(archived from https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/10/response-to-response-to-against-response-to-whatever/)
I don’t have enough time right now to reply fully to most recent Current Affairs article, but a few points:
But that shows exactly what I’m talking about. I have no doubt that writers like David Brooks and Scott Alexander enjoy talking to “people who disagree with them.” I am sure that Alexander would be charitable and fair-minded and polite to me, as he was in his email. But my whole point is that this fair-mindedness and charity is applied selectively, that I get it as an educated white guy who enjoys arguing, but the “social justice warriors” are treated as “beyond reason” in the same way that they are accused of treating others as “beyond reason.”
I like talking to anyone, of any perspective – but I have to be able to talk. If someone explicitly says that I’m not allowed to talk, that logic is a tool of imperialism, that differing opinions should be met with violence, or that I ought to be mocked and shamed into silence for daring to disagree with them – then no conversation is possible.
I acknowledge there are many leftists – including many self-described “social justice warriors” – who don’t believe any of those things. Those people I talk to all the time. For example, one of my most frequent debate partners has been Ozy Franz, a transgender Gender Studies major who wrote a social justice blog.
Nathan accuses me of only wanting to talk to “educated white guys”. The actual distinction is that I avoid people who make death threats against me, say things like “shut up, white boy”, tell me that I’m not allowed to argue because of my privilege, call me a Nazi, try to tell other people I’m a Nazi, or respond to studies contradicting their points with “I see you’re really desperate to defend your white male entitlement”. I avoid these people because they make me anxious and unhappy, and also debating them is impossible, plus I value my life.
When David Brooks complains about “student mobbists”, he’s not complaining about “student debaters” or “student social justice supporters”. He literally means people who, if you try to disagree with social justice, will punch you in the face. There’s a much vaster class of such people who will just try to get you fired, or get your blog taken down, or make fun of your physical appearance, or whatever. This is not a fake concern for me. I’ve had these people call my boss at work, demanding that they fire me and threatening to take down my entire company if they don’t. I have had meetings with my boss, in which I offered to resign to spare the company from having to deal with the threats. I cannot tell you how little I enjoyed it or how little I enjoy every other case where I have crossed paths with one of these people.
Here is an article from the Washington Times:
Roughly 150 Black Lives Matter protesters reportedly stormed a library at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, Thursday night to berate students studying there for their supposed racial privilege. The Dartmouth Review, an independent newspaper at the private Ivy League college, reported that protesters marched into the Baker-Berry Library shouting profanity and berating white students. Protesters reportedly shouted “F– you, you filthy white f–-” “f– you and your comfort” and “f– you, you racist s–.”
Throngs of protesters converged around fellow students who had not joined in their long march,” The Review reported. “They confronted students who bore ‘symbols of oppression’ such as ‘gangster hats’ and Beats-brand headphones. The flood of demonstrators opened the doors of study spaces with students reviewing for exams. Those who tried to close their doors were harassed further. One student abandoned the study room and ran out of the library. The protesters followed her out of the library, shouting obscenities the whole way.” Men and women were pushed and shoved by the group, the newspaper claimed. One woman was reportedly pinned to a wall by protesters who shouted “filthy white b–-” in her face.
The problem here isn’t that college students were jerks. College students are often jerks. The problem here is that large parts of the social justice movement – I agree not 100%, but large parts – justified this, said it was good, attacked people who criticized it, and were against trying to stop it. The problem is that the more I complain about this sort of thing and suggest we should worry about it, the more people call my job and try to get me fired. I am terrified and I think we should all be terrified and I reject Nathan’s claim that I am a bad person for not walking up to these people with a smile on my face and saying “Let’s Have A Logical Discussion 🙂 🙂 🙂 “.
Again, there are many lovely people who support social-justice-related causes who aren’t like this, and these are the people I frequently talk to and debate, and nobody ever calls these people “student mobbists”. The reason Nathan has to snidely say I will only talk to “white guys” who “like to argue” is because any non-snide attempt to define this category would clearly sound like a demand that I put up with arbitrary amounts of abuse from people who have a principled commitment not to listen to anything I say.
This is precisely the point I was making in my article. Instead of adopting the rigorous approach he would use towards other positions, quoting arguments from books and articles and websites and interviews, he lets the social justice left be represented by random twitterers and his own projections of what people would say if he did talk to them, which he doesn’t.
As best I can tell, the particular thing we’re questioning whether I have examples of is a section in Part V where I say that leftists are using “we need to fight racism” as an excuse to undermine liberal norms.
