Good afternoon, everyone, and
thank you all for being here.
And thank you for
coming to the first
of our series of reaffirming
university values-- Campus
Dialogue and Discourse.
My name is Richard Locke.
I'm a professor here
in political science
and international
public affairs,
and currently serve as provost.
Now, this initiative, the
reaffirming university values,
is sponsored by both the
office of the provost
as well as the office
of the president,
and includes engagement
of many others
on campus-- academic
departments, centers, and also
the division of campus life.
And the intention
through this series,
which has different lectures
and workshops and other things,
is to basically do what
universities should and must
do well, which is to
apply rigorous scholarship
and engage in thoughtful,
informed discourse
around society's most
pressing challenges.
So the goal is to do teaching,
to do high quality research,
and we hope, out of this
teaching and research,
to promote solutions to some of
our most pressing challenges.
Now, at one level it
sounds quite simple, right?
Just do research and
teaching and maybe you
can solve the big
problems in the world.
But we know that, in fact,
it's much more complex,
and these challenges
are much more profoundly
difficult than initially
we think, especially
around some of the
very charged issues
that most need attention,
like issues of race,
issues of discourse across
differences and things
like that.
And we are delighted to
be launching this series
with Professor Jelani Cobb.
And many thanks to the Chair
of the American Studies
Department, Matt
Guterl, for helping us
bring Professor Cobb to Brown.
Professor Cobb is a scholar
renowned public intellectual,
and exemplifies exactly the
kind of approach that we're
trying to promote and
reinforce and strengthen here
on campus around
dialogue, across people
with different perspectives,
different backgrounds,
different points of
view, around some
of these most pressing issues.
Jelani Cobb is a highly
accomplished historian
with expertise in post Civil
War African-American history,
20th century American
politics, and the history
of the Cold War.
Prior to joining Columbia
University's School
of Journalism this
past August, he
was an Associate
Professor of History
at the University of
Connecticut and Director
of the Afrikaner
Studies Institute.
He is the author
of several books,
including Substance
of Hope-- Barack Obama
and the Paradox of
Progress, The Devil and Dave
Chapelle and Other Essays,
and To the Break of Dawn-- A
Freestyle on the
Hip Hop Aesthetic,
which was a finalist for
the national awards for arts
writing.
He was also a recipient
of fellowships
from both the Fulbright
and the Ford Foundations.
Beyond these scholarly
achievements,
Professor Cobb is
perhaps best known
for his contributions
to The New Yorker.
And if you haven't seen
some of the recent pieces,
they are absolutely fantastic.
I was just talking
about one that
came out in the last
issue of The New Yorker
around millennials and the
way that they see politics,
which I thought was great.
And he's been writing for
The New Yorker since 2012,
and he joined as a
staff writer in 2015.
He is prolific on issues of
politics, history, and culture,
and writes eloquently on the
enormous complexity of race
in America.
He authored a compelling
series of articles
about race, the
police and injustice,
which included the article,
"The Anger in Ferguson,"
"Murders in
Charleston," and what
we talk about when we
talk about reparations.
In 2015, he received
the Sydney Hillman Prize
for opinion analysis journalism
for his New Yorker columns.
And when he was presented
with this award,
his New Yorker colleague,
Hendrik Hertzberg,
praised Cobb, noting how
fortunate the magazine was
to have found quote unquote,
"this great new voice," a voice
in his words "that
combines the rigor
and depth of a
professional historian,
the alertness of a reporter,
the liberal passion
of an engaged
public intellectual,
and the literary flair
of a fine writer."
In its statement
about the award,
the Hillman award jury
wrote, quote unquote,
"No one has done a better job of
placing the events in Ferguson
and similar happenings in other
places like Sanford, Florida,
Cleveland, Ohio, and
Staten Island, New York,
in their broader context
than Jelani Cobb.
Noting that through
his unique perspectives
as historian, reporter, and
writer, and subtle moralist,
he was able to meet the
challenges of describing
the turmoil in
Ferguson in a way that
cut through the frantic
chaos of breaking news
and deepened readers'
understanding of what they were
seeing, hearing, and feeling.
We are delighted to have
Professor Cobb with us tonight
to discuss his craft,
fuel our thinking,
and to share his views on
a note from the margin,
the unsafe spaces of democracy.
Please join me in
welcoming Professor Cobb.
Good evening.
So I want to start by giving
my thanks for the invitation
to Provost Locke, and
also to Professor Rose
and thank Professor Guterl
here somewhere as well,
but he was in a meeting.
But I wanted to
acknowledge him as well.
I'm very happy to be here
with you this afternoon.
This is my third
time in Providence,
and somehow the first
time I've actually
gotten to Brown's campus.
So in this case, the
third time is the charm.
I'm very eager to have an
exchange and dialogue with you
all today.
So we are in a period
of time in which we've
seen a great number of questions
and a great deal of debate
and protest going back and
forth on our college campuses
in the past year.
We saw protests here at
the University of Missouri,
at the University
of Connecticut where
I was a professor at
the time, at Yale,
at many other institutions,
around kind of similar fault
lines.
And these fault lines
had to do with race.
They also had to do with
academic inquiry and freedom
of speech and lots
of things that I
want to make sure
that I talk with you
all about this afternoon.
But we can start broadly
and then work our way
in to a more discreet discussion
I think will be well served.
So I read a book recently
called The Hunt for Vulcan,
by Thomas Levinson.
It's an interesting book,
although if I give you
the description
of it, it probably
does not sound like it.
It's a book about the
change from Newtonian
physics to Einsteinian physics,
and about the various debates
and complexities that
went into unseating
Newton's ideas about gravity and
its relationship to the cosmos.
And so just on
the surface of it,
it's like a bunch of scientists
arguing with each other.
You know, my equation
is better than yours,
like the academic version
of rappers battling
with each other of some sort.
But in actuality,
it winds up being
a deeply informative and
insightful examination
of human nature and
some questions I think
are pertinent to us today.
So 17th century, when Isaac
Newton publishes the Principia,
and proposes that there is
this discreet, mechanical way
in which we can
understand the universe,
and it is all
based upon gravity,
and that if we understand
the size of an object
and we understand that
gravity is a constant,
we can therefore project out
to the ways of the mechanics
of the universe.
And it is a watershed moment
in human understanding
that for millennia,
untold, humans
have looked toward the
sky in utter bewilderment,
and not understood the
relationship of themselves
to the stars, of what
lay beyond the stars.
And then all of a sudden,
Newton proposes this idea
that says that the
world functions in a way
that is rational,
and that it follows
particular mechanical
laws, and that if you apply
these laws accurately
and appropriately,
you can predict the behavior
of the natural world.
And this is important
because it influences
other ideas, like the ideas that
human societies might actually
be intelligible in the same
way, and that if you found
the right principles
and the right mechanics
and the right formula, that you
could create an orderly society
out of the chaotic human
day-to-day interactions
of humanity.
And this is fundamental to
our pursuit of democracy
and the Enlightenment.
And so there is a
relationship between these two
bodies of knowledge.
Except there's a problem.
There is this kind of
nagging, small disparity
that we find again and again.
And the predictions according
to Newton's theories,
that the cosmos should behave
in just the particular way,
but these celestial bodies are
not quite where they should be.
