook, and, inspired by a Twitter meme claiming that Shakespeare wrote King Lear while in quarantine for the plague, prominent Shakespeare scholars like Stephen Greenblatt, Emma Smith, and James Shapiro meditated on what Shakespeare has to tell us about being creative in or simply living through a pandemic. Others offered direct advice to help readers tackle Shakespeare. Acknowledging that “many people have said they find reading Shakespeare a bit daunting,” Emma Smith returned with “five tips for how to make it simpler and more pleasurable,” her last bit of counsel being “Don’t worry.” Allie Esiri recommended particular readings from Shakespeare for the lockdown period, on the theory that “Reading Shakespeare concentrates the mind which we are all in need of, lending both a challenge and a reward.” Meanwhile, in the conservative publication The Spectator, Chilton Williamson, Jr. guiltily confessed that “it is too easy to put off reading” Shakespeare and pledged to “rectify” that by putting The Complete Works of Shakespeare on his pandemic reading list.

This lockdown-inspired burst of enthusiasm for reading, and in particular for “classics” like Shakespeare, is just the latest manifestation of a persistent current in American life that has linked reading to a quest for self-improvement in which edification and pleasure are supposed ideally to mix. I’m working on a book, Shakespeare and the American Middlebrow: Reading Publics, 1878-Present, that looks closely at institutions that promoted the reading of Shakespeare with just such aims: Chautauqua is a small town in upstate New York that for several decades at the turn of the last century was the center of the burgeoning self-education movement in the United States; The Book-of-the-Month Club pioneered the mail-order sale of books at large scale in the early- to mid-twentieth century; and the Great Books Movement generated a list at mid-century of what it dubbed “the greatest books of the western tradition” and sold them to the American public in 54 volumes. All three of these institutions promised that learning to read books of a certain “quality” or canonical status would create individual mobility and collective uplift, and all three promised to help readers deal with the perceived difficulties and obstacles that accompanied this ambitious reading.

Arguably, no one entity today has the impact on Americans’ reading habits as these institutions did in their heyday (although Oprah’s Book Club has more recently enjoyed something of the same influence). Even on the diffused internet, however, many voices dispense familiar-sounding wisdom, especially the assurance that the reading of culturally sanctioned, esteemed works is therapeutic and even curative in a time of crisis. In this, they hearken back to earlier reading initiatives, for example, the Great Books Program, which in the midst of the Cold War promoted self-educational reading as a means for the American public to rise to the level of an enlightened democratic citizenry and thereby defeat the insidious threat of communism. The dangers may present themselves in different shapes in 2020, but the prescription remains the same.

One thing that does seem to be changing is Americans’ expanding sense of the kind of reading that can enlighten and improve: witness the recent outpouring of #BlackLivesMatter reading lists. When so much seems to fall outside of people’s control, the lure of reading, whether it’s James Baldwin, Shakespeare, or both, is still that the self can be improved, and that if progress is possible on a personal level, perhaps it can also be imagined on a collective scale.

(Director’s note: Jordan Frith, Pearce Professor of Professional Communication in English, researches mobile technologies, social media, and infrastructure, particularly where those topics intersect through questions of space and place. He’s the author of 30 peer-reviewed articles on these topics and three books, the most recent of which was published by MIT Press in 2019.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

Back in March when much of the world was starting to realize that the COVID-19 pandemic was not going to just disappear, various governments and corporations began exploring plans for digital contact tracing applications. Digital contact tracing involves using the data from mobile phones to track whom people come in contact with on a daily basis, so if someone is later diagnosed with COVID-19, anyone they shared a space with can quickly be notified. The apps mostly work through Bluetooth, meaning the phones of anyone who signed up for the contact tracing app would constantly broadcast a Bluetooth signal to nearby phones and record the unique ID of each phone within Bluetooth range. Those unique IDs would link to a database of users, which is how people would be notified if a positive COVID-19 case did occur.

