A Backward Glance

The Great Campus Racial Reckoning of 2020 on Zoom

Today’ s guest post is the faculty Zoom call diary of a pseudonymous academic teaching in the humanities at a major public research institution somewhere in America. He documents some of the coordinated keening, wailing, teeth-gnashing, genuflection, breast-beating, and other exhibitions of verbal and emotional incontinence witnessed in the weeks and months after the summer of 2020. He is one of many academics forced to forbear such displays and swallow his dissenting opinions in a sustained act of self-protective dishonesty that has forever altered his conception of himself and his peers. Two years hence, it already feels like a window into another era, though one whose manias have been built into the foundation of our shared white-collar reality.

By Kevin Finnerty

There are maybe thirty people on this Zoom call. It is mandatory. We are here to discuss “Student and Faculty Wellness.” First a word from our Diversity and Inclusion officer. He speaks with a conspicuous lilt. He reminds us of our renewed commitments to anti-racism (it is news to me that there was ever an original commitment, but okay). This year, “more than ever,” we are encouraged to bring anti-racist pedagogies to our classrooms, regardless of our course topics. Racism, after all, is embedded in the very structure of the university. If we are to root it out, we must fight it in every department, every program, every lecture hall, even in the literal buildings themselves, which he reminds us, built as they were during the political tumult of the 1960s, were designed to stifle student rioting and unrest, and thus served to disproportionately silence the Black and Brown voices who had the most to gain from these protests. If he is calling to raze the buildings he doesn’t say so exactly, but it is not too far a leap to interpret it that way. Maybe that will be on next year’s agenda. Inshallah.

There is an open question just how much the ideology animating this speech is taken seriously by the university’s rank and file. There are known true believers, of course, among them at least a few of the faculty on this Zoom call. Still, these things typically don’t generate much fuss. The Diversity office has been a constant presence on campus for the last five years. It predates Trump. But its programs and desiderata have always been kept at bay, an afterthought to our core work that has never quite leaked in to our classrooms or department meetings. But not this year. For one, seventy-five percent of my colleagues now have their pronouns listed on their Zoom name. This is up from only a handful six months ago. It is a small sign of a big change.

As the Diversity and Inclusion officer finishes, the Program Director chimes in to remind him of a special event this fall. In conjunction with the Diversity office, the School of Humanities will be hosting Dr. Ibram X. Kendi for a panel discussion on anti-racism in the university. Someone unmutes their video to snap approvingly. The Program Director calls on the Assistant Director to explain in more detail. The Assistant Director has a long face, with her hair up, and reading glasses on the end of her nose. She is affecting exactly the look and demeanor of a cartoon librarian. She solemnly announces a new freshman honors seminar, run by our department, built around Kendi’s bestseller, “How To Be An Anti-Racist.” We are all invited to teach a section of the seminar. There is twenty-thousand dollars in grant money available for developing a new curriculum around the book. The Zoom text chat instantly fills up with eager volunteers.

“Amazing.” Wow.” “What an incredible opportunity.” I give a quick thought to how this has all been managed given our budget deficits, the cut classes. I wonder what Dave, the fired adjunct, who, I hope, managed to score that gig at the community college up the road, might think about this. He would probably say it is a good thing, and his job worth sacrificing.

It is in the next portion of the Wellness training where the histrionics kick into high-gear. We are asked by the Program Director to share our thoughts about managing student and personal stress during the quarter. Fair enough. There is plenty to consider. Depression among student has been on the rise for years. The pressure cooker of quarantine has exacerbated the situation. The first hand that goes up belongs to a junior faculty member. He’s been on staff for only a few years and yet to have his review. He has a thin beard, a touch overweight, and the harsh light of his monitor makes his skin look sallow and stretched.

He begins by reflecting on the Breona Taylor verdict and asks for a moment of silence on her behalf. After a few seconds he goes on. “I think it is so important what we are doing here,” he continues. “Our students come to us for more than just an education. Our classrooms should be a sanctuary from the...” He pauses, working up the courage for whatever comes next.

“...shitshow of the current administration. I can’t even say his name.” He then warns us that we need to be prepared for the possibility of “him” being re-elected. “Imagine what this will do to our students,” he says. His voice gets shaky. “I’m just so scared.” He says this part near to tears. A grown man. From a spacious office in his $3500/month suburban apartment.