They may be just
off a little bit.
And the problem of
course has to be
with the application of the
theory, not the theory itself.
Certainly not the theorist.
And so this persists
for two centuries,
more than two centuries.
And Einstein comes along
and proposes his theory
of relativity, which says not
only is gravity not a constant,
that we can only understand
the world, the natural world,
in relationship
to other objects.
We can only understand
one object and it's
to another object, that
gravity is not a constant,
and time itself, in
the most kind of mind
bending concept, that time
itself is not a constant.
And so we only
understand these things--
if we want to
understand one object,
we have to understand its
relationship to something else.
And so this has implications,
but I looked at this.
It had implications for the
ways that I see the world,
and the work that I do,
and the things that I
think about a great deal.
Because when we look at
our theory of democracy,
and our belief that our
constitution could prescribe
and be a formula for and
orderly, democratic society,
we see that the
objects, the bodies,
are not quite where we
think they should be.
If we looked at the
outset of this country,
we would say that those bodies
were on farms and plantations.
And if we looked at the
beginning of this country's
rise in the foundation
of its economy
as a kind of wonderful
book Ed Baptist wrote,
The Half Has Never
Been Told, where
he talks about the
role of slavery
as being foundational
in the American economy,
we see that those bodies are
disproportionately in places
where they are enslaved for
the purposes of producing
profit for other people.
And as we see in the aftermath
of the institution of slavery,
that those bodies are
disproportionately
found to be incarcerated, or
put to service on chain gangs,
the ancestor of the modern
mass incarceration economy
that we have now.
So I say this to say
that our values do not
exist in absolute terms, that
we only understand our values
and we only understand
our democracy
in the relationship in one
person in relation to another.
But like Einstein's
unseating of Newton's ideas,
we don't have an absolute
mechanism for understanding
ourselves or the country.
We only have a relative way
of approaching ourselves
and the country and
that universities
are not absolved from
this, that universities
reflect very much the values.
And we talk about our values
as an academic institution,
or the values of universities
and higher education.
We typically talk about the
support of open inquiry,
of rigorous, intellectual
analysis, of dialogue
across differing
opinions, of the kind
of open pursuit of questioning
what we believe we know,
or what we know.
And these are foundational
to the university
and what we think
of as our values.
But the universities are
not removed from the values
of society themselves.
If we were to talk about--
not to single out this august
institution-- but we know that
it has a very close connection
to the history of
slavery itself.
Or if we were to talk about the
august institution where I am
employed, across the
street at Barnard College,
and recognize that if AB
Barnard was the President
of the University of Mississippi
who, during the Civil War,
allowed for the creation
of regiments of university
students from the University of
Mississippi in order to fight
for the defense of the
institution of slavery,
also kind of ironically
or paradoxically,
Barnard was one of the earliest
advocates for equal access
to education for women.
And so the very
retrograde ideas that he
was responsible for promoting
at the University of Mississippi
are kind of in contrast
to the egalitarian ideas
that he was responsible for
promoting at the college that
came to be named after him, or
University of Alabama, which
was constructed by slave labor.
Or we could kind of go
through this long list.
Craig Steven Wilder, in
his book Ebony and Ivy,
does a great deal to
further our knowledge
about the relationship between
the institution of slavery
and the institutions
of higher education.
And so our values don't
exist in a vacuum.
Our institutions don't
exist in a vacuum.
And so we should not be
surprised to see that
at a point in which we have
great tumult and turmoil
and conflict, and the ways
in which race has become
a critical factor, an
unavoidable element
of American society in
a way that we have not
been forced to confront
until we were all walking
around with cameras
and we could literally
record what we're
seeing happening
as a kind of testament to
the way in which race exists
in the society, until we
reach that moment, portions
of society have the option of
avoiding the resonance of race.
And so for what I do as a
writer and as a journalist,
I've had a particular window
into this series of events.
For The New Yorker, I've
written about Trayvon Martin.
I went to Ferguson, I went to
Charleston, I went to Baltimore
and looked into the
circumstances of Freddie Gray's
death.
I've written about many
of these flash points that
have defined the Obama
era, and the ways
in which race has
been reconfigured
and its implications.
So we should not be surprised
to see these kinds of dynamics
emerge and to be present on
American college campuses.
As a matter of fact, even at
the University of Missouri,
which is only not very far,
actually, from Ferguson,
this was a direct relationship
between young people
who had learned to organize
and become activists
in the context of
Ferguson, and then
looking and confronting the same
sorts of questions and problems
that had emerged
or confronted them
on their own college campuses.
And so one of the things
that was notable to me,
I thought was informative
or instructive,
was that last year, in which
all this was happening,
was also the
centennial anniversary
of a film called Birth
of a Nation, which
you may have heard of.
And so Birth of a Nation, the
classic of American cinema,
depicts, if you
haven't seen it, it
depicts the rise
of the Ku Klux Klan
and the aftermath of slavery
and the midst of reconstruction,
and kind of heroically
portrays them re-instituting
the subjugation of black
people, particularly black men,
and proposes a-- when we talk
about Birth of a Nation, D.W.
Griffiths film, we typically
talk about the overt racism
that he displays there that is
kind of showcased in the film.
And whenever I talk
about the film,
I always say that I'm not nearly
as disturbed by the racism,
as I am about D.W. Griffith's
way of prophetically predicting
the way in which whiteness
would play itself out
over the course of
the 20th century.
What he says in that film
is that white northerners
and white southerners--
and this film
was released on the 50th
anniversary of the end
of the Civil War--
white southerners
and white northerners
could reconcile themselves.
The lingering animus
of the war could
be ameliorated if
they join together
around their mutual
contempt for the negro,
and that this could
be the cement,
this could be the basis of
this new reconciliation.
This is largely the way
that this plays out,
if we look at what
happens in the midst
of the great
migration or earlier,
when African-Americans
begin leaving the South
and then we begin seeing
southern style race
riots popping up in various
locales and northern cities.
The NAACP, as a
matter of fact, owes
its existence to
the fact of there
was a race riot in
Springfield, Illinois,
the home of Abraham Lincoln.
People were saying
that we are now
seeing northern racism
become increasingly
similar to the
southern variant of it.
And so this is what
Griffith proposes.
And at the time
that comes out, it
is tremendously controversial.
One of the fledgling
NAACP's first actions
is to organize
protests of the film,
saying that this film
has dire consequences
for a population that is already
marginalized and subjugated.
And the film is shown
in the White House
and it gains this kind
of rapturous following.
And it also is responsible
for the rebirth of the Ku Klux
Klan, which had
essentially died out
as an organization
in the 19th century.
And so D.W. Griffith's
film re-emerges,
and the Klan re-emerges
on the heels of it.
And so these are the dynamics
that are at play here.
The following year,
Griffith produces
a film called Intolerance.
It comes out in 1916.
And people look at the
film as Griffiths--
he talks about in the film it
is a examination of people who
have been killed as a
result, throughout history,
as a result of intolerance.
Intolerance is one
person for another.
And people have
misread that film.
They thought that
it was his attempt
to make recompense for the
terrible, racial violence that
had been unleashed in the wake
of his earlier film, Birth
of a Nation.
And so this is a point about
the impact and influence
of Birth of a Nation.