With the COVID-19 outbreaks across the globe, digital contact tracing began being talked about as maybe the number one tool for containing outbreaks without going into full lockdown. A successful system would enable health officials to quickly identify case clusters and quarantine people who were at risk. And in a few cases, digital contact tracing has been useful, particularly in places like South Korea that put these plans into place early in the pandemic and got significant public buy-in. But many of the much-hyped digital contact tracing plans have mostly failed. For example, the UK digital contact tracing app has not made much of an impact, and the United States still does not have a robust Federal digital contact tracing system. So why have these systems not succeeded despite getting so much public attention? I argue that it’s partly because the plans relied too much upon data as a good in itself without the necessary critical reflection necessary for the success of most big data projects. That reflection and interrogation is where the humanities come in. As I explain below, the failure of digital contact tracing projects at the time we need them most shows why we need more data-literate humanists.

Digital contact tracing is obviously somewhat unique because it’s not every day we have a global pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. But the hype surrounding digital contact tracing is less unique when considered in the greater context of what has been called the “big data revolution.” The supposed big data revolution represents two major shifts in society in the 21^st century. The first is that we are producing far more data than ever before about everything from energy usage to mobility patterns. For some context, according to Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier, ‘‘Google processes more than 24 petabytes of data per day, a volume that is thousands of times the quantity of all printed material in the U.S. Library of Congress.’’ And that’s just Google. The second development is closely related. We now have vastly improved computing power necessary to process and act upon huge datasets. These two trends have combined to usher in an increased reliance on data in many walks of life, and according to some proponents, if people just collect enough data, the “data can speak for itself.” This blind belief in data without diving deeper into the unique contexts of data sources is part and parcel with the hype we saw about digital contact tracing.

There’s nothing wrong with the use of large-scale datasets to solve problems. Data informed decision making is often far superior to just winging it and guessing. However, the hype surrounded big data often went too far and did not involve humanists to ask questions about data projects that could have helped them succeed. After all, despite beliefs that data could supposedly speak for itself, that can simply never be the case. Data always needs to be interpreted to be acted upon. In addition, datasets are often a partial picture of a phenomenon, and data collection also often has privacy and personal liberty implications that are not closely enough considered. As Rob Kitchin argues, data projects are often best served by combinations of data scientists and humanists/social scientists who can interrogate the data and how it is used to inform decision making.

The COVID digital contact tracing is an important contemporary example of what critical, data-literate humanists can add to data projects. After all, these digital contact tracing apps, despite all their hype, faced some major issues from the very beginning that were not fully addressed. For one, as anthropologist Genevieve Bell argued, the design of these apps matters significantly for user privacy, and governments did not communicate design choices clearly to the public. The lack of explanation of where data was coming from and how it was stored likely hampered public adoption, and contact data is only useful when enough people buy into the system to provide a comprehensive dataset. Secondly, and maybe most importantly, the design choices in these apps were inherently exclusionary. They required mobile phone data (unlike focusing on a human-driven contact tracing system), so children, some elderly people, the homeless, and other non-adopters simply could not participate. In addition, many cheaper mobile phones do not have low-energy Bluetooth capabilities necessary for the applications. For people without the right devices, they are simply left out of the dataset, which can have major consequences for epidemiological tracking. And finally, digital contact tracing itself cannot work successfully without a rapid testing infrastructure to quickly identify positive cases, and—in my opinion—a social safety net that can financially support people staying home from work if they receive a notice they could be infected. Without these broader systems in place, the data provided through these systems and how actionable the alerts are was always going to be limited.

The issues in the previous paragraph have all limited the efficacy of digital contact tracing, and that’s not even mentioning the major surveillance concerns surrounding location data and whether systems are dismantled once (well, maybe if) the pandemic is under control. After all, Congress just renewed parts of the Patriot Act almost 20 years after it was first passed in the shadow of 9/11. But regardless, many of these issues could have been addressed through more critical engagement and less of a blind embrace of data. In other words, I argue part of the reasons these projects have not succeeded is that they often did not involve the necessary types of critical literacies that are the expertise of the humanities. By interrogating the plans for these datasets, issues of inequality, concerns about design and data storage, fears about surveillance, all could have been addressed from the start and communicated to the public. But instead, governments too often pushed forward with these plans without the types of critical analysis required to make them work.