The next speaker is a more senior faculty member who chimes in to offer support to her tearful junior colleague, and affirm his concerns. “We definitely need to prepare for the election,” she says. “We should probably hold open conferences in lieu of classes that week. Students will need a place to talk through it.”

“Agree,” says another.

“Can we drink wine on camera?” This is a welcome joke to break the tension. There is uneasy laughter.

The veteran professor suggests we brainstorm how we might respond to students who are uneasy about the current political climate. One faculty member suggests we model radical honesty in class by being willing to cry ourselves and show our students that it’s okay to feel vulnerable. Another professor suggests we give them readings on “community-centered resistance politics” to empower them in their activism. An older male professor sheepishly asks if it’s appropriate to give special concessions on grades and due dates to “Black and Brown” students who may need to take time off from their studies.

“What about the possibility of ICE raids?” asks one. She begins to tear up too, and takes a minute to collect herself. “I think it’s safe to say we’re all just really scared.”

“I’m angry, also sad, but mostly angry.” Another professor says. He is breathing heavy through his mic. He is a tall guy with long hair. He has an imposing physical presence in person, but on camera is reduced in stature. The anger seems forced. “I am really fucking tired of it all,” he says. He chews on the word “fucking,” slightly embarrassed to be saying it. I would like to ask him what “it all” refers to exactly but I suspect I am the only one who is confused. Everyone else seems to understand perfectly.

“Unfortunately we can’t all be angry,” a colleague responds. She was the same professor who suggested we cancel classes during election week. “Please be mindful of masculine centering.”

“You know I don’t mean it that way, Carol.”

“You’re doing it again,” she says.

The Program Director interrupts to say that we all must do better.

Someone whom I have never seen before then speaks up to say that we are all guilty of committing “ontological violence against our Black and Brown students” and must ask what we can do to begin to heal the damage we’ve done. She has a round face and is wearing too much makeup. The camera is positioned too high above her head and you can see her kitchen through the door behind her. There are plastic bags full of groceries on the stove. She says something about “embedded structures.” She repeats the phrase “ontological violence.” None of it makes any sense. She has confused herself and shakes her head in distress. “It’s just such a shitshow,” she says, repeating an earlier refrain. This has become a favorite phrase. She is also now in tears.

“Thank you, Amanda,” the Program Director says.

It dawns on me who this person is. Amanda is our tech liaison. She helps us set up our emails and various accounts with Zoom and other tech service providers. I’ve talked to her once before. She’s young, just a few few years out of undergrad. She told me she wants to go to get a PhD one day. I wonder where she ever learned the phrase “ontological violence.”

--

During the lunch-break I get a call from my closest friend in the Department, a crusty sixty year old Communist who spends his weekends driving around the state helping organize various labor unions. I figure he is calling to commiserate over the morning therapy session. He does not know my politics, but in the past we have shared our suspicions of the incursion of identity politics on the left. I ask him, as a joke, what he can tell me about “ontological violence.” It doesn’t take. He skips over the joke, only to say that the girl was “righteous.” Instead, he wants to let me know the faculty union is starting a “POC caucus” and do I know anyone who might want to join? I say that I’ll ask around. “We can’t let these fuckers win,” he says. I’m not sure exactly who he’s talking about. His main enemy has always been the university admin, but I suspect he’s referring to someone else. “We’re at the crossroads of history,” he says. “It’s us or them.”

--

About ten years ago a small town in upstate New York briefly made headlines when a group of its high-school aged girls started spontaneously experiencing Tourrettes-like symptoms. You may remember. It is said to have begun when the school’s head cheerleader woke up from a nap with a stutter. The stutter escalated into physical spasms, then verbal outbursts. Several other cheerleaders developed the same symptoms over the course of a few weeks. Within months, the afflicted were counted in the dozens.

Experts searched far and wide for an explanation. A virus of some unknown origin. An environmental pathogen, maybe. A side-effect of a bad batch of HPV-vaccine. Erin Brockovich, the famous lady-lawyer, came to town to inspect for toxic waste. But there was no virus, no bad vaccine, and there was nothing in the water. The small town was an ordinary small town, and these girls were, but for their newly acquired disorder, ordinary girls. So, what then?

Eventually a neurologist who had been brought in by the state settled on a diagnosis: Conversion Disorder and Mass Psychogenic Illness. The symptoms were psychosomatic. The girls, in effect, had memed themselves into their illness as a way of coping with unrelated stress.