The ritual of cross
burning emerged
as a product of D.W.
Griffith's film.
It had not, prior
to the film, been
a part of the clan's rituals.
But D.W. Griffith
conceived of this
as a kind of cinematic
device for the film,
and the clan adopted it itself.
So there's this kind of direct
relationship between the Ku
Klux Klan and this film.
And so the following
year he makes
this film called Intolerance.
And in it, he depicts
all these scenes
of people being killed as
a result of intolerance,
and people read that as
Griffith trying to make amends.
But they couldn't
have been more wrong.
That film was not directed
at the intolerance that
had resulted in the
rise of the Klan,
not directed at the
intolerance that had resulted
in the lynching of
African-Americans,
not directed at the
intolerance that
had created a now national
policy of negro subjugation.
It was directed at the
intolerance of the NAACP
for protesting his earlier film.
And so this is
really the dynamic
that I want to talk about here.
In talking about how we function
and the values of universities,
we have had a kind
of double bind.
There are those of us who
have been concerned primarily
with intolerance,
and those who have
been concerned with
intolerance of the intolerant.
And so this has been
a dynamic that we've
seen play out kind
of time and time
again in these kind
of flash points
that have emerged
on college campuses.
So I think there
are two points here,
relatively narrow and discreet.
And I'll say them and we'll
kind of walk through them.
The first is that, in
a hierarchical society,
even liberties can
be used in ways
that re-inscribe hierarchy.
Even freedoms can be used
in ways that deny freedom.
And the second is
that very often, we
refer back to our
liberalism or our concerns
about one principle as
a means of deflecting
our concerns about another.
And so to the first,
very straightforwardly,
when we look at
the Bill of Rights
and we think about the
protections and freedoms that
are the product of
the Constitution,
the Constitution that we
should point out already
enshrines a particular
racial hierarchy
through the Fugitive
Slave clause
through the protections of
the slave trade for 20 years,
and also through the
Three Fifths Compromise
that says that all
people of African descent
and purposes of taxation
and representation
shall be counted as
3/5 of a human being.
So the document itself
begins with a particular kind
of racial hue.
But then there
are other elements
that, on the face of it, seem
to be abstract or universal,
but in the relativistic
context of race,
actually take on
other connotations.
And so what do I mean by that?
For one, the Fifth Amendment
guarantees of due process,
which is a cornerstone
we believe in now--
5th and 14th Amendment now-- but
the belief that you cannot be
deprived of any of your rights
without due process, and so on.
And so this is not
something that we
find to be objectionable.
But in the context of American
race in American history,
it becomes one of
the leading bull
works against the emancipation
of African-Americans.
So the belief that the
federal government does not
have the authority to free
black people in the context
of slavery is
anchored in the idea
that the country does
not have the right
to remove one person's
property without due process
or recompense.
And so it's noteworthy
that in this context,
the Emancipation Proclamation
is issued as a function of war,
that in the circumstance of
war and under the War Powers
clause, the president
has acted in this way
to kind of abrogate this Fifth
Amendment premise and institute
freedom.
And so we've see more
contemporary examples of this
in the Fourth Amendment.
The Second Amendment
we have seen
the kind of ways in which the
belief in the untrammeled right
of gun ownership has,
at the very least,
created complicated
circumstances in the society.
Depending on where you
fall in this equation,
you'll see that there are vast
numbers of people who wind up
as victims of gun violence.
And those people tend
to be people of color,
far disproportionately
to whites.
And that our policies
of allowing the society
to be flooded with firearms
have very different implications
for a rural middle
class white person
or for a black person living
in urban or challenged
environment.
And so walking through
these dynamics,
or more recently,
even in the case
that we saw in
Indiana just recently,
where the First Amendment
right to religious protection
was invoked as a means of
rationalizing and justifying
the discrimination
against gays and lesbians.
And so looking at people who
are in subordinate positions
in society, even the ways
in which our freedoms exist
can be used in ways
that are undemocratic.
And does this mean
that we should get rid
of these freedoms, or
we should curtail them?
No, it doesn't.
But it means that we
should understand,
as a kind of
democratic maturity,
that we don't all have
the same relationship
to the Constitution, that these
relationships are relative.
And so in American history we
encounter these questions kind
of previously.
In 1940 there's an
interesting situation
that occurs, where there's
a gentleman by the name
of Chaplinsky, who was
a Jehovah's Witness
and who is advocating
for his religious beliefs
on a street corner,
gets involved in
a conflict, an argument
with a police officer.
He calls the police officer
a quote, "god damn fascist,"
and he is arrested.
Now, we kind of
wouldn't think of this
as being particularly
incendiary.
I mean, I called someone a
fascist this morning, actually.
I'm kind of involved on Twitter.
If you have read
anything I've tweeted,
it's like probably
fascist once an hour.
I would give you probably three
guesses, although you only
need one, why I have been
so concerned with fascism
in America of late.
But Mr Chalinsky calls
this police officer
a goddamn fascist,
and he is arrested
for the use of profane language.
And he challenges the arrest as
a violation of his free speech,
and Supreme Court actually
upholds the arrest,
saying that there
is language that
is so devoid of any
redeeming quality
that it actually constitutes
what they called fighting
words, that you are
using language that
doesn't in any way,
kind of augment
our democratic discourse.
Do I agree with it entirely?
No, I don't-- this concept.
But is still worth establishing
that we do recognize parameters
around the ideas of free speech,
and what circumstances in which
we find free speech
being used in ways
which are intrusive or
harmful to other people.
We have libel laws,
something very
pertinent for the arena in
which I work, both arenas.
And so I should say
this at the outset,
that my critique is
lodged as a person who
works both in media
and in academia,
two arenas in which
I literally could not
function without the protections
of the First Amendment.
And it's from that
place that I actually
raise these questions about
how we understand the First
Amendment and how we
understand freedoms
and what our different
relationships to them are.
And so-- and now I went on my
tangent and forgot my point.
Anyway, I'll come back to it.
So I think that one
of the things that we
have to be mindful of
in this conversation
is the implications of our
differing relationships
to this idea and this term of
freedom and freedom of speech.
And so in our daily life, we
go around saying that we cannot
simply say, fire, shout
fire in a crowded theater.
We cannot simply say without
evidence that Donald Trump is--
it's just so many things I
can kind of scroll through.
But were I to say
that Donald Trump was
an unscrupulous businessman who
was responsible for ripping off
many people and should
be in prison, in kind
of specific language,
I'm not saying that.
But were I to say that,
given the litigious nature
of his enterprises, I would
probably be brought up on-- I
could expect a libel
suit in my direction.
And so we have boundaries.
We have a concept that
language in itself
can be injurious in
certain contexts.
But we are reluctant to
extend those boundaries
in particular social
circumstances.
And this is difficult.
And so last year there
was an article that came
out in The Atlantic called
"The Coddling of
the American Mind."
It was written by Greg
Lukianoff and another gentleman.
And Greg and I have actually
gotten to be friends.
We've kind of had conversations.
We've debated this
point back and forth,
but you know I kind
of criticized him
where I said that the
concern about the fragility
of American students and their
belief that they shouldn't have
to be exposed to anything
that offends them,
is kind of belittling the
fact that there are-- it's not
simply a matter
of being offended,
the right to be free from
things that offend you--
but the correlation
between these offenses
and actual dynamics
in the world.
