Last summer, I wrote a piece for the Atlantic in which I argued that Orange Is the New Black (OITNB)fails to effectively critique prison as an institution because prison as an institution in the United States is directed mostly at men, and OITNB presents prison as bad because it victimizes women. The piece went semi-viral as a hate read, and was widely denounced. Jezebel wrote an article with the very Jezebel title “Writer Doesn’t Understand Why Show About Women’s Prison Has So Few Men.” Music critic Brandon Soderberg called me as a “clueless cracker pedant” on Twitter. Folks I liked and respected told me in no uncertain terms that what I had written was unfeminist and generally awful. There was a massive comment thread with people lining up to tell me I was stupid and should shut up. The left, the damn left, in all its insular self-righteousness, would not tolerate brave dissent such as mine.
Or at least, that’s the conclusion I would come to if I were Jonathan Chait. Chait has written a long article for New York magazine in which he bemoaned the return of political correctness and the toxic culture of the left. Chait points to Hanna Rosin, who wrote a book about the current plight of men, and was ridiculed with a hashtag; he also singles out an invitation-only Facebook group where people argueloudly with each other. My experience could be another data point for him, yet one more example of how “swarms of jeering critics can materialize in an instant” terrifying the heterodox leftist or liberal into silence.
There’s a couple of problems with Chait’s thesis, though. First of all, there’s just nothing in his article or in his examples that makes a case that discourse on the broadly defined left is somehow nastier than discourse on the right, or in the center, or out in directionless space. The first controversial piece I wrote for the web was for The Comics Journal. I reviewed Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers and my piece was headlined “In the Shadow of No Talent.” TCJ readers lost their shit and at least one person wished for the death of me and my family. It was exactly the sort of intemperate lashing out at dissent that Chait denigrates — but it didn’t have anything to do with political correctness or a culture of Marxist intolerance. It had to do with comics fans not wanting to hear me tell them that the thing they liked wasn’t any good.
Since then I’ve been told that I am stupid and that I should shut up by lots of Men’s Rights Activists, some feminists, some romance fans, many comics readers, fans of Breaking Bad, fans of The Hobbit, some leftists, and many right-wingers. I’ve even been abused by a fair number of supposedly free-speech-loving liberals and libertarians, who, when it comes to online behavior, aren’t any more tolerant of dissent than anyone else as far as I can tell. In a recent discussion of Charlie Hebdo, one First Amendment lover told me that if I didn’t like America, I could leave it — because free speech means exiling folks who say things you don’t like. Maybe, as Gawker’s Alex Pareene says, the liberal Chait is especially thin-skinned when it comes to criticism from his left. But one thing’s for sure: In terms of yelling at each other online, there are no red states and no blue states. There are only states of intemperate ire, and lots of them.
Chait is right, I think, that social media has changed the way social pressures work when it comes to speech. It used to be that conversations in the public sphere were limited and controlled by institutions. What you could say was controlled by what magazines (like, say, The New Republic, where Chait used to work) would print. That’s still true to some degree. But it’s also true that social media has made it possible for people who didn’t have a platform to speak loudly, astutely, randomly, continuously, profanely, violently—and often right there, just under an author’s prose, in the comments section. The roar can be deafening, and sometimes frightening.
I use the word frightening advisedly. Chait in his piece does that odd thing free-speech advocates sometimes do, and downplays the importance, or dangerousness of talking and expressing opinions. ” Mere expression of opposing ideas, in the form of a poster, is presented as a threatening act,” Chait sneers, denigrating an academic who found a pro-life sign on a college campus offensive. But speech is threatening, often, and aggressive. You could argue that a professor physically grabbing a sign from a student is an escalation, and I’d agree with you. But it’s not an escalation from zero
Chait is telling people on the left that they’re totalitarians; I’m telling him that he’s a fool. The intent, in both cases, is to cause a reaction, to disturb, to mock, to change the world, in some small way. If speech were utterly inconsequential, if it had no power, there wouldn’t be any point in defending it. The argument for free speech, surely, has to be built on the notion that speech does in fact have power. It’s because speech is worth listening to that you defend it, not because it isn’t.
And the cacophony of the internet is, contra Chait, often worth listening to. It’s given a voice to many folks who didn’t have one before. Chait takes a swipe at the 1990s’ anti-sex work policies of Catherine McKinnon, but he doesn’t mention that the social media he sneers at has been a huge boon to sex workers themselves, who can finally create their own platforms after decades of being silenced by both the right and the left.
Similarly, black women and other women of color have a major presence online, and are able to talk back to folks like Chait (or like me) in a way that wasn’t possible even twenty years ago. Chait doesn’t always like what these people tell him — he seems particularly disturbed by Brittney Cooper’s argument that reason is not always a useful tool against racism. But that’s how free speech works; people will sometimes say things you don’t like.
