Problems with “The New Intolerance of Student Activism”

How The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf Straw Manned the Yale Student Activists

Within a couple weeks of an incident in which members of a Yale fraternity excluded Yale students of color from their Halloween party, announcing “white girls only” at the door; and in the age of the constant video stream of those sworn to protect and serve shooting people to death for walking, sitting, standing, and otherwise existing while black; the Atlantic has chosen to publish this article by Conor Friedersdorf, the main thesis of which is that “misguided campus activists” at Yale are overreacting and “catastrophizing” a Halloween email incident that they “mistake for a social-justice priority.”

The article itself, and the Atlantic’s decision to publish it, is a classic case of white fragility.

White fragility, as defined by Robin DiAngelo, a Professor of Whiteness Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis at Westfield State University, is “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.” It’s something I’ve witnessed in myself, friends, family, colleagues, other acquaintances, and, most of all, on the internet.

The typical example of white fragility comes in the form of angry outbursts about the problems with the particular author or blacks in general in response to blacks who are writing about the black experience and/or specifically about racism.

The most recent example of this form to appear in my internet feed was in response to a Students at Cambridge quote from Lola Olufemi observing that there was a lack of social space in which she could share her personal experience as a black woman without being invalidated. The commentator wrote, “Load of rubbish. I was a student in the mid-70s. If you’d been around then you would really know what discrimination was. Be yourself, stop moaning and live your life.”

The more insidious form of white fragility, however, comes in the form of well-composed, articulate pieces, published by reputable magazines. These articles — and there have been quite a number of them published about recent activity at Yale — have the gloss of seeming intellectual rigor that attempts to disguise their actual content: a willful misinterpretation of events that allows the authors to zero in on some particular objectionable behavior of their opponents and thereby discount the larger, and much more important, context.

I understand the impulse to use the missteps of one’s ideological opponents to dismiss them. I recently felt that same satisfaction reflecting on a social media post, in which the author declared he could not “sympathize one iota with” a high school student whose allegedly disrespectful attitude after the death of her mother earned her a beating from the school police officer. My logic was that if the author could be so stunningly lacking in compassion and empathy for a fellow human being — a child at that — I could probably dismiss his perspective as crazy.

The truth is, I probably can’t. He may have been writing in a moment of anger, or caught up in the intensity of a political disagreement, and he wrote carelessly. That doesn’t invalidate everything he stands for. And neither does bad behavior coming from student activists (I’m referring to their spitting on people) negate the validity of their position.

Speaking of the students’ position. It is obvious to those of us who are listening that the students are organizing not in response to any single event, but in response to a much larger context of systemic racism at Yale. Yale senior Aaron Lewis articulates that position nicely in this article, which Friedersdorf quotes. Unfortunately, Friedersdorf prefaces what would have been a very illuminating quotation with, “Some Yalies are defending their broken activist culture by seizing on more defensible reasons for being upset.”

Friedersdorf, a white male living in California and wholly unconnected to Yale or its community, has decided that instead of seeking to understand why student activists are taking action on campus by asking them or listening to them when they explain, he should just substitute his own belief: that the students’ anger stems from the fact that “one woman wrote an email that hurt their feelings.”

Upon first consideration, there are two major problems with Friedersdorf’s approach. Problem one is that Friedersdorf is participating in a classic habit of oppressive systems: invalidating the voices of the oppressed. The students of color at Yale are not to be permitted to define their own positions or be the authority on their own sources of anger.

Problem two is that Friedersdorf is caught up in a delusional myopia, in which he is so laser focused on what he sees as an over-reaction to a minor incident that he believes the entire context of systemic racism can be dismissed as a side note.

Rather than relying on the carefully composed, written arguments of student activists, or even on the testimony of students of color who have spent many hours since Halloween communicating with Dean Holloway and President Salovey about their experiences of racism at Yale, Friedersdorf chooses the outbursts of a few students speaking in the heat of the moment during an unscripted engagement with the Master of Silliman as his source material for understanding the concerns of the student activists and evaluating their position.

Friedersdorf analyzes one student’s outburst (“[Being a Master of a Yale residential college] is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that? It’s about creating a home here. You are not doing that!”) as if it is the core thesis of the activists’ position and requires close, critical reading: “The Yale student appears to believe that creating an intellectual space and a home are at odds with one another. But the entire model of a residential college is premised on the notion that it’s worthwhile for students to reside in a campus home infused with intellectualism, even though creating it requires lavishing extraordinary resources on youngsters who are already among the world’s most advantaged. It is no accident that masters are drawn from the ranks of the faculty.”

If Friedersdorf were more familiar with Yale’s residential college system, he would perhaps have understood the student’s point better. As an alum of Yale College (and Silliman College in particular), I know that each residential college is supervised by both a Dean, who is responsible for providing students with academic guidance, and a Master, who is responsible for providing students with guidance on all aspects of life at Yale, from roommate disputes to intramural sports. (Incidentally, it’s true that it’s no accident that these positions are drawn from the ranks of the faculty, but this is largely because it is the habit of universities to put faculty in positions of authority, regardless of whether they are qualified for the leadership required.)