So it is not simply
to say that we
should be more
tolerant of someone
who makes a comment
that may be sexist,
were it not for the fact that
their actual institutional
structures and actual social
attitudes that enshrine
that sexism into a set of
circumstances that produce
differing outcomes in
life for the people who
are being subjected to it.
More specifically,
it is one thing
to make crass,
sexist commentary.
It is another thing
to fail to recognize
that that commentary contributes
to a climate in which women are
raped and then made
to feel accountable
for the wrong that has been
perpetrated against them.
A study last year
found that about 2/3
of African-American students,
actually just over 2/3,
67% of African-American
students have
some encounter with
racial hostility
during their time on
a university campus.
Over the course of the four
years in higher education,
about 2/3 of these
students encounter
some sort of racial bias.
I don't know if
that data actually
accounted for African-American
students who were at HBCU's and
less likely to encounter
a circumstance like that.
But we can still say it
is a common experience
for African-American students to
encounter this kind of dynamic
and this kind of situation.
In that context, it's not
coddling to say that we should
be mindful of these dynamics.
Last year at Yale, the conflict
emerged from an argument over
whether or not the dean
should say that, Halloween
this coming up, as it is now.
Maybe you don't
wear a blackface.
Maybe you don't do the kind
of ethnic stereotyping.
Because what we do know
is that this is not simply
a matter of free speech.
It also correlates directly
to the retention of students
of color on college campuses.
And so when we look at the
research of people like Claude
Steele, the psychologist who's
talked about the stereotype
threat and the ways in
which people are-- kind
of their outcomes and
their performance--
is mediated by the
additional burden
that they bear about what
the stereotypical perceptions
of them are.
And so for the African-American
who walks into the room,
already feeling
burdened by the idea
that perhaps people believe
that African-Americans are not
equally capable,
the person who says,
you're only here for
affirmative action,
adds a additional burden in
a way that doesn't translate
were we to say this from in the
direction of a group of people
who have not had their humanity
challenged in these ways.
And so these are not kind
of complicated ideas,
or these are not
controversial ideas.
But I feel like we often
talk past each other.
We talk in the language of
racial innocence, in which we
are eager to cast off any
association with anything that
could possibly point to us as
having an unfair advantage.
And so my good friend
and undergrad class mate,
Ta-Nehisi Coates, we had a
conversation about this once.
And he said, I
really get intolerant
with people who say things
like that was a long time ago.
It had nothing to do with me.
And he was like, well, so
was the American Revolution.
But that doesn't stop you
from claiming your identity
as an American.
We're eager to say,
we are Americans.
We're heirs to this particular
element of this history.
Far less eager to
say that we're heirs
to the kind of
social disparities
that began at the
outset of this country
and have played themselves
out in various ways
ever since then.
And so we look at
the 27% of women,
by some estimates, college
women who have been in some way
experienced some form
of sexual assault.
We look at the 67% of
African-American students
who find themselves experiencing
some form of racial bias
over the course of
their four years.
And our response is to,
rather grapple with that,
to assert idea of free speech.
And so as a person who believes
both in free speech and the
is vehemently opposed to bias
along the lines of gender
and race, I think that this
is a kind of false disparity,
a false difference, that
we've kind of bought
into a diversion.
We say, don't look at
what this hand is doing.
Only look at this hand here.
And we play this dynamic
out time and time again.
Now with that said, I
think that it's also worth
noting, before I
actually move on,
it's also worth
noting that just as
in the case that the
majority of women who do not
report instances
of sexual assault,
the majority of
students of color
do not actually report these
instances of racial bias.
And so we have this
kind of dynamic
in which on one side people
believe that people are talking
about race and they're
complaining all the time,
and then on the other side
the people are saying,
you don't know the half.
That were I to actually complain
every time something happened,
we wouldn't be able to get
into a entire conversation.
Wait, you did it again.
And so in this context, I
think the University of Chicago
was interesting, where it kind
of released that letter earlier
this year, where it
announced its terms.
So it basically like,
you know, toughen up.
This is what you're going to get
here, that kind of Marine Corps
type of tone to the letter.
It was like, don't
expect us to be friendly.
I was like, wow, this is really
terrible customer service.
I'd like to have
an establishment,
or open restaurant where I
say like, we're not going
to get you your food quickly.
It'll probably be cold.
The waiter is going
to be a asshole,
but hey, we're
telling you up front.
So come anyway.
Welcome.
But what I found it to
be interesting in that
was that I don't actually--
I found a interesting point
of with accord with it, in that
I don't believe in safe spaces.
And what I mean by that is this.
In this language we say that
people want safe spaces,
they want to be
coddled, they want
to be treated with the utmost
of delicacy, and so on.
And when I looked at
these circumstances
the anger and protests that
emerged on college campuses
last year, and I
had conversations
with peers of mine and
said, we would never
have protested those
things, my generation.
We wouldn't have protested them.
And it was the general accord
that we probably wouldn't have.
And the reason for
it was that few of us
felt that these
institutions belong
to us in the first place.
That is to say, we
anticipated hostility,
and we did not feel that
we were a full shareholders
in the institutions and
places where we attended.
And so if we were the
recipients of racist behavior,
it was kind of par
for our expectations.
The protest that emerged on
college campuses last year
actually have a kind
of curious upside
to them, which is that this
is emerged from people who
actually believe that these
institutions can be better,
that they have a stake, and that
these institutions can function
in ways that are closer to
what we think of as democratic.
Now, at the same time I
wrote something last year
about Hank Aaron and
my admiration for him.
And so I'm kind of a
marginal baseball fan.
I grew up in Queens
near what was then
Shea Stadium where
the Mets played,
and played baseball
as a young person.
And so I've kind of followed
the sport in some kind of way.
But that doesn't really
have any connection
to my admiration for Hank Aaron.
My admiration for Hank
Aaron stemmed from the fact
that he, when he broke Babe
Ruth's home run record in 1974,
he did it under the most adverse
circumstances imaginable,
that toward the end
of the 1973 season,
when it became clear that he
was on the verge of breaking
Babe Ruth's all time
home run record,
he began to receive
death threats
and all manner of hostility.
When he took the
field, there were
instances where people threw
black cats out onto the field
as a means of distracting him
or penalizing him, or ensuring
that this record would belong
to the great white athlete who
had held it previously.
And even I should
say, as a quick aside,
we're in a language
of meritocracy
where we believe that
much of the resentment
is directed at African-Americans
for quote/unquote,
"being given things that
they don't deserve,"
one of the downsides
of the Obama presidency
is establishing the
irrefutable fact that even when
you are the most qualified,
that does not absolve you
from being penalized purely
on the basis of race.
And so when we saw
Hank Aaron in 1973
come this close to
breaking the record
and then have to come
back for 1974 season
and absorb all of this hostility
over the course of that time
period between
those two seasons,
and then begin playing
again with the same burden,
this is exactly this.
It's a response to someone
who, under the same rules, who
has worked hard, has
had no advantages,
has simply moved up
through the ranks
and is about to
achieve something,
and has provoked the same
sort of animus and resentment.
And so when he hits his
715th home run in 1974,
he did it in the
unsafest of spaces.
