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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29290 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell

Very interesting longform article about how a professor had a summer seminar for high school students taken over by his radical TA, in a course focusing primarily on anti-blackness - this despite Dr. Vincent Lloyd's confused self description:

I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization.

What's striking about this is how miserable it seems to have made everyone involved:

Furthermore, in the 2022 community, afternoons and evenings would no longer be spent having fun and doing homework. Two college-age students called “factotums” (led by one I will call “Keisha”) were assigned to create anti-racism workshops to fill the afternoons. There were workshops on white supremacy, on privilege, on African independence movements, on the thought and activism of Angela Davis, and more, all of which followed an initial, day-long workshop on “transformative justice.” Students described the workshops as emotionally draining, forcing the high schoolers to confront tough issues and to be challenged in ways they had never been challenged before.

From the initial “transformative-justice” workshop, students learned to snap their fingers when they agreed with what a classmate was saying. This practice immediately entered the seminar and was weaponized. One student would try out a controversial (or just unusual) view. Silence. Then another student would repeat a piece of anti-racist dogma, and the room would be filled with the click-clack of snapping fingers.

hilariously, two of the asian students ended up being 'expelled' from the program, for reasons that were not shared with the professor.

During our discussion of incarceration, an Asian-American student cited federal inmate demographics: About 60 percent of those incarcerated are white. The black students said they were harmed. They had learned, in one of their workshops, that objective facts are a tool of white supremacy. Outside of the seminar, I was told, the black students had to devote a great deal of time to making right the harm that was inflicted on them by hearing prison statistics that were not about blacks. A few days later, the Asian-American student was expelled from the program.

Finally, about halfway through the seminar, the TA led a struggle session where all the students accused the professor of doing a lot of anti black harm to them, and then they all did their own thing without his involvement.

I emailed the students and Keisha with this decision, and with an offer to read and respond to any written work the students produced—and I never heard back. No one sent written work. None indicated a desire to attend a meeting where I would be a “guest speaker.” The students had almost two weeks left. With the seminar canceled, did they go home? Did they tell their parents? Did Keisha lecture to them all day? I don’t know. I had extricated myself from the abusive relationship, but nine students remained captive.

His entire career, indeed his entire life is built around the anti-racist grift. I cannot even articulate how little sympathy I have for it finally inconveniencing him. If you push for your struggle sessions, everyone should dearly hope that you are one day forced to stand as the enemy. In my preferred world, his ridiculous jobs wouldn't exist at all, but I'll settle for the grievance-based institutions he's helped build turning against him.

I think this is a bit extreme of a reaction. Yes, he certainly would fall within the academic left, but reading this, it seems like he definitely cared about the traditional pursuit of academic understanding and dialectic:

The seminar assumes that each student has innate intelligence, even as we come from different backgrounds, have different amounts and sorts of knowledge, and different skills. We can each be formed best if we take advantage of our differing insights to push each other, over time, again and again. When this practice is occasioned by carefully curated texts—not exclusively “great books,” but texts that challenge each other and us as they probe issues of essential importance—a seminar succeeds.

A seminar takes time. The first day, you will be frustrated. The second and the third day, you will be frustrated. Even on the last day, you will be frustrated, though ideally now in a different way. Each intervention in a seminar is incomplete, and gets things wrong. Each subsequent intervention is also incomplete, and also gets things wrong. But there are plenty of insights and surprises, for each participant looks at a text with different eyes.

It is tempting to add: Such is life. Such is democratic life. We each have different, partial knowledge. We each get things wrong, over and over. At our best, we enter the fray by listening to each other and complementing and challenging the insights of our fellows. In the process, over years, decades, we are oriented toward justice and truth.

If the seminar is slow food, the anti-racist workshop put on by college-age students is a sugar rush. All the hashtags are there, condensed, packaged, and delivered from a place of authority. The worst sort of anti-racist workshop simply offers a new language for participants to echo—to retweet out loud.

But then, perhaps there is something unspoken, unrealized here; that the "slow food" of academic discourse will inevitably be pushed aside for the "junk food" of dogma, some how, some way. Maybe if Lloyd had shut down those who were attempting to shut down others, maybe if he'd put his foot down more, then just maybe he could have salvaged his own course from epistemic closure.

So perhaps the ideas he followed would inevitably lead him to this, because there aren't enough principles to restrain them from the logical conclusion, but it does at least seem like things could have been better.

Maybe if Lloyd had shut down those who were attempting to shut down others, maybe if he'd put his foot down more, then just maybe he could have salvaged his own course from epistemic closure.

But he didn't do that, because he didn't think of himself as The Man. He's built a career on lecturing about The Man but doesn't think of himself as an authority figure; he drops hints all through about really wanting the seminar to be a fun place because he had a good time at the last seminar a few years back. He's like the parent who wants to be a best friend instead of a parent, no wonder Keisha filled the power vacuum:

Occasionally, in one-on-one meetings, I could still kid around with them, or hear them chat among themselves about the mundane details of teenage life.