There are downsides to all this roiling speech, too. Chait seems to think the most serious problem is that white men and white women are sometimes told that their whiteness disqualifies them from speaking. “Under p.c. culture, the same idea can be expressed identically by two people but received differently depending on the race and sex of the individuals doing the expressing,” Chait moans.
And sure, as a white person, I find it unpleasant when my brilliant, beautiful ideas are dismissed because I’m white or male. But that problem pales (as it were) next to receiving actual death threats, being doxxed, or having SWAT teams sicced on your house — none of which Chait mentions, because none of those things are regular occurrences on the left. But other communities haven’t been so lucky. Being white on the internet may be a hard, sad, road, but it’s nothing compared to being a feminist video game developer. For that matter, being white on the Internet is not generally anything compared to being black on the Internet. As Ferguson activist Deray Mckesson told me, “the death threats aren’t fun. They put my address out there, that’s not fun. I get called a nigger more than I’ve ever been called that in my entire life. I’ve blocked over 9,000 people, so I don’t personally see it as much anymore, but my friends do.”
The Internet makes it possible for more people to speak more effectively than ever before in history. That also means it allows more people to issue death threats, shout obscenities, and harass others than ever before. Free speech, and for that matter democracy, has always been a balancing act between the polis and the mob — between unleashing speech to empower people, and trying to figure out how to prevent the power of speech being used to oppress, to terrorize, and even (through that call to the SWAT team, for example) to kill.
The Internet, and social media, have exacerbated these tensions; they increase the potential of speech, for good and ill. Those are problems we have to wrestle with. Jonathan Chait isn’t up to the task, in part because his obsession with the left leads him to focus on ideologies rather than methods; on who he wants to shut up, rather than on figuring out which kinds of speech, whatever the content, should be allowed, which shouldn’t, and how to deal with the difference. Fortunately, the Internet is full of talking people who, civilly and less so, can tell him where he’s wrong, and that he should shut up.
Hi Noah,
I think the Chait piece and the deBoer follow-up was more partition, political, and pragmatic than you let on — even as both pieces seem to have emerged from places of really disgust and discontent. The claims of both are not simply that the Internet is an uncivil place and should really be more so (“Shut up, mean people!”), or that speech policing on the left is worse than on the right (everyone knows about RINOs and all), much less that all forms of intimidation are equal (flaming = bomb threats).
Their concerns are motivated my a certainty that speech-policing on the left — the “radical left,” the “academic left,” the “left” in general — are inimical to political progress, often on the very issues that people seem to care most about. For Chait, this comes down to a distinction of “liberalism” vs “leftism<' with a politically more generous liberalism contributing to much the progress that the left proceeds to disdain. For deBoer, it's a certainty that the rhetorical infighting of the left drives people — potential allies, converts, co-workers — from coalition and common cause.
To make Chait's argument just a matter (even by comparison with your own experiences) of his own hurt feelings for being ignored or called bad names, well that seems to ignore the main thrust of his piece. And maybe it closes in on being an example of the very thing he's worried about.
Best,
Peter
Don’t buy it, Peter. He makes some hand-waving gestures at talking about the toxic culture of the left, but his examples are for the most part small bore instances of people being mean online. (Alex Pareene covers this pretty well.) But that doesn’t have anything to do with a toxic culture on the left, because everyone is mean online, not just the left. So it ends up as a long case of special pleading.
And as I say in the piece, it’s not just about hurt feelings. Online interactions can be really unpleasant, intimidating, and actively dangerous (I provide examples; I argue that Chait is wrong to downplay the effective cruelty of free speech.) The conclusion up there above your comment is about how online speech is a real problem. It’s not a problem that is well summarized by talking about a toxic left culture, though.
And of course any response is an example of the very thing he’s worried about, because he’s got the argument set up so that anyone who tells him he’s an idiot is an example of the very thing he’s worried about. But people telling him he’s an idiot and that he should shut up are not a threat to free speech. They’re examples of free speech. His inability to recognize that (and yours?) seems to me like a problem.
If you want to read people who actually care about community on the left and are thinking about ways to address it, I’d point to Julia Serano’s Excluded, this by Katherine Cross, or this response to Freddie DeBoer by Angus Johnston. When you read them, you’ll note that none of them are apocalyptic diatribes about the death of liberalism and the existential dangers of leftist thought-police. Instead, they’re all efforts to argue for healthier communities and mutual respect, along with some practical tips for reducing bullying and intolerance. Denouncing the left wholesale is always going to be a better sell to the mainstream press, though.
Running the “free speech” banner up the flag pole seems just cheap, Noah — when Chait does it and when you do it (Peter doesn’t understand that criticism and insults are free speech too).
I wish I had time to continue right now. Johnston’s (“Why didn’t you step in?”) and Pareene’s replies are, to me, just weak, but I’m not going to fisk them. I guess you and I just see different essays in this regard, focusing on and motivated by different anxieties.