But he did it by
triumphing over people
who had attempted to derail
his progress in every way
that they could imagine.
My father was a boxer, actually.
My father was a boxer.
My grandfather was a boxer.
And I grew up to be a writer.
Go figure.
But one of the things that
he said that I picked up
from my father was that, the
punch you're most vulnerable to
was the one that you'll be
hit with the most often.
So it's like, you
calibrate your defenses so
that you learn how to navigate.
And so if you're
susceptible to left hooks,
that's what you're going to
be hit with all the time.
It's kind of the history
of Muhammad Ali's career.
He was a great
fighter, great athlete,
but could never get out
of the way of left hooks.
And that was what
he was hit with,
his great nemesis and
adversary, Joe Frazier.
And so this is what happens.
And the metaphor I think
that I'm going with here
is that I think
there's something
to be said for existing
in circumstances that
can be better than they are,
existing in circumstances that
fall short of being
actual democracy
or reaching the
goal of democracy,
and at the same time
protecting your defenses
from the metaphorical left hook.
But if there are,
in fact, individuals
who do not wish to
see you perform well
in these institutions,
it's of little benefit
to tell them exactly what your
biggest vulnerabilities are.
This is a difficult
charge, and it's not fair.
I make no allusions just
to saying that it is.
But it is the same challenge
that generations of people
prior to us have confronted.
And so in believing
in summation,
in believing in the
right to free speech,
and in believing in the
right to open inquiry,
and in believing in the
importance of an arena in which
we talk across
differences and dialogue
across sometimes heatedly
different perspectives,
we have to be careful
not to re-inscribe
those same relativistic
ways in which we
have fallen short of democracy.
That's the challenge
that has confronted us
at the beginning
of this society,
and that's the challenge
that confronts us now.
It is a challenge that
I am optimistic enough
to believe that we are up to.
Thank you.
So we can have some
questions and exchanges here.
Hello, my name is Fidelity.
I'm a student here.
I'm a huge proponent
of safe spaces,
because-- so for example, I'm
in the active minds club here.
I'm in the feminist club.
And I would argue that
having that safe space
and feeling comfortable
talking about issues of sexism
and issues of race and
issues of mental illness,
in those safe spaces make
me stronger when I leave it,
and make me able to
be a stronger person
and understand it
more outside of it.
So, I don't know how.
How would you argue against
that in this community,
it's not like the safe
space needs to be always,
having it for a
temporary moment and then
being able to leave it and
become stronger outside.
I think that you're
right about that.
What I mean by that,
though, is that
what concerns me is the idea
that the safe space becomes
like base during
tag, like, I'm here.
And I understand the
temptation for that.
But I also understand
that there's
a kind of false security
that comes with that as well.
So one of the things that
I did as a young person was
I had to start forcing myself
to read the views of people who
I opposed intellectually,
sometimes people who there was
no justification for the
view, except that this was
an example of racism, and
then to move beyond that
and say, well, what are the
intellectual underpinnings
of this?
What are the vulnerabilities
of this argument?
What is the faulty presumption
that the person makes here?
And the thing is that
kind of engagement
that ultimately
sharpens the sword.
And so I think that
that is crucial.
Now, is it important
for you to have
places where you understand?
Let me just give you
an example of this.
In graduate school,
we had a situation
in which me and a
good friend of mine,
Khaleel Muhammad, who's just
director of the Schomburg,
he and I had a discussion.
We were the only two
African-Americans in the room.
And the discussion,
literally, was about
whether slavery was wrong.
I mean, this was the
term of the debate.
And at first I thought
this was a joke.
And then I realized
that I was in a room
with people who were willing
to debate whether or not
slavery was wrong.
And so it meant everything
in the world for me
to be able to look
across the table at him
and know that I wasn't crazy.
That was important.
But in that moment,
I also said, I'm
going to remain steadfastly
engaged in this discussion.
I'm not going to get up and
walk out, because that's
a particular kind of victory.
And I'm not going to retreat.
I'm not going to
simply say, well,
Khaleel and I are going
to have a conversation
about this afterward,
which we did.
We certainly did.
It's 20 plus years later and
I'll sometimes call him up,
like man, do you
remember that day?
We were actually saying,
no, slavery is wrong.
And so to give a little
bit more nuance to it,
the question was
whether or not people
could be reliably expected to
understand that slavery was
wrong at the time of
the Civil War, which
was a contention that we thought
was, yes, people could know
that it was, very reasonably
they could know that slavery
was wrong at this point.
But I think the
dynamic here is to make
sure-- the other part of
it is that we're existing
in hostile environments.
And I think that the likelihood
of it becoming less hostile
comes from us making that
initial confrontation.
And so with Hank
Aaron, who did this
in the context of not
having any kind of space
to fall back upon,
once he achieved this,
there was nothing
that could be said.
It was like, you can't-- there's
no asterisk associated with
what he achieved.
He did it under
these circumstances.
So no, I'm not
diminishing the importance
of having people
recognize who you are
and what the similar
struggles are.
But I am saying that I'm calling
upon us to be more resilient,
those of us who encounter
these sorts of circumstances,
to be resilient in
the face of them.
Thank you.
Hi, my question is about
a piggyback on that one.
But I came from
Spelman for undergrad
and I'm in graduate
school here at Brown.
And so my safe space--
I broke in undergrad
in spaces that were protected,
and people that loved me.
So I come from a very
different place of privilege
in saying that I was able
to engage with the text that
actually broke me in those
kind of conversations in rooms
with people who loved me, too.
And so when I teach
and I'm trying
to have these conversations
with students,
I never acknowledge
that they did not
come from that same space,
that they are 18 and struggling
with these same texts
that I struggled
with in a room full of black
women who were going to affirm
my intelligence and affirm who
I was as a person in doing that.
And so you had that same
experience in graduate school.
At Howard, as an undergrad.
Right.
But you had this conversation
about the legitimacy of slavery
in graduate school coming from
a place of never having felt--
or for me, at
Spelman, I had never
felt intellectually vulnerable
until I came to Brown,
but I know how to handle it.
I was grown, I was affirmed,
and I knew if I needed to cry,
I could go and cry to my
Spelman sisters who loved me.
And so how do we have these
conversations with undergrads
and affirm their humanity
and affirm their ideals
at the same time that we
are trying to teach them
about the real world, and that
they won't always feel safe,
and that you have to break
sometimes in order to rebuild
in these kind of spaces?
Yeah, I think that
that's important.
So for me, when I
was in that class,
I wrote two words in the
top of the seat of paper.
And the two words
were Paul Robeson.
This was at Ruckers University.
Paul Robeson was one of the most
distinguished alum of Ruckers.
He was the son of two slaves,
and he graduated from Ruckers
as the valedictorian.
Not only was he
valedictorian, I think
he had 8 or 10
letters in sports.
And so whatever achievement
you could make at the school,
he achieved.
But I needed that for myself to
say, people have faced worse.
We're having a hypothetical
question about whether or not
slavery was wrong.
This was a dude who was talking
about, my parents were slaves.
And so I think that
understanding that,
and for me being a historian,
I look at these things
and say in the
relative context I
think that there are
bigger struggles behind me,
and that I'm looking at this
as having a tailwind, not
a headwind.
