There’s a growing movement among the alt-right (white supremacists) and cultural conservatives calling for “diversity of thought”, to make college campuses “unsafe spaces”, rather than confronting the historic and ongoing structural injustices that people typically mean when they talk about a “lack of diversity.” In an odd twist, the Social Justice Warriors - a slur used to describe people who work for civil rights - are blamed by conservatives for causing divisiveness with their PC (politically correct) culture. As part of Spiked Magazine’s Unsafe Space Tour (Dec 11, 2017), Steven Pinker claims that “political correctness has done an enormous amount of harm” and played a role in radicalizing the alt-right: “when they are exposed for the first time to true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses, or in the New York Times, or in respectable media,” Pinker argues that they are not “inoculated”.
As an example of true statements that people won’t have heard on college campuses or in the respectable media, Pinker uses this: “Men and women are not identical in their life priorities, in there sexualities, in their tastes and interests.” Really? ‘Sex differences’ has never been given widespread voice? Contra Pinker, it’s absurd to think that people are not exposed to what is in fact a dominant ideology about differences in men and women because of a repressive PC culture. Look at any advertisement, movie or TV show, or even the New York Times. Just read any David Brooks column, such as this one about “identity politics”, which argues against the idea that we should see gender relations in terms of oppression. “In societies like ours, individuals are responsible for their own identity, happiness and success… We each have to write our own gospel that defines our own virtue. The easiest way to do that is to tell a tribal oppressor/oppressed story and build your own innocence on your status as victim.” Brook’s position on “identity politics” is a page out of the alt-right playbook. There’s no lack of ‘diversity of thought’ caused by PC culture for kids to be exposed to.
In a clarification of his point about men and women not being identical, Pinker alludes to Larry Summers: “A very famous person on this campus did say it, and we all know what happened to him.”(39:50) What Summers actually said was that “issues of intrinsic aptitude” better explain the lack of women in science rather than a “pervasive pattern of discrimination that was leaving an extraordinary number of high-quality potential candidates behind.” According to The Guardian, “During Dr Summers’s presidency, the number of tenured jobs offered to women has fallen from 36% to 13%. Last year, only four of 32 tenured job openings were offered to women.”Summers goes on to say: “”It does appear that on many, many different human attributes — height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability — there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means — which can be debated — there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined.” Far from merely floating some sexist thoughts out into the supposedly coddled safe-space of campuses, Summers and a whole system of sexist ideology has actively shaped the university system. The ‘diversity of thought’ that the alt-right laments has long been at work, gaining real ground in material expression.
The call for “diversity of thought” finds perhaps its most famous champion in the economist Thomas Sowell. In writing about university admissions, Sowell surmised that that “a diversity of viewpoints is not welcome”: “Diversity of physical appearance is the be-all and end-all, but diversity of thought is no more welcome than it has been under the Taliban in Afghanistan.” Sowell uses the same kind of overblown equivocation - no, universities are not murdering people - that’s common in the alt-right. Pinker, a big fan of the “mind-expanding” Sowell, basically parrots Sowell (2001) on the idea of ‘inoculating’ students:
“Even if the academic Talibans of the left were correct in all their beliefs about all current issues, it would still be dangerous to leave students unable to weigh and analyze alternatives for themselves, because the issues in the years ahead of them are almost certain to be different. What they were taught will become progressively less relevant and the mental skills that they have not been taught can become a crippling handicap for them—and for our society.”
The idea that the Academic Taliban cripples students ranks high among the batshit alt-right claims. Interestingly, Sowell is much appreciated among the neo-traditionalist educational crowd in the UK. Katherine Birbalsingh, head of Michaela (a ‘no excuses‘ school), says she loves Sowell’s wisdom:
“The political left has never understood that, if you give the government enough power to create ‘social justice,’ you have given it enough power to create despotism. Millions of people around the world have paid with their lives for overlooking that simple fact.”
