We are all meaner and more conservative than we were 10 years ago
I’m gonna tell you a true story. Well… I can’t guarantee that it’s absolutely 100% true since I wasn’t a part of it, but it’s true enough that it’s been reported on by reputable news sources.
I’ll link to the story later on, but while I’m telling it, you should use the magic of prejudice to fill in the contextual gaps. Try to figure out when and where this happened, what the rationale of the involved parties might have been.
Here’s the story:
An 8th grade teacher brought some cotton plants to class. This was part of a lesson plan on slavery, particularly a discussion of how the invention of the cotton gin led directly to the growth of slavery. The teacher sought to demonstrate the immense difficulty of picking cotton by hand, showing students how easily the sharp edges could pierce skin. Less than a day after this lesson plan, a parental complaint led to the teacher being suspended for more than a month.
Okay, story over.
So… where do you think this happened? One of those regressive states where the governor looks and sounds like Boss Hog? One of those places that enacted a horrific ban on Critical Race Theory, where the fragility of white leadership is so immense they won’t even allow children to learn of the brutal realities of chattel slavery?
Nope. This was in San Francisco, perhaps our nation’s smuggest blue city. And at a self-consciously progressive charter school that focuses on the creative arts. The people who are 100% certain that attempts to ban CRT are due to conservatives not wanting kids to learn about slavery punished a teacher for teaching kids about slavery.
What happened? Has Republican malevolence grown so powerful it now infects areas where Republicans themselves have no power? There’s precedence for such a thing, after all: Trump’s evil was so immense he somehow opened those immigrant child prisons years before taking office.
No, sadly, this seems like an intra-Dem conflict. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, a Famed Race Dimwit, summarized it thusly:
“You just can’t, despite your best efforts actually recreate what slavery was like,” he said. “Any kind of simulation, any kind of re-creation, any kind of that hands-on kind of teaching, just pushes you into the area of re-trauma, traumatizing children and there are better ways to go about it.”
Now, obviously, putting the black kids in chains and allowing the white students to whip them would have been a bridge too far. If that had happened, I would have been like “omg this teacher needs to go!” But that did not happen. Nothing close to that happened. Yet Jeffries seems to be suggesting that any material evocation of slavery, even one designed to denounce it, has that same emotional affect as something as extreme as a full-on recreation–-that black kids have, like, that power from Dune where touching certain objects connects them with the magic aura of their ancestors.
This… this is insane, right? You all see how this is insane?
Here I could take an easy potshot at the fact that Jeffries’ own TedTalk is titled “We Must Confront the Painful Parts of US History.” Were I a less classy fellow, I could perhaps feign an attempt to discern the all-important dividing line between “serious confrontation” and “showing kids raw cotton so they understand a lesson more clearly.” Alas, I shall refrain.
Instead, I hope to draw your attention to the bleak irreconcilability of our present political moment. As I warned way back in 2015, adjudicating the appropriateness of course materials according only to the emotional reaction of students will lead to arbitrary punishment, which can only make classrooms more regressive:
In 2009, the subject of my student’s complaint was my supposed ideology. I was communistical, the student felt, and everyone knows that communisticism is wrong. That was, at best, a debatable assertion. And as I was allowed to rebut it, the complaint was dismissed with prejudice. I didn’t hesitate to reuse that same video in later semesters, and the student’s complaint had no impact on my performance evaluations.
In 2015, such a complaint would not be delivered in such a fashion. Instead of focusing on the rightness or wrongness (or even acceptability) of the materials we reviewed in class, the complaint would center solely on how my teaching affected the student’s emotional state. As I cannot speak to the emotions of my students, I could not mount a defense about the acceptability of my instruction. And if I responded in any way other than apologizing and changing the materials we reviewed in class, professional consequences would likely follow.
In the blog post that preceded that Vox piece, I explained how the ominous rise of wokeness had caused myself, and several other instructors I knew, to purge our syllabi of works and discussions that were intellectually in line with the goals of progressivism, but could nonetheless plausibly be said to cause psychic discomfort:
There are literally dozens of articles and books I thought nothing of teaching, 5-6 years ago, that I wouldn’t even reference in passing today. I just re-read a passage of Late Victorian Holocausts, an account of the British genocide against India, and, wow, today I’d be scared if someone saw a copy of it in my office. There’s graphic pictures right on the cover, harsh rhetoric (“genocide”), historical accounts filled with racially insensitive epithets, and a profound, disquieting indictment of capitalism. No way in hell would I assign that today. Not even to grad students.
Here’s how bad it’s gotten, for reals: last summer, I agonized over whether or not to include texts about climate change in my first-year comp course. They would have fit perfectly into the unit, which was about the selective production of ignorance and the manipulation of public discourse. But I decided against including them. They forced readers to come to uncomfortable conclusions. They indicted our consumption-based lifestyles. They called out liars for lying. Lots of uncomfortable stuff. All it would take was one bougie, liberal student to get offended by them, call them triggering, and then boom, that’s it, that’s the end of me.
Strangely, this was the part of my argument that aroused the most criticism. Liberals and Republicans alike were certain I was lying. The Republicans thought that since colleges are commie indoctrination centers there’s no way the works I’d mention could raise objections. The liberals, meanwhile, were sure that this fancy new means of punishing people we don’t like was so righteous and good that it could only ever be wielded against evil people and evil ideas. Very few people, even those who claim to study this stuff professionally, are capable of understanding a social or cultural problem being caused by a bipartisan trend. There’s no way that an effort to silence and punish the Bad Guys could ever yield negative consequences for the Good Guys.
But, whoops! It turns out mandating that everyone become meaner and more paranoid actually does stifle productive discourse.
By definition, the mandate the we prioritize impact over intent/context is going to lead to more regressive discourse. The cotton lesson may have been pedagogically sound and politically progressive, but that doesn’t matter because its hypothetical impact could, possibly, have led to “re-trauma.” And I stressed the word hypothetical there because no coverage of the piece reported a single perspective from a student in the class–-it was just a parental complaint about something that maybe kinda coulda happened.
As is evidenced by the rise of sensitivity readers, the woke project has gone beyond using social justice as an excuse to regulate your arbitrary pet peeves. The job of the scold is no longer simply policing norms that already exist; social justice only happens when we proactively fabricate new norms based on hypothetical offenses. This means that punishable offenses are going to become more obscure and absurd, effectively rendering it impossible to engage in any of the very difficult discussions we’re supposed to be trying to facilitate, unless they fit into an increasingly narrow template that’s so radical and disruptive it’s gotten the unanimous support of the DNC as well as every major bank and corporation.