But to close, when you say that Chait’s (and I assume deBoer’s) examples are small-bore, what exactly does that mean? That they need twice as many examples (i.e., that they just don’t provide enough data points)? That the examples need to of higher or wider profile (the data are unrepresentative)? Or that it only counts if we’re talking about SWAT teams and doxxing (which looks a lot like the always suspicious “appeal to bigger problems”).
The piece is about free speech. You’re saying the left restricts free speech. I’m replying that that is stupid, because I think it’s stupid. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say there Peter.
Johnston’s response seems really important. How is it cheap? DeBoer says, oh lord, what can I do? and Johnston says, you could step in. I step in all the time. You are allowed to step in. Seriously, it sounds to me like DeBoer needs mentoring or professional development; that would be a lot more helpful than bewailing the fate of the left on the Internet. Obviously we don’t know exactly the problem here, but you really can step in and try to defuse situations, and you should if you can. If DeBoer has trouble with that, that’s not his fault (those situations can be hard) but it’s not a crisis of the left either.
I think that looking into a locked facebook group, pointing out that people behaved badly, and then wringing your hands about the failure of the left, is idiotic. To put it kindly. Hanna Rosin had a hashtag aimed at her, therefore the left is broken? What the hell? As I say at the beginning of the piece, people hating something I wrote is a sign of the end times for liberals and free speech? That’s incredibly stupid.
I think people being cruel to each other online sucks, and can shut down speech in a way that is bad. I moderate comments here heavily for that reason. But, yes, when you’re talking about a problem, it’s useful to look at the worst instances and figure out how to ameliorate them.
I’m not just looking to bigger problems though. I’m looking at Chait’s claims and his evidence. His claim is, the left is toxic. His evidence is people being mean to each other online. But the left is not noticeably meaner to each other online than anyone else, and less so than some. That suggest that he is wrong. Calling my motivations into question doesn’t change the fact that he’s wrong. Speculating fuzzily about the exact genre designation of “small-bore” doesn’t change the fact that he’s wrong. You want to defend him? Engage with what I said. How is what he describes on the left different from anything you see anywhere else online? How does he show that the left, as opposed to people in general, speak intemperately? (And no, pointing to one instance of people on the left harassing someone physically isn’t evidence either, because, again, this happens outside the left, and you can think of examples pretty readily.) Where is this evidence, Peter? There’s none of it in his post.
Again, people who care about the left should care about instances where the left bullies and is intemperate. But framing that as an existential crisis for the left is really unhelpful, mainly because it’s wrong, and basing an analysis on fallacies gets you nowhere. Unless your main concern is to get the people you dislike to go away and stop bothering you.
I do think there’s a potential problem with
“endlessly litigating the fraught requirements of p.c. discourse” as Chait said.
If I were to pick apart this post like some p.c. folks:
1. The post lacks trigger warning. You linked to a 911 related article, what if I was traumatized and didn’t know what Shadow of No Towers was about?
2. The line “Chait is telling people on the left that they’re totalitarians; I’m telling him that he’s a fool.” Is ablelist, according to disabledfeminist.com
““Cretin” is an ableist word acccording to at least one web site. It’s one which shouldn’t be used by people who consider themselves allies to people with disabilities. Many of the synonyms the dictionary so helpfully provides (idiot, moron, mongoloid, imbecile, fool, half-wit for example), are also ableist.”
And if you didn’t concede all points and apologize and alter your writing style, there would be these endless anger issues and meta-derailment…
Noah, I don’t think Chait downplayed the cruelty of free speech at all. His article was full of examples. He’s arguing that many people on the left — most ironically, people from academia and the literary community — are actually strongly against free speech. Furthermore, they are willing to fight it with vicious verbal abuse, threats, assault, censorship, and ostracism that amounts to secular excommunication. Of course they’re not the only ones who behave this way. As you point out, others are even worse. But they are the very communities we count on to defend freedom of speech, because they are the most dependent upon it. It’s as if Amnesty International members were torturing their adversaries.
See…but if someone came here and said that stuff, I’d just talk to them about it. It wouldn’t have to be a disaster. In your case, I’d point out that you’re points aren’t actually in good faith (in the sense that they’re not actual concerns of yourse) and so talking about them specifically would be silly.
But…it’s hardly the case that everyone on the left thinks trigger warnings are a good idea, or necessary. I’m happy to have those conversations without having to claim that those who disagree with me are horrible or should be banished or whatever.
Nah, John, that’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying that the left has never cared about free speech, and we need liberals like him to defend it.
I quote Chait arguing that people are ridiculous or hysterical to see speech as threatening. I’d agree that his argument over all is inconsistent and confused, so it’s hard to pin him down on any one thing.