In conclusion, I’m using digital contact tracing here as an example, but I could point to so many other data projects to make the same case. As humanists, we need to play a role in how data is collected and how data is interpreted. We also have to not be afraid of data. Humanists don’t have to be mathematicians or data scientists, but some of us need to know how to question datasets, how to explore where data comes from, and how to interrogate what it may be missing. And we need to move past antiquated quantitative/qualitative divides that act like numbers are outside the purview of the humanities. Most data projects aren’t going to have major public health consequences like a digital contact tracing app. But regardless, we need to fight for a place at the table for future data projects in both industry and government. We have a role to play to shape the collection and interpretation of data of various types.

(Director’s note: Pauline de Tholozany, an  Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages department, specializes in 19^th-century French Literature. Her first book, L’Ecole de la maladresse (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2017), is a history of clumsiness in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. She is now working on a second book that focuses on impatience, a feeling that we tend to decry; she is interested in why we do so. Her contribution to this series, posted on Medium.com, is on impatience.  She reports that this project as a whole was inspired by Clemson students’ activism and their legitimate, peaceful, and powerful impatience.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

(Director’s Note: Stephanie Barczewski is Professor of History and Carol K. Brown Scholar in the Humanities. She is a specialist in the history of modern Britain. Her most recent book is Heroic Failure and the British (2016); her next book, Englishness and the Country House, is forthcoming from Reaktion Books in 2021.  The title of her essay comes from Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Critic as Artist” (1891): “To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.”  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

The response to the coronavirus pandemic has relied upon academic expertise from obvious sources: medicine, epidemiology, biology and other scientific disciplines. Occasionally, however, historians have been summoned to provide insight, mostly related to the “Spanish flu” pandemic of 1918. For example, they have pointed out that the very name of the pandemic is misleading, because it resulted from Spain’s neutrality in World War I, which meant that its newspapers were the first to report the outbreak. Even today, the source remains unknown: it was most likely the United States but could also have been China, France or Britain. This knowledge is valuable not only for accuracy’s sake, but because it points out the damage that can be done by associating a deadly virus with a particular country. This has been useful for combating President Trump’s efforts to label Covid-19 the “Chinese” or “Wuhan virus,” which can lead to the demonization of people of East Asian ethnicity.[2]

Historians have also contributed to efforts to examine the efforts made to reduce the impact of the 1918 flu through “non-pharmaceutical interventions” (NPIs). Academic studies showing that American cities that imposed NPIs more aggressively saw reduced death rates have been frequently cited on social media.[3] But I would like to introduce a counter-example: in Britain, almost nothing was done to combat the spread of the virus, as the Great War was deemed a greater threat to public safety and the national welfare. The general attitude was summed up by Sir Arthur Newsholme in a report compiled for the Royal Society of Medicine in 1919: “There are national circumstances in which the major duty is to ‘carry on’, even when risk to health and life is involved.”[4] We might then assume that the death toll was higher in Britain than it was in the United States. But this was not the case: Britain, with minimal NPIs, suffered around 228,000 deaths out of a total population of around 42,000,000 (or .005 of the total population). The United States, with far more NPIs, suffered 670,000 deaths out of a total population of 104,000,000 (.006). So are we to conclude from this that not introducing NPIs saved 24,000 lives in Britain, or the difference between .005 and .006 of the population? Or conversely that NPIs cost 130,000 lives in the United States? This would be ridiculously simplistic, but it is no more so than the “Philadelphia had a parade and St. Louis did not” comparisons that have frequently been used to justify aggressive NPIs.