He let Keisha get away with murder because he didn't want to be the bad guy imposing his authority like a grown-up. And so she cut the ground out from under him, while he was hoping for a nice chatty lunch and fun time with the kids:

As I was beginning the seminar, sitting on the grass in my backyard, Keisha interrupted: “I think you should start with a lecture offering context for this reading and telling us the main points.” ...She then announced that she would take the students back to their house without eating the lunch I had waiting for them.

I can't feel sorry for the guy, either he has the backbone of a jellyfish to let his 'teaching assistant' dictate to him what the content of his lectures should be, or he was there for a lazy, well-paid summer break where he wouldn't have to do any real work except sit around chatting with the kids and if the organisation gave him a 'teaching assistant' who wanted to do all the work, sure, let her.

Maybe if Lloyd had shut down those who were attempting to shut down others, maybe if he'd put his foot down more, then just maybe he could have salvaged his own course from epistemic closure.

It's exactly what he should have done, and he didn't. Keisha was only supposed to be a teaching assistant. He sat back and let her dictate more and more of what would be covered, what could be covered, and if the students would even listen to him, without attempting to take back control or get the administration to rein her in. He let her bully and intimidate and silence students, and kick two students out. And then she led the mob that came for him, and he was shocked, shocked!

Right, but in practice, his academic understanding and dialectic amounted to devising ever more sophisticated methods of waging culture war, in ever sharper methods of criticism, and all with a clear ideological outcome in mind - the production of political activists to go and spread the bad news. It's hard to imagine the same thing occurring in a programming course. These kids weren't dumb. They were carefully and rigorously selected - no doubt for their ideological discipline, their ability to internalize antiracist rhetoric, and their willingness to challenge and rebel against traditional authority. They were then armed with the finest rhetorical weapons modern society affords, and taught they were not allowed to defend themselves against them. Of interest is that the professor himself has no defense against them either, beyond a weak appeal to his own anti-racist credentials.

These kids weren't dumb. They were carefully and rigorously selected - no doubt for their ideological discipline, their ability to internalize antiracist rhetoric, and their willingness to challenge and rebel against traditional authority.

They were also a bunch of impressionable 17 year olds feeling flattered that they had been selected for Real Grown-up College seminar. Since the professor seems to have done damn-all, by his own account, to protect them, they were ripe for being bullied into compliance with a loud, aggressive young adult (but still older than them and with the authority of being a teaching assistant) like Keisha while Lloyd just sat around in the background wringing his hands:

Eventually, two of the Asian-American students would be expelled from the program for reasons that, Keisha said, couldn’t be shared with me.

Right then is when he should have slapped her down about "I'm the professor contracted to teach this seminar, not you, and I need to know why my class is being expelled without my knowledge or consent", but he let it all go until too late and the leadership of course would not back him up:

Telluride is governed and largely run by program alumni who volunteer their time to further the goals of the association. The volunteer overseeing the summer programs explained to me that there were internal divisions within the loose, sprawling Telluride world over the direction of the summer programs, with some corners of that world zealously pursuing a singular focus on anti-blackness and other corners hoping to continue seminars as they had been conducted in the past. They realized this summer was bumpy not just in our seminar, but across the program. Because Telluride wanted to respect the democratic self-governance of the student community, the leadership didn’t feel comfortable intervening.

Adults with their own careers and lives were too scared to stand up to this virago, why would a small group of kids who were strangers to the place be able to do so?

He helpfully provided an example of how things are supposed to work:

During the first week of the 2014 iteration of the seminar, focused on slavery, a Chinese-American student pointed to a moment in our text where white slave owners were providing food for the enslaved and suggested this showed there were two sides to the issue of slavery. Before I formulated a way to turn his intervention into a stepping-stone toward more sophisticated discussion, two students spoke up with other evidence from the text suggesting that slavery is a moral abomination unworthy of “both sides” discussion. By the end of the seminar, the initial student, who seemed like he might have a wavering moral compass, expressed a newfound commitment to justice

Now was that a discussion, or was it badgering ? He didn‘t seem to be fond of the ‚both sides‘ method then.

I had extricated myself from the abusive relationship, but nine students remained captive. Belief in democracy had authorized abuse, and there was no way out.

He‘s an abused spouse by the end. There‘s that language of harm that seemingly came out of nowhere from the mouths of his students. Poor guy doesn‘t have the tools to explain what happened to him, let alone articulate why his students might be wrong. He seems pretty light skinned, and he‘s not even a woman or queer. He clearly was less on the side of blacks than Keisha was. Ergo, he is the oppressor in that relationship, and that's all she wrote.

He's a damn coward. He spouts all the nice line about what the seminar is supposed to achieve and how the students are supposed to use their talents and experience and be guided (not led or taught, mind you) to the proper conclusions.

And then the new generation of grifter starts holding his feet to the fire, and he abandons the kids (they're 17 is all) to the thought police while he goes home to cry about how he's the victim here. If he had any spine, he would have fought for them. No, when it looked like his cosy sinecure of being a Telluride lecturer would actually require him to do something, he folded as Keisha wanted.

I'm even beginning to doubt his story; I find myself suspecting that he was quite happy to let Keisha do all the heavy lifting in organising the course while he joked around with the kids, told them stories, and did the Wise Elder bit. Just this time it turned out that this Keisha had an agenda of her own, not the plan he wanted her to follow.

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