All I was claiming was that many people on the Left are saying it’s acceptable to use violence and censorship in the name of fighting racists. I could cite ten million examples, but I’d rather continue to use Nathan’s own words. In an article from last year he says that “a lot of people on the left” now believe that free speech should not be protected and that fascists should be met with violence. He says two pieces “capture the emergent left consensus fairly well” – one saying The ACLU Should Rethink Free Speech, the other being It’s Time To Make Nazis Feel Afraid Again.
I continue to be confused. My only claim is that a lot of people on the social justice left support censorship and violence in the name of fighting racism. Nathan Robinson has himself written an article calling this “the emergent left consensus” and admitting “a lot of people on the left believe it”. Why are we having this debate?
In order to agree that Alexander has responded here to the position, we have to accept that “anything is racist whose consequence is to harm minorities” is an accurate characterization of definition that “scholars in the area use.” He cites no actual “scholars in the area” who use this definition, and it is one I haven’t heard.
Robinson goes on to say scholars have very sophisticated definitions that allow, eg, “racism without racists”. Fine. Maybe all of the definitions I suggested are wrong. But I have a sinking feeling that any definition I propose which is clear enough to tell if a specific person or action is racist or not, someone will tell me that isn’t sophisticated enough. The only real definition is the one so incomprehensible that it can simultaneously be too strict for anyone to ever criticize, and too loose for anyone to ever defend against. Or as I put it before in my previous post about this, just after the Donald Sterling incident:
Everyone is a little bit racist. We know this because there is a song called “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist” and it is very cute. Also because most people score poorly on implicit association tests, because a lot of white people will get anxious if they see a black man on a deserted street late at night, and because if you prime people with traditionally white versus traditionally black names they will answer questions differently in psychology experiments. It is no shame to be racist as long as you admit that you are racist and you try your best to resist your racism. Everyone knows this.
Donald Sterling is racist. We know this because he made a racist comment in the privacy of his own home. As a result, he was fined $2.5 million, banned for life from an industry he’s been in for thirty-five years, banned from ever going to basketball games, forced to sell his property against his will, publicly condmened by everyone from the President of the United States on down, denounced in every media outlet from the national news to the Podunk Herald-Tribune, and got people all over the Internet gloating about how pleased they are that he will die soon. We know he deserved this, because people who argue he didn’t deserve this were also fired from their jobs. He deserved it because he was racist. Everyone knows this.
So.
Everybody is racist.
And racist people deserve to lose everything they have and be hated by everyone.
This seems like it might present a problem. Unless of course you plan to be the person who gets to decide which racists lose everything and get hated by everyone, and which racists are okay for now as long as they never cross you in any way.
Sorry, there’s that paranoia again.
Someone will argue I am equivocating between two different uses of “racist”. To which I would respond that this is exactly the point. I think there is a strain of the social justice movement which is very much about abusing this ability to tar people with extremely dangerous labels that they are not allowed to deny, in order to further their political goals.
Nobody spoke up and said “it’s not clear what it means to call Donald Sterling racist, after all, racism is just a property of entire social structures, not of individuals”. They said “take all of his stuff away, and we hope he dies”.
If Nathan disagrees with this, I invite him to tell me the real definition, that actually justifies who we call racist when, and which he is not going to switch around in ten minutes. If there is no such definition, I invite him to sign on to my plan to stop using this word, and use other more specific words which are less confusing and toxic.
But here I have to make an embarrassing confession: sometimes I, and other writers for our magazine, use words in ways that are not strictly literal in every sense. We liven up our prose with hyperbole for rhetorical effect. So, for example, if I say “I cannot imagine anything more callous than watching a family get deported and feeling nothing,” I may not literally mean that I am incapable of conceiving of anything more callous, just that, well, it’s very callous. If I say Martin Shkreli is a snake, which he is, I do not mean to deny his humanity or accuse him of having no legs. (I am reliably informed that he does have a forked tongue, though.) Writers use exaggeration because it helps drive the point home. In the Coulter passage in question, Brianna showed, using rigorous argumentation, that Coulter’s position is totally indifferent to the terrible human consequences it advocates. She wants to show that this is monstrous! Now, once again, a bit of a confession (don’t tell anyone): Brianna is actually a very empathetic person who could sit down with a person deeply hostile to immigrants and see their human side, and her article is an effort to explain why ordinary and good people can be convinced by anti-immigrant propaganda! A fair reading of it, which we know Alexander does not like to give, would actually show that while Brianna uses strong and biting language, she has a deep compassion for those who come to xenophobic positions after reading people like Coulter. (Coulter herself is actually a monster though.)
I would be more sympathetic to the claim that this was metaphorical if it had not been preceded by the word “literally”.
