Call-out culture, a mode of confronting actual or perceived injustices through strident acts of public censure, usually via social media, takes on a curious patina in the supposedly more civil world of academe. In 2010, I co-founded a feminist blog with a group of friends, who were academics and activists. In 2011, we issued a series of call-outs to the burgeoning SlutWalk Movement — whose marchers protested rape culture and victim-blaming — for its faulty and limited racial analysis. A consensus among feminist bloggers of color seemed to emerge about SlutWalk’s racism, and the movement lost critical momentum. Pressing “publish” on a blog post had begun to give ordinary dissenters a power they never had before.
There is both pleasure and peril in having that kind of power. The immediate pleasure of call-outs comes in the form of catharsis and clicks. The peril comes when we rob ourselves of tools — better analysis and robust forms of protest — that can help us to respond to structural forms of injustice.
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.
It is identity politics that makes white scholars believe that their whiteness does not play a role in the kinds of scholarly questions they ask.
This past spring, Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College, published an article in the prestigious philosophy journal Hypatia examining the identity claims of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who identified herself as black. Tuvel’s article took on a controversial topic and might have, if argued differently, offered us better analytic tools for thinking about race- and gender-identity debates. Instead, she argued that transracialism can be fruitfully compared with transgenderism, and that it constitutes a legitimate racial-identity position. Other feminist academics, including both white women and women of color, immediately took to social media and decried this work as transphobic and racially insensitive. Tuvel received severe criticism and experienced harassment and name-calling both publicly and privately.
Both Tuvel and the editors of Hypatia were encouraged to apologize for her piece and to retract it. In an essay defending Tuvel, who was her doctoral student at Vanderbilt University, Kelly Oliver argued that “the feeding frenzy ... couldn’t have happened without social media,” and that “the viciousness of the attacks was fueled by the mob mentality of Facebook.” Dissenters, she argued, were “afraid to voice their opinions in public.” More recently, Oliver has written that she herself now fears “being subject to public shaming on social media, and receiving private hate mail.” As a regular recipient of hateful email, voicemail, and snail mail anytime I write publicly against white supremacy or patriarchy, I understand her trepidation.
But there is a qualitative difference between being the recipient of outrage because you are fighting the good fight and having to deal with the outrage of marginalized people who see your rhetoric as harmful and divisive. When one is ducking discursive daggers, perhaps those distinctions seem difficult and beside the point. But our ability to attend to the subject position of the outraged — to evaluate the messengers, as it were — is critical to our ability to avoid false equivalencies.
In 2014, I voiced a similar set of concerns about the sometimes vicious and vehement kinds of rhetoric that can happen on social media. I argued that the toxicity of debates between and among feminists on Twitter didn’t seem especially helpful to black women, whose expressions of outrage, I feared, made it too easy for white feminists to dismiss them. 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.
And I, too, worry when the demand to get woke street cred on social media takes the place of the kind of careful thinking that scholars are charged to do. It is important for scholars to ask tough and even sticky questions, even when those questions or concerns rub up against the political demands of the moment.
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.
Those who uncritically assert their academic freedom refuse to consider how they are positioned in existing structures of power. Yes, I am invoking Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality. It’s important to say that, because Kelly Oliver, Mark Lilla, and others might think that what I am doing is asserting a facile notion of identity politics, about who gets to ask which questions. For instance, Oliver’s resentment is palpable in her defense of Tuvel, when she writes:
Part of the problem with the response to Tuvel’s article is that some seem to feel that they are the only ones who have the legitimate right to talk about certain topics. At best, this is identity politics run amok; at worst it is a turf war. Indeed, it leads to a kind of academic Selfie culture where all we can do is take pictures of ourselves and never consider the lives of others.
The ahistoricism floating around the unarticulated but sharp edges of Oliver’s assertions here boggle the mind. No questions have ever been off-limits for white scholars. In Ibram Kendi’s recent book, Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Nation Books, 2016), he tells us that in 1664, Robert Boyle, the father of English chemistry, wrote in Of the Nature of Whiteness and Blackness that “the physics of light ... showed that Whiteness was ‘the chiefest color.’ " Boyle claimed that these were objective conclusions, uncolored by his personal opinions. Isaac Newton was influenced by Boyle’s work when he said white light was the standard from which all other colors derived. Boyle’s and Newton’s claims weren’t objective. They were white. It is identity politics that makes white scholars believe that their whiteness does not play a role in the kinds of scholarly questions they ask.
During the height of the Rachel Dolezal debacle, I, too, called for scholars to take up the question of identity logics that undergirded claims of transgender versus transracial identity. I argued that as scholars we must dig in and figure out if perhaps Dolezal had exposed the limitations of thinking about race and gender according to social-constructionist logics. But when I called for this conversation, I made sure to own the potential for harm I might do to my trans siblings, and tried to let them know that I did not ask these questions to delegitimize their existence but rather simply because the integrity of the scholarship on gender demanded that we clarify these kinds of matters. It mattered that I was entering a fraught debate about gender and racial identity as a cisgender black woman. That positionality and the structural harms (and cisgender privilege) associated with it absolutely shaped my concerns about what Rachel Dolezal meant to articulations of black womanhood.
Clearly Tuvel’s white womanhood matters for how she thinks about Rachel Dolezal’s right to invoke racial plasticity: It prevented her from seeing the potential pitfalls of a white woman making the case for another white woman to assert her right to become a black woman. What I know for sure as a dark-brown-skinned black woman is that the dictates of transracialism as Tuvel argues for it are not available to me. If I woke up one day, told people I identified as a white woman, and insisted that I be able to move about the world as one — well, I hope you see the absurdity of such a position.