The Master and Dean are together responsible for creating a community within a community, and I don’t believe that space is designed primarily as an intellectual one, though intellectualism certainly has its place there (as I think the quoted student would acknowledge in a calmer moment). As a student, I primarily thought of the Master as someone whose job it was to help students feel safe, comfortable, adjusted, and supported within the larger context of Yale; in other words, exactly what the quoted student expressed.

This is why I was shocked when I initially heard about Erika Christakis’ Halloween email to the students. I was shocked because I knew that no matter how thoughtful or intellectually grounded the email might be, it was also a rejection of something important and necessary: the message, from those at the school with administrative power to the students, that the experiences of students of color matter.

In her email, Christakis expresses her belief that it’s inappropriate for the Yale administration to give guidance to the students about the sensitivity of their Halloween costumes, because she thinks the students should be permitted the freedom to express themselves. However, in articulating this point, she inadvertently uses her own position of authority to put pressure on the students in the very way she is objecting to. Christakis didn’t write an op-ed — she wrote a email to the students to whom she is a mentor and authority figure.

Of course, Christakis words her email so as to place herself in some sort of neutral middle ground. She is writing on behalf of free speech; she wants the students to take charge of the debate; she wants the university to take a hands-off approach.

But Christakis is only on neutral middle ground if you assume the debate should be characterized in precisely her own terms. She writes, “I don’t, actually, trust myself to foist my Halloweenish standards and motives on others.” But she does feel perfectly comfortable foisting on others the idea that the administration has no role to play in encouraging students to be respectful of oppressed groups when designing Halloween costumes. Reading her words, I can’t help but think she would have made her point better by encouraging the students who objected to the costume guidance email to write their own response to it.

Her belief that it’s not the University’s job to guide students on what is and isn’t appropriate for Halloween costumes is, of course, precisely what the student activists object to. The students, unlike Christakis, are deeply aware of the need for the University to provide a very specific sort of guidance, in order to combat the systemic racism that exists as the status quo at Yale and throughout the nation.

Christakis wrote, “I can’t defend [my Halloweenish standards and motives] anymore than you could defend yours.” But the minority students, and the school administrators who spoke to their concerns in the original email, are quite capable of defending theirs. Theirs are based on an intellectual and personal understanding of entrenched racism and the impact that it has on students of color at Yale.

Friedersdorf exposes his own ignorance of this impact when he mocks students who no longer feel safe living in the Silliman community. He lists the physical luxuries of Silliman college as evidence that the students’ feelings of unsafety are unfounded, as if grand pianos and movie theaters should somehow eradicate or compensate for systemic racism.

When the students express a desire not to have their existences invalidated on campus, Friedersdorf responses with incredulity and the vacuous platitude that “no one is capable of invalidating their existence, full stop.”

I believe Friedersdorf intends this sentence, and the rest of the paragraph expressing variations on this sentiment, to be encouraging. He wants students to develop an independent sense of self-worth, and he wants them to refuse to let attitudes in their environment oppress them.

If only it were that simple. The truth is that the existence of black people in this country can and has been invalidated, pretty consistently for the last few hundred years. From slavery to black codes to Jim Crow to separate-but-equal to mass incarceration, police violence, implicit and explicit racial prejudice, systemically perpetuated poverty, and yes, a culture that refuses to allow blacks to self-express (and that culture includes Friedersdorf’s article), blacks have been and are being invalidated in every way.

Friedersdorf is taking on the role of motivational speaker for the wrong crowd. Young people of color don’t need a white man to tell them that they are “capable of tremendous resilience”; and they particularly don’t need this message to be wrapped up with the accusation that they are expressing a “disempowering ideology foisted on them by well-intentioned, wrongheaded ideologues encouraging them to imagine that they are not privileged.”

What they need is for their voices to be heard. Yale students of color know their own privilege better than anyone else on campus. They also understand the concept of intersectionality, which illustrates how they can be oppressed in some ways while experiencing privilege in others. Yale students of color also know that oppression can be traumatizing.

While Friedersdorf naively cheers You-can-do-it!, minority Yale students know better. They know the psychological and emotional effects of oppression — they know the many barriers they face. And they want the administration’s cooperation in an effort to break down those barriers and create a culture at Yale that gives them the opportunity to flourish only as much as it does their white classmates.

Friedersdorf provides this pot shot in response to the very real mental health consequences for minority students of an unsafe environment: “But if an email about Halloween costumes has them skipping class and suffering breakdowns, either they need help from mental-health professionals or they’ve been grievously ill-served by debilitating ideological notions they’ve acquired about what ought to cause them pain.”

Indeed, they do need help from mental-health professionals, because their suffering is real. (And that isn’t something that should be mocked.) And it’s cause is not the ideological notions they’ve acquired: it’s systemic racism. Friedersdorf is the fish asking, “What’s water?”, ignoring the piles of research (read this or this to start) on how racial oppression can cause trauma and how we need to create safe environments for minorities (read this).

