Yale students speaking out about racism on campus.
I’m not about to join calls for two Yale residential-college masters to resign amid protests or to defend the uncivil “acting out” to which they were subjected. I’ve witnessed and criticized plenty of destructive racial political theater over the years that vilified the innocent and silenced people with legitimate differences of opinion.
But, unlike some observers in the national media, I also understand the difference between mob behavior and the foolish lashings-out of a few 18 – 20-year olds, at Yale or any other college, especially those who didn’t attend well-integrated schools and have found themselves plunged after high school into Yale’s daunting and dazzling campus culture.
Such students often try out ethno-racial flag waving and other gestures of self-enclosure and defiance as they struggle to find themselves.
Sure, some students don’t outgrow the worst of that defensive flag-waving. But most certainly do, as was clear Wednesday night, when four panels composed mostly of Yalies of color spoke to a thousand of us Yale people of all colors who packed into Battell Chapel to hear their accounts and assessments. There was some racial “theater” in a few lines I could have done without, but almost all of what I heard came from the speakers’ hearts and their deepest humanity.
Conservative critics from outside New Haven who are using the current unrest at Yale to advance a political agenda under the cover of “free speech” — like the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf and the Wall Street Journal editorial page — should give these students room and not indulge in apocalyptic scenarios of “liberal” totalitarianism.
No one scores well from such distorted accounts, least of all their authors and others who purvey tiresome narratives about coddled and fragile racial tokens.
Instead of hitting these kids with the “free speech” absolutism that has become the strategy of some distant, churlish pundits ever since the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, they ought to write about these students and their experiences, precisely in order to condemn what should be condemned without broad-brushing the hundreds of students who’ve engaged intelligently and caringly, as most Yalies are doing.
Any exercise of freedom (including freedom of speech) is inconceivable without an exercise of responsibility —in other words, freedom cannot exist without limits against which it defines itself and upon which it therefore relies.
While this principle clearly discredits shouting “shut the fuck up!” at someone who is behaving in a civil manner, no matter how heinous his or her views, it also discredits the disingenuous advocates of “free speech” who, while they are right to say that no bureaucracy should regulate it, are wrong to suggest that that there’s anything really “free” about carelessly degrading and humiliating speech.
I did some over-reacting to that kind of speech myself as a Jewish freshman at Yale back in 1965, when the college was heavily preppy and WASP, even though the worst experience I suffered was an aggressive come-on from the Campus Crusade for Christ – nothing remotely like what many black students experience even at today’s far-more diverse and tolerant Yale. (Even so, upset by my would-be evangelists’ oversolicitude, I sent a letter of protest to the editor of the Yale Daily News and, sure enough, wound up on the CBS evening radio news. Then, as now, news media were mindlessly hungry for sensation.)
In the end, there is no substitute for the self-regulation that develops only when a civil society has nurtured it and its members have internalized it out of love for the society in which they live. A liberal capitalist republic like ours must rely on its citizens to voluntarily uphold public virtues and beliefs that neither the liberal state itself nor markets can do much to uphold.
The liberal state can’t do it because it’s not supposed to judge between one way of life and another, beyond imposing minimal standards of tolerance.
And markets cant do it because their very genius is to approach individuals as narrowly self-interested consumers and/or investors for limited, focused ends, not to regard them as citizens who are sometimes willing to subordinate their immediate self-interest to a larger public interest and who become larger selves by doing so.
Who or what nurtures us as that kind of citizen? Certainly that’s Yale’s purpose (and it’s the purpose of schools, churches, civic associations, and the New Haven Independent, too). A student who shrieks obscenities may be too angry or pained to remember or practice that restraint. But so are pundits who are dining out on such excesses and the expense of compounding the pain and anger that went into them.
Jim Sleeper (pictured), a lecturer in political science at Yale, teaches a seminar on “Journalism, Liberalism & Democracy.” He is the author of Liberal Racism and The Closest of Strangers.