I respond to Freddie deBoer over here if people are interested in that as well.
Also, Chait’s point about the left being toxic is that this is intra-community abuse. Chait doesn’t acknoewledge this, but people are generally far more vicious to those within their own advocacy group who are seen as “soft” or somehow traitorous than they are their common opponents.
I don’t think that’s true…gamergate is about attacking an out group, more or less, and you don’t get much more vicious than that.
“See…but if someone came here and said that stuff, I’d just talk to them about it. It wouldn’t have to be a disaster.”
I don’t think its necessarily a “disaster”, but in some leftist venues if you made that post (without trigger warnings, or with banned words) you’d simply be warned to follow the community policy regarding banned words or trigger warnings: it’s not really open to discussion or debate.
Noah: I think you’re accusing Chait of using a broader brush than he actually uses. I disagree that he’s saying “the left has never cared about free speech,” but it’s of course accurate that free speech needs defense. That’s always true. And of course liberals would defend it; free speech is a liberal idea (and ideal), in the traditional European politics meaning of liberal.
Furthermore, whether Chait said it or not, isn’t it true that the extreme left (just like the extreme right) really has always been against free speech? From Robespierre to Mao, the record is pretty abysmal. Most of Chait’s examples were of people whose politics are far more moderate, but the The Feminist Wire argument he cited reminded me of Pol pot’s ideology.
“Fortunately, the Internet is full of talking people who, civilly and less so, can tell him where he’s wrong, and that he should shut up.”
Dunno if I agree. Ughhhh, I have struggled with this story, and not just because I hate the Chait piece. I struggled maybe most with the takes. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I ENJOYED those takes, especially Pareene’s and Jia Tolentino’s. But those pieces aren’t really talking to Chait (or his sympathizers), are they? They’re talking to people like you and me. They were written to entertain us, to affirm our fully formed beliefs about the issues at hand. And at the end of the day, it seemed to me like so much wasted breath because no one reading Jia Tolentino really needed her to delve in to the particulars of why Chait’s argument was bad. It was immediately obvious to anyone who read the dek.
I can’t fully endorse that DeBoer take, but it was the first one I read that didn’t seem, like, rote. It raised questions that I’m still thinking about a day later. It’s interesting, Noah, to see you point to Angus Johnston as a measured response. Noticed that guy on Twitter yesterday and he gave me the creeps. I think the college student population DeBoer works with is skewing his perspective on the severity of the “crisis” he describes–and the way he lays out his views sets the same tired “your dissent just proves me right” trap that we see in Chait’s piece. But to respond to his concerns with “you’re just a shitty teacher” seems to me, among other things, ad hominem.
ICYMI some of Chait’s key examples are even worse than they seem on the surface. Jessica Valenti pointed out that Chait mischaracterized that Hanna Rosin hashtag, and Carrie Cutforth (one of the women in that FB group Chait quotes from) says he grossly distorted that conversation for his own purposes.
Anyway, thanks for this piece.
John, I’m of the opinion that free-speech absolutist arguments can end up some fairly awful places as well. Mao and Stalin are terrible, obviously, and you want to watch that, but…well, Andrew Sullivan, free speech libertarian that he is, basically called left folks who opposed the Iraq war traitors (all in the name of battling Islamofascism, don’t you know.) Everybody pretty much wants their opponents to shut up, is the point of this piece.
Kim, I enjoyed Pareene..the Jezebel take somewhat less. I’ve talked to Johnston before, and I generally like him (even though he’s come for me at least once.) His response is personal…but the point, for me, is that Freddie’s complaints really are personal ones that he’s turning into broad policy worries. He’s talking about interpersonal conflict, which can be handled interpersonally, and saying that the fact that he doesn’t know how to handle it interpersonally is the sign of a giant crisis on the left.
I guess Johnston could have been nicer about it — but Freddie’s piece is really snotty too.
Anyway…I’d say that Pareene’s piece and the Jezebel piece were preaching to the converted. This one is at least trying not to do that to some degree (I wrote it for a larger venue, which ended up not being able to use it.) I don’t know that preaching to the converted is always a horrible thing though. Pareene’s piece, at least, clarified my thinking to some degree — and I do kind of think Chait should be laughed at. His is a really bad piece of writing and thinking, in my opinion, and I think he’s a poisonous public figure in many ways, even though I agree with him sometimes. It’s hard for me to live down the Iraq war cheerleading and his apparent lack of regret. That’s a lot of dead bodies to forgive.
Oh, and Pallas, different communities have different norms, of course. If some anon showed up here and cursed you out, I would delete their comment, probably. Is that stifling free speech? Does every space have a moral obligation to allow people to say anything they want forever? I just don’t think that’s a useful way of approaching things. If some sites insist on trigger warnings, I just don’t see that as a sign of intolerance on the left, in particular.