Speaking of research, Friedersdorf would benefit from making himself aware of some (this and this, for example). He is curiously comfortable dismissing the concerns of minority students because their perspective is based on “subjective feeling,” when his own attitudes are just as emotionally charged. His mocking tone throughout most of the article clearly illustrates this. The difference is that the minority students acknowledge that their emotional experience is driving the conversation.

And, frankly, it should. The students have overwhelming data about racism through their own experience of being oppressed. Their “subjective feelings” are the result of this extensive experience encountering racism, and an understanding of racism is precisely what should guide the conversation. By contrast, white men like Friedersdorf have the privilege of moving through life without experiencing racism personally or even necessarily observing it.

This, by the way, isn’t Friedersdorf’s fault. He didn’t ask for white privilege, and society has conditioned him very poorly to respond to it. But, that doesn’t mean he isn’t responsible for educating himself. (The best analogy I’ve read to illustrate this pairing of non-fault with responsibility is shoveling. It’s not your fault that there is snow on your driveway and sidewalk, but you are still responsible for clearing it away.)

Listening to a recounting of personal experience from a person of color is not the only way Friedersdorf could come to understand racism (though it’s a damn good one, if you know how to listen). There is also rigorous academic data collection, analysis, and theorizing about the experience of the oppressed. (Here and here are good places to start.)

If Friedersdorf were familiar with this research, he would understand what students mean when they say they feel “invalidated” and “unsafe,” instead of inserting his own attitudes about those words into the discussion and using them to mock the students.

He would also understand how important it is for the administration and faculty at a place like Yale to be engaged in guiding the students on issues related to race. It’s not because the students are immature children that need to be told how to behave: it’s because race is a complex topic that most students — and most faculty and staff — have little grasp of.

(We don’t live in a world in which a university community finds it acceptable for random laypeople, even otherwise well-educated ones, to espouse views on physics or linguistics that are inconsistent with the data. With respect to the discipline of race, however, this is permitted and even lauded as the only appropriate way to deal with the subject; although many of the concepts are as or more intellectually challenging.)

Insteading of opining, people like Friedersdorf should be learning.

There are two ways to become educated about race. One is to live the experience of being racially oppressed, and the other is to study the subject. Professor Christakis is an educated person and an expert in her field (and seems thoughtful), but she is not an expert on race. Neither is Friedersdorf. Both would do well to start listening to those who are more educated on the topic. They could start with minority students at Yale.

If Friedersdorf were to educate himself about racism, he would learn about how his field treats whites as more credible than non-whites. He might then question his choice to report confidently on Master Christakis’ civility and restraint during a confrontation with students, Friedersdorf’s only access to which is through a truncated video clip, while expressing skepticism about the “white girls only” incident at a Yale fraternity party, which had multiple independent eyewitnesses.

He might reconsider his choice of language in writing, “If any discrete group of students is ever discriminated against, or disproportionately victimized by campus crime, or graded more harshly by professors, then of course students should protest and remedies should be implemented,” because he would know that this happens every day on Yale’s campus, and because he would know that this is in fact why Yale students are protesting, because he would trust the students to articulate their own position rather than dismissing their explanation as a post hoc excuse and substituting his own straw man.

He might then reconsider promoting “civil disagreement” during conversations about race, and instead advocate for faculty and staff to attend mandatory race education courses before being placed in positions of authority over students of mixed races, because he would have discovered the difference between an opinion gradient and an expertise and awareness gradient.

Most of all, I think he would come to regret writing, “The focus belongs on the flawed ideas that [the student activists at Yale have] absorbed,” and wish instead that he had written, “The focus belongs on the deeply ingrained systemic racism that the student activists have experienced, not only at Yale but everywhere; because it is this context that allows us to understand how a seemingly minor event could be the spark that sets off angry protests.”

I think Friedersdorf would come to recognize that he is like the many commentators who struggled to understand why Michael Brown’s death set off the massive protests in Ferguson and a movement throughout the nation. What Friedersdorf is able to see at Yale is a few email exchanges and a video of an undergraduate yelling at her professor. What he does not see is what lies beneath.

He grasps at “flaws” in “ideology” because he doesn’t see the elephant in the room. He thinks the Yale students are too sensitive, when it is he, and his fellow uninformed whites, who are too sensitive — too sensitive to hear the truth that is necessary in order for our country to move past hundreds of years of oppression.

Friedersdorf has chosen to focus his article on the moments when students are angriest and least in control, moments when they scream or spit. He makes this choice intentionally, because it allows him to discredit the students without actually engaging with any of their ideas.

Friedersdorf may or may not undertake the slow and painful process of educating himself about race. In the meantime, I am deeply disappointed that the Atlantic, a publication I’ve come to admire as a host of important educational articles about oppression in the U.S. (especially this), has lowered itself to publish his work.