And for me, psychologically,
that was important.
I think that's something that
we have to instill, certainly,
in young people who are learning
to exist in these environments.
But the other thing I
have to say is this.
Having gone to an HBCU,
it didn't immunize me
from the kind of
bigger currents.
It was certainly
important, but there
had been 18 years
of my life prior
to that where I had absorbed all
these kinds of ideas about what
the limitations and
expectations were
of people who were
black in the society,
and wanted to be a professor.
I literally did not
know any black people
who were professors.
I met a woman who
was a professor
and I was 17 or 18 years old.
I was like, really?
We did that?
We do that?
Oh, OK.
And I think that it's
important that we are there
to kind of explain and model
what the possibilities are
in these contexts.
But I also think
that we should not
go into them
anticipating the best.
I think it's prepare
for the worst,
and be happy if things
are better than that.
It's a kind of
optimistic pessimism.
Yeah, in the white t-shirt-- oh.
You alluded to the Lukianoff
cover story in The Atlantic,
and I was just wondering if
you could elaborate a bit more
on your thoughts on that piece.
Elaborate a bit more about what?
Just what your thought
about the piece is.
It's a 8,000 word piece.
And I encourage
you to all read it.
And as I mentioned, Greg
and I have had this debate
and actually-- in some ways
he kind of wins on the fact
that we've argued about
this in a very civil way.
Because he's kind of arguing
for these civil exchanges
about things we disagree about,
even disagree about vehemently.
But nonetheless, we've had
this conversation and you
he knows my criticism
of it, which
is that piece talks
a lot about the kind
of emotional overreaction, some
of them which have happened
on college campuses.
But as a kind of reductio
ad absurdum approach
to it by pointing to the
most ridiculous examples
that-- you know, that
student who says we
shouldn't have tacos
in the cafeteria
because it's cultural
appropriation--
like that person, as
opposed to saying, well,
that's on one end
of the spectrum,
but also have a blackface
face on this other end
of the spectrum.
It is very different to be
having this conversation
as a person of color.
If you are of Latino descent,
while we are actually
talking about building a
wall on the southern border
of this country, that there are
actually things these tie to.
It's not simply in the
kind of abstract sense.
The other part of
it is that I tend
to be hesitant to take the
kind of psychological diagnosis
approach to what's happening
on college campuses.
Because it could easily dovetail
into a kind of gas lighting,
where you think that this
is something or people
convince you that there's
not a thing that actually
is a thing in front of you.
And it kind of reminds me of
the afflictioned during slavery
that they conjured up of
drapetomania, the illness which
caused enslaved black people
to irrationally continue
running away.
And so it reminded
me of that dynamic,
because you're a
person who's enslaved,
it makes perfect sense for
you to have this reaction.
Like, I don't like
the circumstances.
I'm going to leave.
But if people who have power
decided this is irrational,
then all of a sudden
the reasonable thing
becomes something
that we talk about as
this psychological phenomenon
that needs explanation.
And so I think there's a danger
to doing that and that we
overlook things that we
are actually complicit in,
or we minimize
things, where we'll
see something that is outside
our range of experience
where we want to
explain to people who
have actual experience
with these things
that we know it
better than they do.
And I don't absolve
myself from this.
So I always have to
kind of talk to myself,
because when someone points
out a instance of sexism,
not even something that I may
have done, but something that's
sexist in society, my
instinct to say, it's not.
No, it's not.
Because I, as a man,
don't want to be
associated with a group of
people who do these things.
But the more mature
approach to this
is saying that I can
actually be a man
and disassociate myself with the
elements of my identity group
who are perpetrating
these behaviors,
that I can actually step
outside that and say,
I dissent from this.
I'm not part of that.
And I think that that is kind
of the mature approach that
is lacking, very often it
will remain kind of mired
at the-- that wasn't racism.
You just thought it was.
Even though I have no
experience dealing with racism,
I've never experienced
racism in my life,
but I can tell you
what it is, you
as a person who has to navigate
and experience and figure out
how to grapple with the
circumstance as part
of your daily life.
There's a bunch of folk.
Hi, Jaleni.
That's a great talk, thank you.
A lot to think about.
I wondered if I
could add a dimension
and see what you might
do with it, particularly
in thinking about the context
for the skirmishes around,
not just freedom of
speech, but around student
expectations around
institutions,
and putting a sort
of post civil rights
era racial lens-- I mean, we're
similarly positioned in age,
where we weren't
really in college
when colorblindness
was all the rage,
and the absolute sort
of ideology about race.
But I think it's an important
context for both the kinds
of tools students may or
may not have around race,
because it has been a
kind of un-education
about race for 40
years, pretty intensely.
And the second
matter is that all
of these dog whistles
around freedom of speech
feel very much about
talking about power, not
just about race, but
talking about power
without acknowledging it in what
we call power neutral terms.
So I'm wondering
if color blindness
as a potential
framework for thinking
both about the generational gap
in perception of expectations,
but also about the way in which
it is fueling a way of thinking
about freedom of speech
that, as you point out,
actually reduces it.
Right.
I think that
colorblindness is part
of that matrix that
we were talking
about earlier, of
the belief that there
is this universal
democracy, capital D,
and that all people have the
same relationship to this,
and that if we just simply
establish this rule,
we will all kind of have
the same experience.
But it doesn't wind up that
way, like there's no data that
actually points to that.
As a matter of fact, the
data points to the opposite.
And it's a kind of
willful refusal of us
to engage with it.
But the we wind up saying, just
like the people with Newton,
we're saying we keep getting
these findings that aren't
in accord with what we believe.
It can't be that
the theory is wrong.
It has to be that there's
some other thing that's there,
because we have a particular
kind of emotional attachment
to viewing the world in
these colorblind terms.
But there has certainly been
this rise over the years that
is not unrelated.
I think the acceleration
of this is not
unrelated to the presence of
a black person in the White
House.
And so one of the
things that happened,
we can just kind of make
a historical comparison.
In 1964, during the contentious
debates around the Civil Rights
Act of that year, there
was a senator from Alabama
by the name of Jay Lister Hill.
He was opposed to
the Civil Rights Act.
And he took to the floor of the
Senate, he made an argument,
he said, I do not believe in the
extension of special privileges
or rights to any part
of American society.
And on its face, that sounds
like an actual defense
of the Civil Rights Act.
Sure, we should not give one
group and society more rights
than we give to another
group and society.
But he's actually arguing very
much akin to the D.W. Griffith
idea around intolerance.
He is arguing that by protecting
black people's civil rights,
you're giving them
advantages over white people.
Now, this was an outlier opinion
coming from an Alabama senator
in 1964.
But what has happened is
that the increasing presence,
although far from
proportional in society,
the increasing presence of
African-Americans on university
campuses, in corporate America,
and more visibility in politics
in media and entertainment,
has allowed people
to indulge this
idea that protecting
the rights of black
people actually
constitutes a added privilege
given to black people.
And it is contrary to our
idea of colorblindness,
where we should all have the
same rights at the same time.
And so kind of most recent
example that we saw of this
was in the Shelby vs. Holder
case, which struck down
the protections of the
Voting Rights Act, which
said that, essentially,
the burden wasn't around
African-American voters who
have to have their right
to vote protected.