I mean, I will admit Brianna probably doesn’t think Ann Coulter supporters are from a nonhuman species that lives in people’s closets and came out to scare children, possibly as part of a bizarre transdimensional corporation. But there does seem to be…some sort of really strong claim here. I want to post the quote again:
Anti-immigration activists of Coulter’s ilk are not people passionately advocating for what they believe is the most sensible and humane model of human governance. They are monsters who literally believe that non-American lives, especially non-white non-American lives, are worth less than dirt.
I have lived a sufficiently blessed life never to have actually heard or read Ann Coulter. But I know many anti-immigration activists, some of them quite strong in their convictions, and I think these people are advocating for what they believe is the most sensible and humane model of human governance. If you ask them their concerns, they will say that they’re really worried about crime. Or they think that immigrants will vote so overwhelmingly Democratic that the conservative values they love will be destroyed. Or that everywhere will merge together and become featureless, and the diversity of human cultures will be lost. Or that the Deep Roots theory is true and the more Africans come to America the more America will become as poor and war-torn as Africa.
I don’t think it’s “hyperbole” to say that these people “are monsters who literally believe that non-American lives, especially non-white non-American lives, are worth less than dirt.” I think it’s wrong. I think it’s exactly the sort of horribleness and dismissiveness that David Brooks and I complain about. I think it comes from the same sort of awful place that leads anti-Semites to say Jews laugh as they drink the blood of children. I think it does not even have a shred of truth. I think some of these same anti-immigration activists, if it came to this, would devote their lives to helping non-Americans.
I think that if Robinson thinks this is within the acceptable realm of hyperbole, then this is our entire disagreement, and we should forget about all the rest of this and concentrate on whether it’s true. If approximately half the country – half your friends, relatives, co-workers – believe non-white people are dirt and want to hurt them, that is way more important than anything he or I have written on this subject otherwise, and probably an existential threat to everything. When I say I’m against the current depiction of racism, I 100% mean I’m against the sort of attitude that can possibly, even at its most hyperbolic, give rise to that sort of statement. When I say we need more dialogue and empathy, I mean that anyone who can write that hasn’t talked to enough people on the other side and doesn’t understand how they think. If you think that quote was at all excusable, I don’t think you realize exactly what I’m against when I mean I’m against portraying racists as monsters, or how normal and similar to the motives of everyone else the motives of racists really are.
(a friend, who I like and trust, and who nobody would ever describe as a “student mobbist”, recently said he wondered if the attempt to arm teachers was actually a plan to get police to shoot all the black teachers so that the teacher force would become wholly white. As long as the climate is such that even the best and most reasonable people I know are thinking these kinds of things, we as a country are doomedCurrent Affairs treated conservatives four days ago (okay, there was that one thing about Voldemort, but IT WAS A JOKE). I think that makes me justified in saying, non-hypocritically, that these kinds of attitudes scare me and I wish we had fewer of them.
(I’ll use this as a space to voice an unrelated complaint – Current Affairs thinks it can get away with saying anti-immigration activists are “monsters”, libertarians are “psychotic”, anyone they disagree with is evil, or monstrous, or inhuman, or whatever word they want to use – but if I politely disagree with social justice, suddenly I’m ‘not charitable enough’ and ‘need to read all the literature before making an opinion’)
I am not up to continue this discussion further, though I will read any last word Current Affairs has. But I will make the following three offers:
1. If Nathan wants to send me a (reasonable-length) book that he thinks represents the best of the social justice movement, I’ll read and review it.
2. If anybody from the social justice movement – “educated white man” or not – wants to discuss things with me, I am happy to do so as long as you agree to my terms. The terms are that we keep it polite/non-threatening/non-insulting/non-personal, that we agree science and evidence work and are the right way to settle these things, and that both sides have the right to speak.
I realize that these are not completely neutral terms – for example, if one of the questions at issue is whether science and evidence are the right way to settle these things, then I’ve just hard-coded my preference into the debate. But number one, if people think that’s wrong I would like them to openly admit that’s wrong. And number two, I don’t know any way to have a fair and truth-producing debate without them.
Also, realistically I’ll have time to do this with, like, one person before I get bored, but I won’t do it any less with believers in social justice than I would with anyone else.
3. I continue to invite everyone, including believers in social justice, to comment on my blog, on the subreddit, on the Discord, and I’ll respond to your comments with the same frequency as I respond to anyone else’s, and you won’t be moderated away unless you break the (viewpoint-neutral) rules of moderation. I think you have worthy perspectives, and I enjoy learning from social justice advocates the same as from everyone else.
Nathan asks how I’m different from the people I’m criticizing. I think I’m different insofar as I support these things. If the social justice movement were to believe this kind of stuff, neither myself nor David Brooks would have any problem with them. Insofar as there are some people in the movement who do believe these things, I like them and debate them already. Insofar as there are some people who don’t – well, I think it’s reasonable to be worried.