I am not attempting here to assess the efficacy of NPIs, a subject on which I am not qualified to offer an opinion, but rather I am trying to make a suggestion about how history can be most effective in helping to shape the response to a present-day crisis. My point is that the past rarely offers simple answers, because the evidence often points in multiple directions. History may be doomed to repeat itself, but this is not because we ignore it, but because of how difficult its lessons are to extract. In 1918, there was a debate over whether wearing masks could slow the spread of influenza. In some large cities, mask usage was widespread, and, as one Red Cross public-service announcement put it, “the man or woman or child who will not wear a mask” was seen as “a dangerous slacker.” But other voices argued that masks did not work, were uncomfortable or detrimental to commerce. Some public officials refused to wear them, and in San Francisco there was even an “Anti-Mask League.”[5] A century later, the “science” has not much changed; it is instead the culture of mask-wearing that has evolved in recent months, perhaps to fit people’s political predilections.

If history is going to provide understanding of the Covid-19 pandemic, it must be done in a way that acknowledges the unknowability of the past alongside its knowability; history tells us not only what we do know, but also what we do not. If we fail to acknowledge this, it will mislead more than it will enlighten. As a guide to present-day decision-making, it therefore requires more than facile comparisons between then and now. And with its eye on the long view, it may be better suited to helping to provide the answers to the big, long-term questions about the impact of the pandemic rather than the shorter-term ones such as what measures might be effective. In this moment where we are increasingly recognizing the historical impact of the privileging of certain groups over others, we should be unafraid to acknowledge how the ways in which western societies have chosen to react to a threatening new disease are having an impact on the rest of the world. Is the near-obsessive focus on Covid-19, in other words, yet another embodiment of the elevation of the lives of wealthy westerners over those of people in the developing world? While attention and resources are directed exclusively at Covid, millions may die from other infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria, the treatment of which is currently being set back for years if not decades, while millions of children will go unvaccinated for diseases like polio that were, prior to this crisis, on the brink of elimination. And this is without taking into account the effects of the massive economic disruption caused by the western response to the pandemic, which will cause widespread hunger and social unrest. This, I fear, and not our failure to achieve the eradication of the virus through lockdowns or universal mask-wearing, is the most dire way in which our current history will take the form of a repetition of the past.

[1] The title of this essay comes from Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Critic as Artist” (1891): “To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.”

[2] See https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304645.

[3] The most-frequently cited study is: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291356/.

[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-52564371. See also https://www.historyextra.com/period/first-world-war/spanish-flu-britain-how-many-died-quarantine-corona-virus-deaths-pandemic/.

[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/05/06/mask-protests-flu-san-francisco-coronavirus/.

(Director’s note: Erin M. Goss, Associate Professor of English, thinks and writes about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing by and about women, especially as it intersects with contemporary gender politics. She is finishing a book currently called Complicity and the Bargains of White Femininity, 1750-1850.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

So much has happened since the morning of Monday, May 25 that it almost seems beside the point to return to the moment when Amy Cooper, formerly employed by Franklin Templeton, was recorded demonstrating what white women’s entitlement looks like when it is aimed at a Black man attempting to protect birds and respect city ordinances while using an area of public municipal space designated for the purpose of nature preservation. Apparently unwilling to accept that anyone might challenge her right to break whatever rules she saw fit to break, she called the police “to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.” Her premeditated lie demonstrated her very clear sense of the power she could wield, and her performance of vulnerability and need for protection showed just how far she would take the apparent affront to her dignity that was Christian Cooper’s request that she follow the law.

Amy Cooper later apologized, of course. She “would never have imagined that [she] would be involved in the type of incident that occurred with Chris,” she writes, speaking of a man she does not know by a first name that has not been given to her to use. Calling their interaction “a few mortifying seconds in a lifetime of forty years,” she chooses her words unwisely but well. Those seconds could indeed have been “mortifying,” in that, as so many have noted, there is all too often a straight line from a white woman’s phone call to a black man’s death.

