Fear and social justice

While I was a college undergraduate, circa 1990, I had a gig working for the university doing math and physics tutoring. As an employee in a position which carried a hint of authority over the students I was tutoring, there was a mandatory training in avoiding sexual harassment.

I walked into the training attentive and interested, thanks to having stumbled into reading a lot of feminist thinkers as a teenager. Indeed, interacting with women as a young straight fella circa 1990 informed by mostly Second Wave feminist writing eventually lead to some women giving me a talking to about how my care with boundaries was so peculiar that they found it confusing. So I am not laying claim to any virtue; I just want to make clear where I was coming from. I had not been told not to read that stuff when I was trying to figure things out. So: attentive and interested.

The training offered good lore and technique.

One thing it stressed was the concept of a “hostile environment”.

In the original Twitter thread which became this essay, I linked some reporting on Governor Andrew Cuomo’s predatory behavior which quoted a senior aide in the Attorney General’s report which offers a horrifying example of that:

I’m disgusted that Andrew Cuomo — a man who understands subtle power dynamics and power plays better than almost anyone in the planet — is giving this loopy excuse of not knowing he made women feel uncomfortable

I point to that because I believed then, and believe now, that we must take very seriously how microaggressions create hostile environments, and that we need institutional interventions against those those patterns.

The trainer told us that our students needed to feel safe. If they did not, they could come to university authorities for redress; I could be subject to various disciplinary sanctions.

The talk about hostile environment and about my students needing to feel safe started to gnaw at me. There was something unsettling in the combination. I needed some support thinking about it. So I asked a question:

“Suppose I say something which I thought at the time was innocent, but on reflection think may have upset a student, so I ask, ‘Hey, I’m worried that I may have misstepped when I said X. If that upset you, then I apologize for my error and will avoid saying something like that again.’ If that student replies to me, ‘No, there’s no problem’, is the policy that they may still come to you and tell you that they answered that way because they did not feel safe telling me the truth, so that I could be in deep trouble?”

“Oh yes,” said the trainer, without hesitation.

“Well I sure do not want to put one of my students in that situation. I would like more guidance, then, about what I can do to be certain that I am supporting my students and complying with the policy.”

The trainer looked at me as if I were stupid … and suspect. She replied, flatly, “Just don’t do anything which makes your students feel unsafe or uncomfortable.” It’s simple, Asshole.

I got a very cold feeling.

I am disgusted by opponents of social justice offering a lot of bullshit grounded in a fantasy about the “silencing power of SJW Thought Police on college campuses”. And yet, there I was in that moment, silenced by dread of zealotry in the name of social justice. I could do my best to avoid stepping wrong, I could actively check in with my students about it, and there was still nothing I could do to be certain that I would not be reprimanded. Asking for policy clarity had obviously been suspicious. So I nodded and smiled and kept my big yap shut for the rest of the training.

I believed then and still believe now that holding me responsible for my students feeling safe was an unreasonable standard.

We need to face responsibility for our behavior, yes. We need to exercise caution about the impacts of our behavior. And we have a greater responsibility for our behavior whenever we hold power.

But one cannot be responsible for other people’s feelings. Further, I consider it dangerous to suggest that we can or should face sanctions not for our actions but for those feelings.

I recognize that I am particularly reactive on this point. I grew up with narcissistic abuse. At a very tender age my parents held me responsible for their inability to manage their own feelings. And this sensitivity born of my own traumas connects to an important part the danger here. Trauma can make people feel disproportionately unsafe in the presence of things which are modest threats … or even not really threats at all.

That trauma responses can be unpredictable and disproportionate shapes the responsibility we do have for our behavior. We still need to take care; we must work hard at it. And we must do that with the understanding no measure of care can entirely prevent the traumatized from feeling unsafe.

We need a better cultural politics of trauma. Social justice advocacy must take the emotional trauma of the marginalized seriously. We must prioritize care for that trauma both as a strategic goal of the better world we create and also as part of the tactical method by which we work toward justice.