Noah writes:
“If speech were utterly inconsequential, if it had no power, there wouldn’t be any point in defending it.”
I’m probably pointing out the obvious here, but this isn’t so much a paradox as a reflection of an implicit theory language. Namely, that the power of words depends on the power of the ideas they contain. Words, on this view, are the currency in the marketplace of ideas, and thanks to the invisible hand of the market the better idea will prevail. Words are powerful, sacred even, but only as conduits for meaning. Hence the defense of speech even at the apparent expense of the power of words.
To my eye, the problem with this sort of defense is that it blinds us to how words participate in the creation of meaning. Words aren’t merely conduits for meaning. They reflect the position of the writer or speaker, they imply the identity of the audience, and they carry the connotational baggage of previous utterances even as they pick up new meanings. In short, language cannot make ideas equivalent in the way that other units of exchange can be equivalent (dollars for dollars).
For the free speech fundamentalist, this is a bug in the system of language that the market can be trusted to work out. I, on the other hand, tend to view it as a feature to be nurtured by making the spaces of language safer for all. And before anyone cries censorship or thought police, I don’t think we can make these changes through the legal or even social regulation of language. To the extent we’ll get there, it will be through interactions with each other through language that makes it easier for others to speak, and not harder.
Noah, your GamerGate counterexample works, but only because GamerGate has already used their worst tactics on their opponents, so they can only use equivalent tactics on the dissenters within the ranks, like Grace Lynn in the swatting article you linked to. I still think the tendency I describe is generally true.
Regarding the rhetorical trap you and Kim cite, I didn’t see it in the piece. If you were to threaten, shove, doxx, or “emotionally savage” Chait, or show up with your gang at his house while hiding your face from security cameras, you would be part of the problem he cites. All you’ve done is accuse him of exaggerating a problem and falsely isolating it to one intellectual community. None of that is an attempt to silence him.
Is it possible that your other problems with Chait and the positions he’s advocated in the past are skewing your reading? It can be difficult to give an argument a fair hearing when we have antipathy toward the speaker.
All that said — great title.
Noah,
All this time later, it probably doesn’t matter, but I can’t see how I wasn’t engaging with your arguments. I argued that you misrepresented Chait in terms of his goals and pragmatic purpose, that your attack on his use of evidence was muddled, and that your “it’s the same everywhere and worse over there” argument is completely beside the point. I assume you disagree. But to claim that I’m just nit-picking and playing word games seems churlish.
Personally I really liked your arguments, elsewhere, about about how this handwriting on and about the left is just as damaging to attracting the like-minded and producing action as any mean Tweets could be. But that’s a different argument than the one you make here, which settles into a tepid mode of “it’s all free speech everywhere, so you can’t talk about attacks on speech anywhere” and “if you attack some kinds of speech somewhere, you really aren’t interested in the rigorous defense of free speech and democracy.”
How is one supposed to take this inflated response to Chait’s inflated piece? I think Chait is wrong in many areas, and large chunks of essay are weak (I like deBoer’s better, in part because it is upfront about the limits of his claims, scope, and situation). But when you say things like “[Chait doesn’t think] the cacophony of the Internet is worth listening to” — while you, generously, do think there is something worthwhile there — you tell me that you aren’t really trying to argue against anything other than a caricature of his argument.
On the lameness of Johnston, see Kim. (Great comment!) To impute deBoer’s anger or reaction to some deflected feelings about his own inability to do anything as a teacher, that’s just crap. And for Johnston to lead with this? Double crap.
Johnston isn’t imputing the piece to DeBoer’s deflected feelings. Johnston is answering DeBoer’s question. DeBoer says, what should I do? Johnson says, if you are a teacher, you should intervene. If you don’t intervene, you’re doing a bad job as a teacher. That seems correct to me (though again, being a bad teacher isn’t a sin — but it’s not the sign of a hideous crisis on the left, either.)
My point isn’t it’s all free speech everywhere. My point is that drawing a line between free speech that is allowable and speech that is harmful or shuts down discussion is difficult to do. It is not made easier in any way by pretending that it is a particular problem of the left, or by attributing it to “PC”, or by pretending that people disliking Hanna Rosin’s book is some sort of sign of incipient Maoism.
What part of that do you disagree with, Peter? Do you honestly think Chait made the case that the left is especially totalitarian? If you think he made that case, explain to me how so, because I don’t see it.
Freddie’s piece seems in better faith, but similarly confused. And in part that’s about tone. The questions he asks are reasonable; they just don’t have anything to do with an apocalyptic failure of the left (which I say in the linked piece.) People should talk about how to handle those issues, but to frame them as apocalypse is not talking about them. There could have been a conversation sans snark where Freddie said, I have these problems in my classroom, and someone (Angus Johnston, even) told him how you can deal with them. Instead, DeBoer uses it as an opportunity to claim unique clear sightedness and brave truth-talking. It’s bullshit.