Christina Sharpe writes in “Lose Your Kin” (The New Inquiry, Nov. 2016) that “Whiteness is a political project and it is also a logic, by which I mean it is a calculus, a way of sorting oneself and others into categories of those who must be protected and those who are, or soon will be, expendable.” Within what Sharpe calls the logic of whiteness, white women – second only, perhaps, to white babies – must be protected, and it is our innocence that generates the demand. Cooper shows that she knows how to embody both her apparent right to protection and her concomitant capacity to deny her own involvement in the violence necessary for that protection to occur.

In the same essay, Sharpe also identifies the “unmoral, unethical anger” that carries “the full support of the state.” I, likely along with many other well-meaning white people, have grown used to recognizing that anger in the white men haunting my computer screen and sometimes the streets of the town I claim as home; these men bear torches and Confederate flags and red hats. They are angry, these men, and their whiteness protects their rage from interrogation. They are angry, apparently, at an eroding sense of certainty, at the idea that they might someday have to share. They are angry that the rest of the world may be noticing that they aren’t actually very important. What I haven’t thought about anywhere near enough until more recently than I should have done, is the anger of white women. When we see today’s obviously angry white ladies, they are angry at absurdities. They are angry that Black people are cooking outdoors in spaces set aside for people to do just that; they are angry that Black people are sitting on park benches; they are angry that Black people are writing on their own walls. Amy Cooper was angry that she was being told to follow rules that exist in order to protect someone and something other than her.

As someone who has spent the past several years reflecting both personally and through my research on the centuries-long project that has created white women as we are, I am struck first and foremost by the claims a woman like Amy Cooper makes to innocence. She is surprised at herself, apparently, and she distances herself even as she claims to apologize. She also shows all the signs of someone tired of being told what to do. Add to the usual rules of white femininity those of quarantine and the ground is set for any number of ultimately meaningless acts of selfish rebellion. Hers involved leash laws. In the Ramble in New York City’s Central Park dogs are to be on leash at all times for the protection of migrating birds and their habitat, as I have learned from both Christian Cooper, the man on whom Amy Cooper attempted to set the police she imagined as her personal security force, and from Clemson Alumni Distinguished Professor Drew Lanham. To Amy Cooper, apparently, such a rule was a hindrance and a stifling of her right to do as she wished with the dog she would later hold in the air by its leash so that she could focus on the phone call she attempted to use to have a Black man removed from the space in which she sought to exercise her freedom from the law.

White women’s anger can be crucial, vital. Adrienne Rich called anger “our birth-pains,” and celebrated the possibility that “we are bearing ourselves” through our anger. White women’s anger, though, is also the twisted faces of the young women spitting on Elizabeth Eckford as she walks to her first day at a newly integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. As Audre Lorde reminded in her essay “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” (1981), white women’s anger all too often “lies within them like an undetonated device, usually to be hurled at the first woman of Color who talks about racism,” or, Lorde easily could have added, the first Black man to tell us what to do.

In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, often considered a sort of origin text for contemporary (white) feminist thought, Mary Wollstonecraft lamented the modes of power available to the bourgeois white woman, who learns to wield vulnerability as a tool to garner sympathy and produce desire in the white men who allow her no other means to power. Offered opportunities to be either, as she defines her fellow white women, “abject slaves or capricious tyrants,” white women too often choose the latter, and learn to find opportunities to push others into the role of the former. What Wollstonecraft did not recognize, what she could not see, was the way that vulnerability becomes not only a tool but a weapon. Her critique of instrumentalized femininity within heterosexual white relationship – as provocative as it still may be – failed to recognize what such femininity could do and be outside of that relationship and the way that it becomes both a weapon to wield against those outside the heterosexual white dyad and a shield from ever recognizing the weapon that it is. White femininity as Wollstonecraft identifies it in 1792 provides white women a means to power as long as we continue to perform as if we have none at all.