And if we take the reactions of traumatized people as the whole truth, we are not helping them heal. Accepting traumatized reactivity as the highest standard of truth enables cycle-of-trauma abuse patterns. Punitive power mounted on that post is a very bad idea. I knew that very personally and directly. Hence my cold feeling in that moment.

If we are to keep the worst people in the world from recruiting moments of dread like I experienced to legitimize their opposition to social justice, we cannot allow them the opening to claim that they are The Only People Brave Enough To Talk About This. We need to frankly recognize that these moments of legitimate dread do happen. We need to offer a thoughtful critique which both sees a real problem with things like what I was told in that moment and which defends the prudent social justice practices from which that moment emerged. If we do, it not only defends against opponents of social justice, it offers directions toward better social justice advocacy.

I count myself lucky that I stumbled into a commitment to feminism before I experienced that moment. I count myself lucky that I did not grow up in the current environment awash in propaganda leveraging such experiences to recruit young men to fascism.

Experiences similar to my moment of dread contributed to weird reactions men have had to the MeToo moment. Hearing critiques of horrific abuse couched in terms which drift toward implying impossible demands that men never misstep at all has led a lot of men to imagine that the world is stringent about preventing sexual harassment when it is in fact the opposite. This makes predators’ rationalizations of “innocent misunderstandings” sound too plausible. To my shame, there have been times when I have been among the men slower to accept what predatory men have been accused of than than we should have been, because we thought we lived in world where no one could possibly get away with the things those predators did.

I want strong, wise, and effective social justice advocacy. We must build a world where everyone is safe. We must build a world where everyone can feel safe. We must do this with a focus on supporting the people who are now least safe. I am certain that this is possible, even though I do not know all of how.

A friend picked up on how my story was, in part, about me asking how to correct my inevitable mistakes:

Yes…and when i read her thread [below], i realize that the very definition of safety for me comes with courage and mistake making. And most institutions, academic and otherwise allow for and reward dehumanization of ourselves and others. So when i read threads like the one you link to, I find them problematic for many reasons.

So that, too: we need a cultural politics which enables us to face mistakes.

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The Twitter thread which became this post was inspired by another thread by Jennifer A. Frey, who made an observation which many people circulated:

I am informed by my university DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] office today that every student has a fundamental right to “feel safe.”

The way I would describe doing philosophy is feeling like the ground is moving out from under you. Nobody “feels safe” doing philosophy if they are doing it correctly.

This sort of language is quite generally ill suited to the life of the mind and open inquiry. Nobody opens up Homer, Toni Morrison, or Darwin to “feel safe”. Inquiry requires fortitude and determination & a healthy awareness that truth unsettles and doesn’t flatter/comfort us. All of this talk of a right to feel safe obscures this. I challenge anyone to define this “feeling” in such a way that doesn’t cut against free and open inquiry and the dogged pursuit of truth. I have yet to see anything close to a helpful definition of this “fundamental right”.

One of the beautiful things about the life of the mind is that it requires that we get over ourselves and our need to protect ourselves from reality. It can be shattering, but real liberation is like that. Liberal learning is supposed to liberate, not protect feelings.

Imagine if universities called their students to have the courage and determination to pursue the truth together as a common end? Imagine if they reminded students that this requires mutual respect, civility, and other virtues?

I care a great deal about diversity and our school needs to better reflect our state’s demographics. Students should be respected and have equal access to opportunity to learn. But there is no fundamental right to “feel safe” and making up this right doesn’t help students learn.

We should be honest with students: inquiry is unsettling and that’s not only ok but good. Helping students feel safe should not be a priority for an institution devoted to learning. Civility, respect and justice should be concerns.

Rather than these supposedly neutral terms like health and safety, we should be talking about what respectful, civil pursuit of the truth looks like in practice. We should be open and honest about the challenges and demands of university life.

Finally, as a philosophy professor, what am I to do to protect this fundamental right that my students feel safe? I have no idea. Philosophy terrified me when I first began it—it made me question everything and I felt unmoored. I had various existential crises bc of it.