Someone on twitter just summarized my argument as being that debates about free speech and the left need to move beyond moral panic. Which I think is exactly right; wish I had thought to phrase it that way.
I didn’t read DeBoer’s tone as sneering or hysterical. I read it as frustrated. Noah, your comments about his rudeness and “kicking” Pareene–I just didn’t see that. I also didn’t see him frame the situation in terms of apocalypse.
What did I see? Well, for one thing, I saw him describe multiple incidents, only one of which occurred in a classroom. I saw him say: I see a nugget somewhere deep in this Chait piece that is perhaps obscured by the fact that he’s a raging hellbeast. I saw him say: I’m ambivalent about even bringing it up, because it seems inevitable that people will think I’m a hellbeast, too.
I mean, I guess you’re not calling him a hellbeast. He’s just a hysterical handwringer, an incompetent teacher, and a self-important snob. Right?
Regarding Angus Johnston, I didn’t have a problem with his tone. I had a problem with his content. But since we’re on the subject, I didn’t read his tone as rude. I read it as manic and creepy.
He talks about “Weird Twitter”; he calls the folks he’s calling out “children of privilege”, he tells Alex Pareene that he’s just writing for money and isn’t really committed to the struggle. I don’t know how to read that except as sneering.
He frames several relatively minor interpersonal altercations as being irresolvable because of crippling, worsening problems on the left. I think that’s manufacturing a moral panic.
I don’t think he’s a hellbeast. I say in the piece I wrote about him, I think he’s well-intentioned. I don’t really know if he’s an incompetent teacher; I don’t think Johnston’s conclusion there is unwarranted, but it’s hard to tell because deBoer doesn’t really provide enough context. He could have been a student in some of those situations, or a bystander. Johnston’s point that you can in fact intervene in these situations seems right to me though.
I don’t think I called him a snob? He does generally strike me as kind of self-important, I’ll admit it. I don’t know how else to take the humble seeker, lone truth teller schtick. It really puts me off.
I guess there’s something in that Johnston piece I’m just not seeing. I know a lot of people found it really off-putting. It didn’t strike me as manic or creepy. It seemed like a reasonable answer to a poorly presented question.
He has a longer followup today that I don’t exactly know if I agree with, but which seems generally more helpful.
Are the situations that DeBoer described really so easily defused? Would *you* want to be the white guy telling a young woman to knock it off about the patriarchy, already, in the example he gives about the vet? If anything, the stakes seem higher if that white guy were there in his capacity as teacher if he were untenured, an adjunct or (as Deboer is) a graduate student.
So yeah, I think Johnston’s response was ad hominem. But beyond that, I’m not sure it was particularly sound advice.
I try to defuse situations like that on the blog, actually. I know you don’t like my moderation of the threads, but when I close things down or try to defuse things, that’s what I’m doing, in part, or trying to (not that I’m always protecting people from left on left squabbles, but I am trying to prevent conversations from getting needlessly cruel).
I don’t think it’s necessarily easy to do. I don’t know that I’m good at it online; I don’t know that I’d be good at it in person. Johnston’s saying that, as a teacher who deals with these issues, he has seen this sort of thing, and has has success defusing it, and I don’t have any reason to doubt him. I suspect that as with many things it’s something that gets easier with practice.
And…yeah, I have been in these situations online, at least a few times. There was one incident in which a black woman with a large twitter following was telling a white woman that the white woman didn’t have the right to ask her questions about academic terminology (I think it was about intersectionality.) It was pretty harsh. I didn’t confront anyone in public, because I don’t know that that would have gone anywhere good, but I DM’d the woman and told her I’d be happy to talk to her and try to answer questions. We chatted a little. I haven’t heard from her since.
Did that solve the world’s problems? Did it make the left a happy, friendly place? Did it even make the woman (who as it turns out was poor, and not exactly white) feel better about her experience? No, no, and quite possibly not. But I don’t think it was meaningless. I think people can in fact do that sort of thing. And I think Freddie’s suggestion that they can’t is inaccurate, and doesn’t lead the conversation anywhere good.
Using “Teach Men Not To Rape” as a guide here, I’m not sure about something from your example:
Should we be teaching black women with large twitter followings not to be rude in conversations or should we be teaching nominally white women not to ask black women with large twitter followings questions?
Who’s the aggressive party here? My understanding is that Chait is calling out that kind of behavior. Is that inappropriate? Do you consider your solution ideal?
Hey; I thought the person with the large twitter following was being a jerk, myself. I don’t really know that we can effectively teach people not to be jerks, or never to act like jerks (the person in question who was being a jerk is not a jerk all the time, by any means.) People kind of suck, and not only on the left. But I think you can try to intervene in various ways. If you’re in a position of authority (like I am, sort of, on here) I think you can use that authority to try to prevent people from being totally awful to each other, by closing a thread down if you have to, or banning bad actors. If you’re not in a position of authority, you can sometimes still intervene, or at least reach out to people and try to answer their questions, or at least let them know that, no, everybody doesn’t think that they are the ones at fault.
