Reconciliation Begins at Home: Two Pleas for Post-Trump Academic Life
More than 74 million Americans voted for President Trump in November. I was not one of them. Like almost everyone who teaches at Santa Clara University, furthermore, I am counting the days until January 20.
Some of my non-SCU friends supported Trump as ardently as I supported Joe Biden. My attempts to change their minds failed, so I can hardly suggest a program for enlightening the millions. Civic duty, however, obliges us to seek a modus vivendi; civil war would be catastrophic.
Trump, by my lights, regularly manifests both moral and intellectual flaws through demonization and distortion. In what follows, I shall attempt to discourage my fellow Democrats from demonizing and distorting, particularly when debating among themselves. If we cannot model meticulous, open-minded, and constructive disagreement “at home” in our universities, what hope do we have of finding common ground with Trump supporters?
My examples center on faculty and staff at SCU, my multi-decade home whose alums include Gavin Newsom, Janet Napolitano, Leon Panetta, Brandi Chastain, Steve Nash, Dee Dee Myers, Khaled Hosseini, and Reza Aslan. With a view to urgency and brevity, I focus below on racial issues. I shall not name names. The point is to act, think, and communicate better, not to humiliate, intimidate, or ostracize.
Plea One: Address the actions, claims, and concerns of your opponents – not their race, sex, or “privilege”
After the appalling killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, SCU’s faculty/staff email list conveyed hundreds of memos that condemned racism and affirmed support for Black Lives Matter. A part-time instructor responded by sending one-sentence memos that mocked this endeavor. When someone replied by scolding him on behalf of our “Black and Brown” personnel, he lashed back rudely. He subsequently received a torrent of denunciations, to which I then responded.
Many of the denouncers had highlighted the instructor’s “privilege.” One stated that his “odiously patronizing” memo was “symptomatic of the banal exercise of white privilege, ethnocentrism, and prejudice” that mars our university and our country. White privilege is worth discussing, I conceded, but I added that it should not be used “to redirect—or shut down—discussions.” I proceeded to mention 14 nonwhite men and women (including Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele) who “might have responded to the memo flood as contemptuously” as the instructor had. I did not mention John McWhorter, who specifically denies that the police “regularly kill black people under circumstances in which white people would be merely disciplined.” Even if you feel obliged to condemn such commentators, you cannot invoke their “white privilege.”
My intervention provoked more than a dozen replies-to-all that featured ad hominem attacks. I, too, was scolded for privilege, and also for committing “violence.” One professor, invoking my “unwillingness to own” my “white and male privileges,” described me as “unfixable.”
Everyone who excoriated the part-time instructor or me would join me in denouncing Trump’s unconscionable use of racist generalizations (e.g., about Judge Gonzalo Curiel) and vicious hyperbole (e.g., the press being “the enemy of the people”). I would encourage these critics, however, to argue more judiciously – and to question author Robin DiAngelo’s suggestion that “white fragility” displays itself via “dominance and intimidation” whenever a white man presumes to correct “the racial analysis of people of color and white women.”
Plea Two: Communicate constructively when promoting slogans
The memo eruption also launched reply-to-all calls to “defund the police.” At one point, an economics lecturer who had been conveying common-sense objections was subjected to an ad hominem attack that included visual embellishment: a meme featuring a smirking young “white dude.” The smirker, who has “no interest in learning,” proclaims that he’s only seeking to “exhaust people who are trying to fight against the status quo, which serves me.” For the record, the skeptical economist spent his early years in Central America as the son of Jewish refugees.
My response also protested something an SCU administrator had posted for an Ethics Center “spotlight.” Within an essay that I described as “strikingly eloquent and stirring,” the author included these inflammatory sentences: “When I hear someone say, ‘All lives matter,’ I see and hear someone who refuses to acknowledge the facts. This is someone who is blind to the lived experience of Blacks in America.”
In some settings, of course, saying “all lives matter” might indicate that the speaker is deeply ignorant and also callous, but it would hardly guarantee that he or she is “blind” to black experience. In other settings, furthermore, the phrase might be admirable. First, it encapsulates a profound truth that can illuminate discussions of police brutality, hate crimes, ethnic cleansing, religious persecution, capital punishment, immigration, euthanasia, abortion, “collateral damage,” environmental justice, health insurance, vaccine triage, and Covid lockdowns. Given the legacies of Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden, Bashar al-Assad, and Kim Jong Un, finally, “all lives matter” is hardly a trivial reminder.
Slogans can be indispensable for rallying the troops, and I acknowledge that nitpicking can be a vice. But if academics don’t police the boundary between persuasion and propaganda, who will?
Conclusion
The above-discussed attacks at SCU were entirely verbal. Elsewhere, alas, professorial dissidents have been harmed more concretely, e.g., by classroom disruption, office vandalism, or firing. Off campus, meanwhile, President Trump’s admirers routinely celebrate his attacks on “political correctness.” To leave Trumpism and its cultish tendencies behind, we academics should strive consistently to model rigor, illuminate complexities, and understand diverse perspectives.
