Indeed, both the right and the left have converged on an emphasis on student sensitivity, which was far less prominent in the debate’s earlier phase. When, in 2015, incoming freshman at Duke were assigned Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home, a group of Christian students refused to read it on the grounds that, in the words of one student, “it was insensitive to people with more conservative beliefs.” Note the form of the argument: not, “Fun Home is immoral and in my view it is wrong for Duke to require it; I will therefore refuse, as an act of protest, to read it,” but rather, “Fun Home is offensive to me on the basis of my identity as a conservative and a Christian.”
This is not the only incident involving Fun Home. In 2016, when the book was assigned to first-year cadets at West Point, four of them received a religious exemption. (I have this story from a friend who used to teach there.) They still had to read it, but the inspector general’s office pasted pink pieces of paper over the offending panels. These Christians have seamlessly adopted the logic of identity-based harm from the curricular hypochondria of the activist-student left. In the same year, for instance, an op-ed in Columbia University’s student paper called “Our Identities Matter in Core Classrooms” warned about the “impacts that the Western canon has had and continues to have on marginalized groups”: “Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ is a fixture of Lit Hum, but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background.”
The language of much anti-CRT legislation develops these themes of harm and vulnerability. Consider one such bill, passed in South Dakota in March 2022, prohibiting the teaching of “divisive concepts,” including any concept suggesting that “an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race, color, religion, ethnicity, or national origin.” The rhetorical escalation from “discomfort” to “anguish” mirrors the language of the activist academic left, in which psychic unease gets figured in relentlessly catastrophic terms — an irony not unremarked by critics of such bills. As one columnist mocked, “Something unexpected is happening to Republicans: They’re getting in touch with their own emotional vulnerability, and making policy demands based on ensuring that people’s feelings don’t get hurt.”
Read an excerpt from Montás’s book here. For Louis Menand’s extremely critical take on Montás in The New Yorker, see here; for a defense of Montás by Brian Rosenberg in our own pages, see here. And check out Sánchez Prado’s essay in LARB.