I don’t think it’s inappropriate to point out ways in which people could act better. I don’t think it’s helpful to pretend that there’s a crisis of massive ideological proportions when there isn’t one, partially because you end up having large scale ideological battles rather than dealing with more appropriate small scale solutions.
Was my solution ideal? Probably not; there’s not much I’ve ever done that I would term “ideal”. I’m glad I did it; I think it was worthwhile.
Kim, have you ever witnessed a situation like this? Did you intervene? Would you intervene in the future? Are there approaches that have worked?
Or Peter, for that matter; you teach, I know. How do you defuse situations like this? or do they never arise really where you are?
LOL. I can’t say I’ve ever seen you shut down a thread on one of my posts at HU because someone was being aggressively politically correct. (If only!) In fact the last post of mine you shut down was because someone made a super weird, sexist comment.
I also think it’s important to distinguish between the version of “political correctness” that DeBoer’s trying to describe and the anger of that black woman in Noah’s story. I mean, I didn’t see that exchange, maybe she really was a huge jerk. But in reading this, it seems to me her irritation was understandable and legitimate. I think DeBoer touches on this in his post today…
She was being kind of a jerk. And the person she was being a jerk too was legitimately more marginalized in a lot of ways than she was; she was light-skinned but black herself, hadn’t finished high school, and was struggling financially.
And yes, often threads get shut down for reasons other than people being politically correct. But that’s kind of my point. Politically correct jerks aren’t really different in kind than people being any other kind of jerk.
Would a response that encouraged a change of behavior, perhaps one that encouraged a more civil and respectful tone, be considered ideal? I don’t really want to be a jerk but I’m conflicted because I don’t want to allow someone else to be a jerk either. It just doesn’t seem right to let a jerk run roughshod over their victims.
Well, as Kim sort of suggested (and as Johnston acknowledges too) depending on the situation and your relationship to the people involved and what the power dynamics are, public pushback can just make things worse, I think. You have to gauge the situation and try to figure out what you think is best.
It does seem like something where people could get training, or advice about it, in classroom situations or in meetings….you know, I’m going to see if I can ask some folks I know who deal with this sort of thing if they want to weigh in. Not sure they will, but worth a try.
On Twitter, I’ve see a lot of people of color (and trans people and sex workers etc.–esp. writers and educators) field “well meaning” questions all the time, and I can see why that would be frustrating. Anyway, it’s a lot easier to be polite when you can speak on these issues from a personal remove.
So, my slightly heterodox suggestion re leftist spaces is maybe that it might be a good idea for people with particular kinds of institutional power to be willing to acknowledge that, and to acknowledge that it means that they can be bullies in certain situations, even when, in the broader culture, they’re members of a marginalized group.
Folks demanding evidence or information on twitter — I totally understand why people would get sick of that, and I have no doubt racial and gender dynamics affect that. When someone approaches you as a resource because they admire you — I understand how that can get old too, and certainly race and gender can play a factor there as well. But it’s also the case that if you’ve got 40k followers or something and someone comes to you because they admire you and think you might be able to answer a question for them — you have no obligation to answer, but if you’re rude to them, the power dynamic is in part that you’re in a position of authority and power and you’re being rude to somebody who has less of both those things in that particular context.
Chait’s contrast between liberals and the far left seems off to me. I don’t think Bill Clinton is a liberal, but more importantly, I’m not sure that the “politically correct” people Chait complains about should be called the far left. When I hear the term “far left,” I think of people like Noam Chomsky and the late Howard Zinn, who sharply attack America’s political and economic system, call for massive structural changes, and probably don’t even agree that “white male privilege” is a problem. In contrast, I think Chait is talking about people who focus on promoting cultural changes with regard to racial, gender, and sexual issues, rather than on promoting changes in economics or foreign policy. Chait identifies political correctness with Marxism, and right-wingers often call it cultural Marxism, but I don’t think there’s much overlap between people who denounce “heterosexism” and “cis-gender privilege” and people who want a proletariat revolution. I think there may even be a bit of mutual contempt between some of the people I call far leftists and some the people Chait is complaining about. For example, I once attended a speech by Ralph Nader (who I guess is part of the far left, even though he technically supports capitalism) in which he cited some appalling statistic about yearly on-the-job mortality in the U.S. and remarked, “I bet that if I made a racial or a gender slur here tonight, it would be all over the papers tomorrow. But no one is shocked by or eager to talk about the statistics I just cited.” On the other end of the spectrum, I think a lot of internet social-justice people would vote for Obama or Hilary Clinton over Nader because they’re sick of having white male know-it-alls in the White House. I’ll admit that I’m a totally complacent non-activist and I could be completely full of shit here, but I did used to subscribe to the International Socialist Review, and I get the general impression that the dichotomy I’m describing exists.