Again, it’s a false equivalence to compare people who work for social justice to despots. But it fits into a narrative that supports a small state along with a highly individualized responsibility for one’s own success. In the Guardian interview, Birbalsingh links the strict behaviour policy at Michaela - detentions for being one minute late or not having a pencil - to the population it serves:
But would Michaela need to be strict if it was in a wealthy suburb such as Hampstead rather than deprived Brent, where 30% of pupils are on free school meals?
“I don’t think it would need to be. But I think all schools should be like this,” Birbalsingh says.
Educators in North America will likely be more familiar with Doug Lemov than Michaela, but it’s the same idea: discipline is the best medicine for poverty. From this neo-traditionalist point of view, the real issue of diversity has nothing to do with addressing the historic debt to people of colour and white women based on their systemic exclusion from power, but from a lack of conservative voices in universities and neo-traditionalist representation at conferences. Influential UK blogger Andrew Smith writes about how calls for more inclusive representation at conferences is really a ‘smear’ attempt: “It’s almost as if “diversity policing” on social media, where people harass organisers of education events for not having enough diversity in their speakers, is actually about trying to silence traditionalists and/or teachers and nothing about diversity at all.” While Smith is largely irrelevant outside the UK unless you have a rude encounter with him on Twitter, the conservative policy elites often reference his ideas (whether or not he’s had any success in the classroom). There’s simply no systemic exclusion of this neo-traditional point of view. In fact, it’s been the norm for most of the history of education. Any anxiety provoked by loss of traction in a changing educational world is best understood as the kind of unsettling that happens whenever privilege is contested.
Part of the alt-right strategy relies on drawing false equivalences between white supremacists, Mao, and despots with people who work for social justice.Jordan Peterson says that social justice activists are dangerous because the share the same “identity politics” ideology as Mao. There simply isn’t a valid comparison here. Overwhelmingly, the harassment and violence comes from the right-wing white supremacists, and is homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic in nature. Joshua A. Cuevas describes the harassment he faced from white supremacists who “use their collective “power” to harass someone in a public position who belongs to a minority group.” Tressie McMillan Cottom has also written about how she needs “contingency plans” to be safe at her university, and has arranged with her institution to locate her office to “minimize foot traffic from strangers” just to do her job. (Yes, this does make Pinker sound like a dangerous asshole for calling to make campuses “unsafe spaces.”) Far from being left-wing indoctrination cults as Jordan Peterson would have it, universities are conservative institutions according to McMillan Cottom:
“A handful of gender studies courses could not begin to check the power of an economics department or a business school at any university in the U.S. The college down the street from most Americans is a conservative institution that is sensitive to the pluralist needs of the students they serve because its economic viability depends on it.”
One of the most effective ways to rig the game is to cry ‘racism!’ or ‘identity politics!’ when people of colour or people with disabilities try to bring up race or disability as being a factor in how systems treat people. By arguing for a ‘colour blind’ - or ‘disability blind’ or ‘gender blind’ - discourse, institutions and people with power ensure that the game remains rigged because important injustices are pushed off the table for discussion. As Reni Eddo-Lodge articulates, this unwillingness to listen to people when they talk about injustices they have experienced stems from an emotional disconnection on the part of the hearer:
“I can no longer engage with the gulf of an emotional disconnect that white people display when a person of colour articulates their experience. You can see their eyes shut down and harden. It’s like treacle is poured into their ears, blocking up their ear canals. It’s like they can no longer hear us. This emotional disconnect is the conclusion of living a life oblivious to the fact that their skin colour is the norm and all others deviate from it.”
There’s no reason to let the alt-right sabotage movements for justice with the cry for ‘diversity of thought.’ Reactionary conservative, white supremacist, neoliberal colour-blind, and patriarchal thought has shaped systems of power for long enough. In fact, it’s never gone away. Perhaps most importantly, we can’t give the socialist left an easy pass here when they also dismiss calls for racial justice as identity politics. People need to work to establish the emotional connection that would help them understand the experience of long-silenced voices. There’s so much work still to be done.
Header by Tim Gouw
Please take the time to listen to all of Reni Eddo-Lodge: