“How Free Speech Works for White Academics”
“Catharsis, the ability to express the rage and pain that we are often called to internalize and forget, matters in a world where the stakes of violent discourse toward people of color; queer, trans, and gender nonbinary folks; and women are ever clearer. But our ability to talk back has created a crisis of knowledge production for academics who are used to occupying the space of “the expert” largely without challenge. Academe is not built for the kind of immediate and forceful resistance that social and digital media tools have provided to communities more used to being theorized about than having the opportunity to do the theorizing…
Then as now, I struggle with how to hold the righteousness and rightfulness of black rage alongside the necessity of working to build social movements and better bodies of scholarship with groups whose uninterrogated access to power and privilege routinely cause harm…
But black feminism as an intellectual project has taught me the importance of always being clear about the social location from which I ask questions. For instance, many of those who questioned Tuvel are trans people or people of color: folks directly affected by the kind of scholarship in which she is engaging. What for her may be an interesting theoretical question determines the shape of their lives. That doesn’t mean academics shouldn’t ask theoretical questions. It means we have to remember that scholarship is a form of power precisely because it does shape the material world…
The lack of self-reflexivity and the uncritical assumption of a supposedly “objective” standpoint in both Tuvel’s article and Oliver’s does indeed feel like white women colonizing the epistemological terrain of black women and then crying copious white-lady tears when black women remain unimpressed by these allegedly rational arguments. This is, to riff on Oliver, what it looks like to pull out your selfie-stick in the public square and snap away while complaining that other people are in the way, mucking up your shot.”
Related: “Who’s Left to Defend Tommy Curry?”; “Research shows prejudice, not principle, often underpins ‘free-speech defense’ of racist language”; “When Free Speech Dismantles Diversity Initiatives”