The burden was around
southern whites
who had been unfairly
stigmatized as racist.
And so I think that the dynamics
that we're talking about
that we see on college campuses
are just reflections, and not
particular to college campuses.
They're just reflections of
maybe more visible reflections
of the same dynamic in
other parts of the society.
You had a second part
of your question.
Just [INAUDIBLE] it was the
same framework [INAUDIBLE].
Right.
True.
I think that that is a kind
of intergenerational dynamic.
And I also think that part of
this is very hard to reconcile.
I taught for a
semester in Moscow.
And this was right after
Obama had been elected.
And so there were people
who were saying, yes, OK.
So you all are finished
with this race thing, right?
And I was like, not exactly.
He's like, but you
have a black president.
Yeah, and I was like, but most
of us are not the president.
And so this is where
it becomes complicated,
in that it's possible
for both of these things
to exist at the same time.
I don't know that we've done
a good enough job of conveying
that.
As a matter of fact,
in this conversation
that I had where I was making
reference to with our peers,
I actually said that some
of this is on our shoulders
for not having adequately
equipped people.
Now, perhaps we
were too cynical.
I'm open to the idea,
though I don't necessarily
think we were.
But I think that there
was not enough transmitted
to another generation about
how race might actually
confront you.
And so for me, growing up in a
household with two parents who
had migrated to New York
from Alabama and Georgia,
they had very, very
low expectations
for what interaction
with the white world
and white institutions
would yield.
Just being very frank.
And I think that that
is part of the dynamic
that we've seen emerging in
the past year, year and a half,
as well.
There were some questions
up here in the blue.
Someone tell me I'm wrong.
I'm open to that.
My daughter does this
quite frequently.
I'll try to do that.
I'm Kurt.
I'm a Brown alumnus.
And first off, thanks
for coming to speak.
It was a fantastic lecture.
So I think that you
make a really good point
about sharpening
the sword, and I
think that is an incredibly
valuable educational exercise.
But there is a flip
side to even allowing
people that advocate for slavery
to speak, or something like.
And that by allowing
them to speak,
we inherently give
them a platform
and enable the structures
that they create.
A lot of people
theorize, and some people
are studying the effects
of Donald Trump's rhetoric
on interracial violence
and things like that,
in the current era.
And so I guess the question
is, what guidelines would you
offer to navigate that
difference between-- when
do you give people a platform?
And I think the
other thing to add,
I think, is that a lot of
people, they say they've staked
their political career
on some racist agenda,
like if I can say stop
and frisk in New York,
for example, where
somebody isn't going
to be open to rethinking
their perspective,
because they have some
kind of capital or interest
in their perspective.
So when do you say, OK, we
should have this debate,
and when do you say, OK,
this debate is hopeless,
and by having
these words spoken,
is just encouraging the problem.
So there's a saying.
I don't remember who
to attribute it to.
But they say, never
argue with a fool,
because they'll drag
you down to their level
and beat you with experience.
And so there is
that element of it.
There is a certain point at
which this becomes fruitless,
and you outline the exact point
at which it becomes fruitless.
As a matter of fact,
in the conversation
earlier today,
that was exactly--
those were the contours
of the conversation,
saying that some of this
is amenable to intellectual
exchange and dialogue.
But a great deal of
the progress that's
been made in this
society happened
because it was in
people's self-interest,
or because they had
no other choice,
not because they
had been won over
by an intellectual argument.
So when you look at the
civil rights movement,
it's not coincidental that
the kind of upsurge of it
happens of the same
upsurge of the Cold War.
The United States has
historically been,
as a constitutional
democracy, intensely
concerned about its
public appearance abroad.
And so having its
contradictions,
its racial contradictions,
highlighted
by the Soviet Union, was
actually a liability.
The existence of the Cold
War made racism expensive,
whereas it has previously been
very few punitive elements
of it.
It became expensive in that
context, especially when you're
trying to establish
diplomatic relationships
with other countries that are
constituted by people of color.
And they're looking,
going, wow, you treat
those black people really bad.
Why should we have good
trade relations with you?
Why should we anticipate
anything but bad treatment
from you?
And so I think that
those things are real.
But I do think there is perhaps
a middle ground, wherein
by stating your cause, and
stating your cause repeatedly
and consistently, you can help
hasten those points in which it
becomes in someone's
self-interest
to act on your behalf.
And so it's kind of amazing,
too, even the language
we have around it.
Like, when we talk about
the end of the Civil War,
there was this exchange
between Martin R. Delaney, who
is this African-American
leader who
had helped to rally black
people to the cause of the war,
and this white former union
official, who says, yes, you
have been given your freedom.
Your people have been given
their freedom, which completely
erases the fact
that the freedom had
been taken in the first place.
And so we talk about this as
if it was kind of bestowed
on people, like, hey, we know.
We have decided to
give you back the thing
that we stole from you
in the first place.
Now, give us great claim for it.
And so because we had
that kind of confusion,
it sometimes takes a long time.
You sometimes have to
articulate this idea again
and again and again.
And people recognize that,
well, it's in our interests,
as it was emancipation.
People say, well, Lincoln,
who was confronted,
you know, the who
the virtue of Lincoln
is not that he was this kind
of blameless, faultless,
completely pure
avatar of democracy.
The virtue of Lincoln
is that he is somebody
who looked and said, I can have
racism or I can have a country.
I'll choose the country.
Or I can have slavery,
or I can have a country.
I'll choose the country,
which is not guaranteed.
There are plenty
of other people who
were in the North who would say,
I'm sorry, I'll take slavery.
If you give me a choice
between subordinating
black people and the integrity
of the United States,
I'm going to choose
subordinating black people.
And so that's the
virtue of that.
But at the same time, this is a
question of pure self-interest.
His virtue was that he
could actually recognize
where his self-interest lay.
And so I think that in many
of these instances, we engage.
And I don't think that
this is making a superhuman
request, a superhuman
commitment to it, that we all
have our particular boundaries
or thresholds, where
which you say you don't
feel that it's useful,
a point of diminishing returns.
I'm not engaging that this
person doesn't get anywhere.
It's not moving the ball.
But I still think that
you have to engage.
And to the first part
about letting people speak,
I think you have to
let people speak,
simply in the interest of
having-- if there is ignorance,
then I have enough
faith that eventually,
over time, people will recognize
ignorance for what it is,
which is a pure decision to
be optimistic about this.
But if you don't
allow people to speak,
if you shout people down,
they still wind up speaking.
They still want to
speaking, but now they
speak as a person who
has been persecuted,
and they speak with a particular
kind of moral authority
that they're granted by that,
or appear to be granted by that.
Wow, we've got a
bunch of people.
Just whoever.
You can go, you down here.
Hi, my name's Alessio.
I'm a graduate
student here at Brown.
And I have a question
regarding the role university
should play moving
forward in this dialogue.
I'm concerned over
the use of power
in these dynamics, where
well-intentioned activists have
had-- historically, we
talked about it recently,
some of the events cross
country-- to silence opposing
viewpoints which, on a number of
lines of argument as you said,
are complete ridiculous.
But I'm concerned
about the opposite
[INAUDIBLE] like I just said.
Not quite what I said,
but you were saying?
Continue.