I am glad for that disruption, though it was difficult for me. So I’m very uncomfortable with all this talk of a fundamental right to feel safe. And btw philosophy is still terrifying—it has never made me feel safe, nor should it.

That thread inspired a very smart comment by Dr. Johnathan Flowers, underlining how engaging with the inherent danger of some things demands vigorously maintaining an environment which makes work & learning as safe as possible:

Okay, so. I think the fundamental problem with this take is that is conflates “feeling safe” and “safe spaces” with a space absent of “dangerous” activities. Further, this take, like many of its ilk, fails to think seriously about the meaning of “safety” in this context.

Allow me to provide an example: When I taught motorcycling, one of the things we reinforced was that riding a motorcycle was an inherently dangerous activity, and that each rider must choose the level of risk they adopt. This is verbatim from our training guides and manuals.

The point of the ridercoaches and the training program was to create a safe space for students to engage in the inherently dangerous activity of riding a motorcycle. We did so through control over the student activities, ensuring students understood directions, and vigilance. To be clear: we created a space for students to engage in an inherently dangerous activity while cultivating student awareness of the risks they took when engaging in the inherently dangerous activity, both on the range and on the street, through controlling the space.

For example, we limited the speeds of the students early on in the course so that they could learn to safely handle the bike. We spent an entire day on the range familiarizing the students with the controls and the “bite” of the engine when easing out the clutch.

We did everything in our power early on to create as save an environment for students to practice this dangerous activity, and this included removing students who were a danger to themselves and others for the sake of the whole class.

The second example, obviously, is from the martial arts. A dojo is a space for people to practice an inherently dangerous activity. It is also a space for learning. In the dojo, the instructor’s responsibility is to not only cultivate technique, but organize the space. By which I mean, the instructor must be sensitive to students’ level of skill, and willingness to engage in the dangerous activity, and adjust the class accordingly.

Further, the instructor must be sensitive to student dynamics: they must intervene when a student is abusive. And by “abusive,” I don’t simply mean in the malicious sense: I mean in the sense where a student may genuinely think they know better, and in so doing, end up demoralizing or otherwise impeding student learning. In essence, they become “that guy” in class who must be dealt with.

Again, the focus is once more on creating a space where students feel safe engaging in the dangerous activity.

This is, unfortunately, what this take and the people dunking on it miss. It is not that philosophy needs to be “safe” and not unsettle people or be “dangerous.”

It’s that philosophy can be dangerous, and if we’re going to teach people philosophies that are dangerous in the broadest sense, we need to do so in a context where they feel safe to explore these dangerous concepts. As they become more comfortable, we remove the guardrails.

However, there is nothing in the instruction of philosophy (or any other subject for that matter) that requires us to make our students fundamentally unsafe. This is a misplaced understanding of what we do when we challenge students and it reflects something shitty in pedagogy.

You can challenge students in an environment where they feel safe. As a shinkendo instructor and a senior student in a variety of martial arts, I did so quite often at the request of my instructors or when I felt the student was ready. When they weren’t, I backed off.

Knowing these limits is part of pedagogy, and knowing how to create a space where students feel safe in their exploration is also part of pedagogy. Unfortunately, it is a part of pedagogy that is lost through appeals to “rigor” and “challenge,” both of which are shit excuses.

So yeah, a whole bunch of people need to re-evaluate their approaches to pedagogy before they kill the discipline with it.

Oh wait.

Related: Dr. Nerdlove on Why Can’t He Stop Worrying About Being A Creeper?, which is smart … though I have to challenge the implication that the bloke asking not have real friendships with women. When I was an awkward young fella, I worried about being a “creeper” because I had friends who trusted me enough to tell me about their encounters with “creeps”.

It’s less that the dominant cultural narrative is that approaching women is bad, it’s how much you’ve heard this or read this in places and how much it conforms to what you already believe.

Yes, when I was that guy my insecurities reïnforced that worry, but I think it is wrong to think that I picked up those warnings because I had the worry.