I also think that Chait’s contrast between liberals and far leftists on free speech issues is questionable. On a philosophical level, liberalism does seem like a better free-speech bulwark than Marxism, but that’s not always how it plays out in reality. Marxist Eugene Debs went to jail for vocally opposing conscription into WWI, while the entire American liberal intelligencia (along with most socialists, admittedly) supported liberal Woodrow Wilson’s call for American entry into the war. Similarly, in the 50s, the ACLU refused to defend American Communists, who acted like great civil libertarians at home while supporting Stalin abroad. Also, Chait doesn’t mention Marxists’ main rivals on the American far left, anarchists, who are obviously against speech restrictions on a philosophical level and have fought hard for it in American history. Chomsky, probably the most important figure on the American left today, comes from the anarchist tradition and has defended free speech to the point of becoming embarrassingly entangled with a French Holocaust denier.
There’s definitely a split between old school Marxists who focus on class issues and the post Civil Rights left which tends to be more focused on issues of gender and race. The traditions overlap a lot, not least because race and poverty are pretty inextricable in the U.S. (both in the sense that black people are disproportionately poor and in the sense that inequality is justified in large part by the assumption that the poor will be disproportionately black.)
But yes, I agree, Chait’s use of Marx there isn’t very analytically useful. The suspicion is that he’s deliberately red-baiting. Because he is really a dick.
Noah: “…public pushback can just make things worse, I think. You have to gauge the situation and try to figure out what you think is best.”
The Book of Proverbs: “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be just like him. Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.”
I think you’re saying the same thing.
By the way, Noah, I very much appreciate your “heavy moderation” of the comments here. I’ve been in a number of arguments on this site, and we’ve all played the dissenting voice role (even you), but the debate is never anything other than civil. I know that your experiences in other fora is often very different, and maybe that’s part of why you’ve made HU a safe place. Regardless, thank you.
Aw, thanks John.
Those with large twitter followings kind of remind me of the plight that celebrities have when they become famous. To have such renown has its trade offs.
Yeah…though celebrities at least often choose celebrity in some direct way, and then have money/power to go with it. Folks with large twitter followings have some power and authority, but generally not really money — and they become targets too. So it’s complicated.
I would imagine that twitter celebrities chose to become twitter celebrities as well. I have no idea how one can make money off twitter, but the power and authority is enough of a draw. There are probably some shared character traits between the two groups.
I think getting 10k or 20k followers on twitter can somewhat sneak up on you. Folks who have 100k or what have you are often actual real life celebrities too, but you can have a good bit of oomph on twitter without necessarily wanting to be highly visible, I think, if you’re in the right place at the right time.
My impression is that people mostly concerned with racial, gender or sexual issues are so because they are immediately affected by them, but that also includes economic issues. I’ve heard of bad experiences with communities and individuals (often white and male) anarchists and socialists which might explain some antipathy but not necessarily towards the stated goals of those ideologies. I think most would consider capitalism a system of oppression, just like patriarchy.
A writer for the National Review made some observations on this debate from the right. The system I’m on isn’t letting me paste hyperlinked text, so here’s the whole URL: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/397613/left-realizes-too-late-political-correctness-virus-charles-c-w-cooke
Well, apparently I was wrong about the link. Also, I think the author agrees with Noah regarding DeBoer.
That’s a pretty annoying piece. Among other things, he sneers at people who won’t talk to others, and then vociferously starts listing people who it’s not worth talking to.
Basically confirms my sense that the right is more of a mess on this issue than the supposedly P.C. left. Like, he doesn’t seem to have any idea why it might be worthwhile for a political coalition to try to deal with folks with differing opinions, even strong differing opinions. I think deBoer’s piece is not very thoughtful in a lot of ways, but Cooke can’t even figure out why it’s a problem. “Just write everyone off” is I think a good thumbnail description of the right’s current approach to politics, and Cooke does a good job demonstrating that.
I think he’s saying to write off those who won’t listen to reason; don’t waste your time attempting rational discussion with the irrational, or at least deeply uncritical thinkers. And there’s some truth in that. But several people in the comments section take him to task just as you do, Noah. Walking away can’t always be the answer. Sometimes we have to stand our ground and show that these people are fighting for justice in unjust ways, became the hateful bigots that inspired their hatred. They are, to steal a quote Chris G just used in another piece, warped by constant pursuit. So sometimes we have try and help them see that. If that fails, help the crowd around them see it, so they don’t take anyone with them on their descent.
I agree about the right’s politics, also — far too often writing off people they should be listening to and engaging, then complaining when they can’t get their votes.