The neurologist’s diagnosis was consistent with other such cases--a 1965 mass fainting episode at an all girls school in Blackburn, England, the famed “June Bug Epidemic,” among others--and explained both the symptoms and the method of contagion.

The girls, naturally, were not persuaded by this diagnosis, and neither were their families. It stands to reason. Few will readily accept that they’ve gone crazy. They insisted the diagnosis was a cover-up for a more sinister cause. They took to social media to express their outrage. Cable news, happy to string the story along, invited the girls on for interviews. Duringgrad-school, I watched a lot of Nancy Grace and HLN and I remember seeing these girls on TV.

It’s not the kind of thing you readily forget. In spasmodic fits and starts, in obvious--and genuine--mental anguish, the girls testified their lived experience to the world. Knowing what we know now, that it was all in their heads, it is truly a sight to behold.

As the media spectacle reached a fever pitch, cases of the illness continued to mount. Within a month of that first television appearance, twice as many girls were reporting symptoms as in the month before the diagnosis.

But the media could only milk the story for so long. It was an election year and there was much else to report on. Occupy Wall Street. The Trayvon Martin shooting. The story faded from public view. Reporters packed up their cameras and left town. As part of their treatment, the girls were instructed to stay offline. The school instituted special rules barring social media use on campus. Many students were at first reluctant to comply, but in a desperate bid to stave off any additional torment, they eventually gave in to the neurologist’s recommendations and logged off.

By the end of winter, the number of cases had stopped growing. By spring, the majority of girls were showing improvements. By graduation, all but one had been cured entirely.

--

Among those who resist wokeness, I among them, there is a tendency to assume its adherents are by and large engaged in a kind of rhetorical performance to fortify their tenuous grasp on their status as (self-imagined) intellectual elites. The upper-middle-class, highly-educated, conspicuously credentialed, managerial-suite female--the modal woke evangelist--uses the language and posture of wokeness to both gatekeep and to justify new and ever-expansive needs for her otherwise trivial skillset. There is also the common materialist critique that wokeness is used by these same elites, and elite aspirants, as a moral cover for the ongoing dominion over the very same classes of people wokeness is ostensibly meant to elevate. Or that wokeness is a substitute for the far more difficult work of actual social change. Or that it is a perverse pseudo-Christian off-shoot, religion for a nominally godless world. Or, as Glenn Loury has suggested, that having failed to meaningfully rectify underlying racial inequalities over multiple decades and iterations of progressive policy, wokeness is a concession that their political project is dead, and its blanket pronouncements a final rhetorical “bluff” to disguise its corpse.

In all of these conceptions of wokeness, and its function, there is the implicit suspicion that the woke do not literally believe what they say. How could they, when the bare facts about crime rates for example, or the choices they make about what neighborhoods to live in, are so at odds with their stated convictions? They must be, on some level, faking it. How could they reconcile the cognitive dissonance, otherwise? Or at least it seems clear that wokeness is mostly a signal, an in-group shibboleth, and that late adopters especially may even privately be antagonistic to the larger political and cultural project it governs, but like Havel’s greengrocer, are compelled to utter its slogans just to get along; “I am obedient and therefore have the right to be left in peace.”

I would have said the same a year ago, even six months ago. But since George Floyd’s death, and the society-wide paroxysms that followed, my assessment has changed. The character of wokeness is not only different from a year ago in degree but in kind, at least from my vantage point in the hallways of academia. Woke adherents, most of them anyway, are not faking it. Not in the sense the word normally means. While, like the school girls’ sudden Tourrette’s, this turn toward actual, demonstrable conviction is not grounded in anything real, or anyway anything not imagined, its effects are real, these people do in fact believe exactly what they say they do and the consequences of these beliefs, the guilt, the anxiety, the seething enmity at all that is represented by the avatar of Donald Trump, are unambiguously real.

--

In a month, I will be there, digitally, when Ibrim X. Kendi gives his talk. I will watch my colleagues clap like seals, tear up, snarl at the endemic injustices he chronicles, and enthusiastically vow their allegiance as soldiers on the front lines of his war against racism. I will be silent if I can, though I may be called on to contribute this or that anecdote. I will disguise, as I am accustomed to doing, my true beliefs. I concede that this makes me a coward on some level, even a collaborator, and I am prepared to face down the consequences of that personal failing. But more than anything, I will be thinking of those girls from New York. I will hope that before my colleagues find me out, before they discover my twitter feed, or my writings under this name, they will log off, their fever will break, and they will cure themselves of this illness. But I am not counting on it.