Well, I'm just
really-- in the heart
of what you said is
that once you take away
that platform from
them, they can
argue from a point of moral
authority as the persecuted.
And that's why I'm curious
as to what your thoughts are
on letting these ideas die
in the free market of ideas,
as opposed to creating a
institutionalized regulation
of private conversation
and essentially private
action on campus,
and how then maybe
does that correlate to other
functions outside of that?
Yeah, no.
Here's the thing.
These ideas don't die in
the free market of ideas.
They're killed, sometimes, but
they don't in and of themselves
die.
And they have to be sometimes
institutional authority
levied in order to make
these things happen.
It's like the argument
people make that slavery
would have died out eventually.
Yeah, well, OK, after
two or three or four more
generations of people
had been enslaved, maybe.
But people had to
actually challenge that.
And so I do think that
there is a difference.
And there is a boundary
between saying,
I disagree, or, I have a
viewpoint that you find
offensive, and that
I'm actually working
in service of things that
marginalize and exploit
and oppress people.
And so when we talked about the
conflict around Charlie Hebdo,
for instance, and lots
of people saw like, OK,
what happened to these
writers was horrendous.
That should never have happened.
There is no defense for
what happened to them.
But it was important to draw
a distinction, for many of us,
between the moral abhorrence for
the attack upon these writers,
with validating what the
writers themselves were doing,
knowing that by
ridiculing Islam,
it's not simply a
competition among equals.
It's ridiculing a group that is
marginalized in French society,
that we have even now people
are wearing-- going to beaches
and arresting women for
wearing what they deem to be--
is it the burqini that
they were calling it?
Or that women cannot wear veils,
or that there are these actual
dynamics that work to the social
and political and economic
marginalization of
this population.
And in that case you
wind up punching down.
That's what you're doing.
And I don't think that we should
pretend that those things are
not connected in some way,
shape, and form, that we
understand that propaganda
has a actual function,
that propaganda actually
has consequences.
And that's the
difference between what
DW Griffith saw, where he's
saying, I'm making a film.
You can't trample upon
my right to make a film.
And then the NAACP
was saying, no,
the people who are watching your
film are actually killing us.
You're talking about
an abstract principle
and we're talking about
our ability to live.
And so I think
that you don't have
a kind of neutral
institution in that case.
We find there is a parameter,
and we can define that.
There can be a debate about
where those parameters lie,
or where those lines are.
But to simply say that we
will just say, oh OK, well,
I believe that black people
are intellectually inferior.
Let's have a debate about that.
When you're on a campus
where there are hardly
any black people,
you have a hard time
retaining those who do come.
Yeah, no, that's
not quite the same.
Another thing that
I find about this
is that we often have
this conversation,
it's on the terms of
the marginalized people.
We never have a debate
where we're saying,
let's go to heterosexual
people and say,
prove that you should
be able to marry.
Defend your right to marry.
Because it's absurd.
We wouldn't question it.
If we did actually
have that debate,
it wouldn't correlate
to anything that
actually happens in the world.
Because when you walk out of the
room as a heterosexual person,
you are still going
to be able to live
your life without the
threat of violence or fear
of alienation or ostracisation
or any of those things
that gays and lesbians have
to confront in society.
I think that's the difference--
recognizing that these are not
equal terms of debate, and
that we are relativistic,
and maybe even grappling with
that, that simple recognition
is the best I think I can hope
for in terms of us finding what
some sort of fair middle
ground might look like.
OK.
Oh, he had his
hand up, actually,
the longest, in the gray
jacket, gentleman right here.
Yeah, you.
Thank you.
My name is David Kim.
I teach down the road
at Connecticut College.
OK.
Maybe on that last note, and
about the kind of the cultures
democracy-- and so
maybe in response
to what you were
saying about the kind
of pessimistic optimism.
I can't quite remember
what you were saying there.
But the ambivalence we
have around democracy--
do we treat each other
as equals even though
in a thoroughly
hierarchical society.
How do we grapple with
that, where there's
a real ambivalence about our
investments and our continuing
investments, in a process
and a culture that
breaks down with more
consistency than it
meets our expectations.
Right.
I think that's
difficult. And so there
is this conversation around
American exceptionalism
that we have.
And I think it's the
most toxic thing.
And the reason I think that
is that, I keep saying this.
I was saying this on Twitter
earlier today with someone.
It was like, that
being exceptional
is like being wealthy
or good looking,
which is that it's
better for other people
to say that about you than for
you to say that about yourself.
And so I think that it's also
corrosive in a particular way.
The biggest barrier to
actually being exceptional
is thinking of yourself
as that, that you become
blind to your own shortcomings.
So if there are things about the
society that are a laudable--
I was part of a
media panel last July
4th where people think
that-- people always
think that people on
the left hate America.
And so this discussion
was name one thing
that you love about America.
And I said, public libraries.
And I think of
how many thousands
of public libraries,
there's an absurd number
of public libraries
in this country.
And it is an amazing
testament of these places
that you can just walk in.
You don't have to
have any money.
You can walk in
and learn things.
I think that that is a
principle that reflects well
upon-- the institution
that reflects well
upon our principles.
But I don't want to say
because we have this fantastic
number of public libraries,
we shut down conversations
around mass
incarceration, and saying
that we have the largest
incarcerated population
in the Western world.
And so we're so busy talking
about the exceptionalism
of our public library
system that we
can't countenance all
these other things that
become shortcomings.
And I think it's just
a matter of maturity.
It's a matter of
social, intellectual,
and moral maturity
to grapple with that,
even as we kind of
think ourselves,
we like to think of
ourselves as good people,
but we have shortcomings.
All of us have shortcomings.
And we don't think of those
shortcomings as being,
ideally, in a kind
of healthy outlook,
we don't look think
of those shortcomings
as being the cancellation of the
things that are good about us.
We have things that
we can work on.
And we look at the
things we've done well,
and hopefully use
that as a basis
for working on things
that we need to change.
I think that that is really--
when we talk about the threats
to American democracy,
and if I just
put my cards on the table we
talk about this election, what
frightens me the most is the
kind of jingoistic reference
to making America great again,
and greatness being associated
in these terms that are none
of the things, none of them
are things that we, I think,
in a democratic society
should think about as great,
as mostly bluster and swagger,
and kind of the ability
to intimidate people
on the world stage.
I think that if we were going
to make America great again,
we would actually talk
about doing things
like creating a living
wage and diminishing
the number of people in
society who are incarcerated,
and making education affordable,
and making a society such
that one's gender
or race or ethnicity
does not correlate to
your life outcomes,
to these things where we
actually have a society where
we make it easy
for people to vote,
kind of fundamental
cornerstone things.
And I think at that
point, that is actually
what makes you look more
like an exceptional society
than you currently do.
Thank you.
That was fantastic,
Jelani, really fantastic.
The purpose of this series
was to have exactly this kind
of conversation, is to
be able to actually talk
about these things,
those boundary issues,
and as a community
really engage in them.
And I think that professor
Cobb did an amazing job.
We have a whole series of
other people coming to speak.
It's on the other side
of today's a pamphlet,
so I really hope
that you do make it.
We have people from very
different perspectives talking
about, more or less,
the same issues,
and I hope to see you at
those sessions as well.
Please join me in
thanking professor Cobb
for really fantastic talk.