What those who become fixated on their right to speak really mean is that they don’t want to be held responsible for the harms their work might cause.
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.
Feelings are not facts. Indeed, Oliver makes an important point about the ways that feelings should not trump scholarly analysis: “In a culture that increasingly values raw emotions uncontaminated by scholarly analysis, the uncritical legitimation of feelings as the basis for moral authority becomes a form of political leveling. If unexamined outrage is the new truth, then we are moving dangerously close to a form of reactionary politics that closes down difficult discussions and prevents us from distinguishing between sexism or racism and critical discussions of them.” I do not disagree with anything Oliver says here. The thing is: White supremacy, patriarchy, and transphobia are facts, and those of us on the losing end of those systems have every right to feel — to put it colloquially — some type of way about how the material facts of these systems shape our lives.
The black feminist rage that animates many of the responses to the scholarship of white feminists is far from unexamined. In fact, our rage is eloquent, clear, and deeply contextual. Much of that rage is at the ready precisely because the claims of white scholars to expertise and objectivity, even as they simultaneously advance work that does harm to our communities, are neither new nor original.
But this is bigger than the flap over Rebecca Tuvel. Last month, a tour of writers and thinkers called the “Unsafe Space” Tour came to Rutgers, where I work, for a panel titled “Identity Politics: The New Racialism on Campus?” Their pitch for the event read in part: “We believe in free speech, and we want to discuss what role identity politics, and what’s often called a ‘culture of victimhood,’ is playing in the debate about race on campus. From ‘cultural appropriation’ to ‘microaggressions,’ are student activists re-racializing campus life?”
I refused to attend because protecting my blood pressure was paramount. What the organizers failed to see is that campus culture has never not been racialized. Their very framing of the event demonstrates a problem at the core of this debate over academic freedom and freedom of speech: Dominant groups want to engage in harmful discourse without accepting that hurtful speech and shoddy scholarship can have actual victims.
How is it harmful to simply ask these questions? What is wrong, for instance, with an academic journal like Third World Quarterly publishing a piece called “The Case for Colonialism”? Why would thousands of people sign a petition calling for the editors to retract it? Campuses and academic journals should be the space to ask tough questions, shouldn’t they, even if those questions are unpopular? Won’t academic vetting processes weed out bad argumentation?
Sure, campuses and academic journals should be spaces to have a range of conversations and to have debates about things that matter. Vetting processes, however, don’t always work: The apologetic for colonization was reportedly published despite having been rejected by peer reviewers. Eventually the publisher withdrew the article, after the editor had received death threats. That kind of violent trolling and harassment is absolutely unacceptable.
It is also unacceptable to publish work that defends the right of any nation to violently colonize another group. Trying to make the case for colonialism, given what we know about the genocide of indigenous folks and the multigenerational trauma of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, is harmful. It is not merely a difference of opinion. But this is often how freedom of speech works for white academics — they are given a platform for their ideas, even when it is clear that the ideas don’t meet academic standards. Academics from communities still dealing with the ravages of colonization have every right to be outraged.
We simply must acknowledge that academic inquiry is absolutely capable of doing harm. Whole bodies of scholarship argued that women were a weaker gender, properly subject to the rule of men. The history of Western thought and science is predicated on the argument that African and indigenous peoples are inferior races. None of the questions that researchers ask issue from value-neutral terrain. And because the American landscape is so deeply tethered to notions that whiteness (and maleness) are neutral, objective, superior, then often the kinds of debates that academics want to have are intrinsically harmful. If there is anything objective that we can say, it is that.
My questions about Rachel Dolezal had the potential to do harm to trans people. Freedom of speech and inquiry does not absolve us of responsibility. Speech is rarely without consequence. But what those who become fixated on their right to speak really mean is that they don’t want to be held responsible for the harms their work might cause. They want to escape accountability.
Thus it becomes easier to recast efforts to hold them accountable as attacks, especially if you aren’t used to hearing the tears and pain of other people.
This, then, is the challenge. Before we have a conversation about civility, ground rules, and freedom of speech, it is incumbent upon all of us to think about the identity positions from which we make certain claims. The embodiment of scholars is central rather than incidental to their scholarship — not a constraint on academic freedom, but a reasonable limit on claims to objectivity and universality. As a black woman whose research is about the black female intellectuals who came before me, I never indulge the fantasy of noninvestment.
That does not mean that scholarly distance doesn’t matter. It does. But scholarly authority does not erase the embodied experiences and social investments of the very researchers who produce this work.
Academic freedom and freedom of speech are never primarily about the rights of people with power. They are always about the rights of people who would be silenced by those with more institutional or structural power. Having powerful white academics claim that marginalized groups — trans people, black people — are impinging on their academic freedom misses the obvious point that those groups rely on freedom of speech to be able to dissent from harmful ideas and to resist their dissemination. These dust-ups in academe are always about who has the power to shape knowledge production. So I must always stand with those who have to fight for the right to be heard.
This doesn’t mean that I don’t wish for more loving and sometimes less combative modes of engagement. Yes, in addition to calling out, we should call in people more. Perhaps sending an email or making a phone call would be more helpful than using an open letter or a fiery blog post as a first line of defense. At the same time, our scholarship is more public than it has ever been, and sometimes this means that accountability for ideas must happen in the public square.
We can agree that name-calling, career threats, and harassment are not the same as accountability. We can exercise more care with each other. But we can’t reserve all our outrage for the fiery reactions of the marginalized and injured while studiously minimizing the provocations of those who throw scholarship and language around like hand grenades.
Brittney Cooper is an associate professor of women’s and gender studies and Africana studies at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, and the author of Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (University of Illinois Press, 2017). Her book Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, will be published in February by St. Martin’s Press.
