Tag: racism

(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: 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.