Amy Cooper has reminded me of a thing I already know too well. It is not anger that makes white women dangerous. Anger can provide a means to exceed the instrumentalized helplessness that Mary Wollstonecraft long ago identified as the primary mode by which white women achieve power and attention; anger can give us another way to be. What makes white women dangerous, harmful, deadly is the insistence on our protection. James Baldwin said of white people’s refusal to acknowledge the harm that American racism consistently enacts upon Black lives in this country that it is the innocence that constitutes the crime. If the innocence constitutes the crime, it is protection of that innocence that produces its violence. And nothing seems to make innocence feel more under threat than the eruption of white women’s undetonated and undirected anger.

(Director’s note: Salvador Oropesa, Chair of Languages, earned a PhD in Latin American literature from Arizona State, was born in Málaga, Spain, and studied Spanish Philology at the Universidad de Granada, Spain.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

At this age of wisdom and foolishness, the pandemic arrived with the new year. The citizens of the kingdom of Spain obediently followed the royal decrees and constitutional States of Alarm. Spaniards stayed at home and wore masks. The old folks died alone in residences, and the younger survived thanks to the best cleaning and auxiliary personnel, nurses, and doctors. Tourists disappeared, and the Prado Museum ghosts returned. The old kings and queens painted by Titian, Velázquez, Ranc, Goya, and others were puzzled by the lack of visitors. The bars poured the last beer and turned the lights off, and the school principals closed the doors with keys that no one knew ever existed. People moved to the balconies of their apartments to contemplate deserted streets. They applauded and cheered the work done by the exhausted hospital personnel and police officers. Army soldiers entered abandoned residences to pick up the corpses of our elderly and disinfect the facilities. Grandparents could only see their grandchildren via video WhatsApp and schoolmates became little squares on computer screens and smartphones. Some local representatives, just a few, became beacons of hope amongst a generation of Instagram, hollow politicians. Democracy is boring and managerial, and many representatives got tired of dealing with reality. Teachers, doctors, pharmacists, firefighters, supermarket managers, restockers, cashiers, truckers, and bikers became the city’s lifeblood by delivering goods to those in need and became heroes in their own right while civic servants kept state services functioning.

Spaniards learned again or for the first time, what an exponential chart was. Today’s date, mid-June, the official death toll is more than 28,300, and the highest mortality rate in the world per million inhabitants. The curve has been flattened, and there is a slow return to the new normalcy: the soccer season is finishing with empty stadiums with a virtual audience, and furloughed players. People get sunburnt in the lines at the beach, waiting for their determined square meters to abide by social distancing standards. Churches are practically empty, with marks to determine where you can sit, communion is to only be received by hand, and offerings such as holy water and peace greetings are banned. The government canceled spring Holy Week ceremonies and the summer celebration running of the bulls. Resilience is the new buzz word. Many jobs have disappeared forever, Nissan shut down for good the Barcelona plant.

Many bars and cafes will never reopen, and plastic screens reflect the sadness of a new society, covered by the obligatory face masks. Memes in my Whatssup groups display the new reality. Why is the Committee of Experts secret under the excuse that they will be harassed if we know their names? Democracy and transparency are always casualties of big crises. The nation is not better; we have become too polarized; my friend Javier uses the term “podrido,” ‘rotten.” Javier is the epitome of common sense and cordura, the sanity of the heart as the Latin root ‘cord’ indicates. Tribes are more important than science and common sense. Greeks invented the tragedy to represent situations like this. We all lose, the least fortunate their lives, many their jobs, others, their immediate future like college degrees without a job waiting for them. I talk to my brother and sisters, my nephews and nieces, and their children, my schoolmates, and their feelings are that of being in the middle of a war, with many more months to come and no light at the end of the tunnel. The unaffected and the devastated of the pandemic share the same street as if a random bomb of the resurrected Civil War exploded. “Safe Sport, Safe Tourism” is the new slogan promoted by the Ministry of Health and professional soccer La Liga. Ojalá (I wish.)

(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.