Sure enough, when Venker wrote about the cancellation on Fox News, she said, “The students who took issue with my appearance are as sensitive as their feminist leaders, who are notorious for cowering in the face of opposition. And I understand why: their arguments are weak. And weak arguments can’t hold up to scrutiny.”
My piece in response to the cancellation took Venker’s visit from a campus controversy to a nationwide scandal. I began receiving calls from editors at national newspapers asking for a quote, an interview, or a written response. CNN, The Washington Post, and many other outlets covered the controversy surrounding the decision to cancel Venker’s speech as part of a bigger conversation about free speech and whether colleges and universities should protect students’ feelings by offering a “safe space” that keeps out oppositional voices.
Even my mom called me when she saw what I’d written. “You have handled yourself like a man,” she said. “That’s how I raised you to be.” We hadn’t talked much since my visit during my senior year of high school, but now we began to speak on the phone once every couple of weeks for thirty minutes to an hour at a time. My mom supported everything I was doing, read every interview I gave and article I wrote, and provided me with some valuable nuggets of wisdom about how to approach different people in light of this controversy.
By then, we had a tacit understanding that the only way we could move forward with any type of relationship was to look forward, not back, and essentially pretend that nothing bad had ever happened. So that’s what we did. I sensed from our talks that she was more stable and better able to restrain her emotions than she had been previously, but we never spoke about the past. Instead, we focused our conversations on how I could answer certain interview questions, and she helped me develop a core competency in conducting effective media relations.
When I wasn’t doing interviews, writing articles—which I did for a national outlet every month going forward—or focusing on my course work, I took my own advice and sat down with students one-on-one and in groups to understand their perspectives. It was important to me to demonstrate that Uncomfortable Learning was about more than winning an argument; it was also about understanding what mattered to other people and why. So, as part of my own uncomfortable learning, I focused on trying to engage with various people who disagreed with what I was doing.
The tenor of these conversations varied, based on whom I was talking to. If someone came at me aggressively, I hit right back. But if people just wanted to talk and express how someone like Venker made them feel, I did my best to listen attentively so that I could understand as fully as possible and then let them know which factors of their analysis and experience resonated with me.
Many of those students remained unconvinced, but I felt confident that they left our discussions knowing that I was not simply evil or opportunistic, and that instead I had valid reasons for what I was doing—even if they were reasons they personally disagreed with. I learned from those conversations, too, that some of my critics weren’t merely as hypersensitive and intolerant as I’d assumed. Some of them had a more sophisticated and nuanced argument. They believed that these issues had been conclusively decided upon and were no longer up for debate, and that belaboring the issue was unnecessarily hurtful, bordering on abusive. Though I understood their perspective better, they did little to sway me. The way I saw it, if millions of people still believed in what someone was saying, it was essential to engage with their argument and directly take it on.
After the uproar over Venker, Chris and Jake decided to step down as presidents of Uncomfortable Learning and left me to run it by myself. That was fine with me. Chris and Jake had been the ones to cancel Venker’s speech, so I reinvited her the next day. Unfortunately, she had already published her speech online, so she declined the invitation.
Uncomfortable Learning already had the next speaker planned—KC Johnson, a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center and the co-author of The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities. Johnson had drawn criticism for his beliefs that campus policies unfairly presume guilt when a student is accused of rape or sexual assault. Chris, one of the former co-presidents of Uncomfortable Learning, had originally invited KC and wanted to rejoin now that things had settled down. I welcomed him back and set about preparing for the event.
I had some sense of which students on campus would be most upset with Johnson’s visit, so I tried to preempt some of the potential uproar by seeking out certain individuals beforehand so that I could explain my position one-on-one. I told them, “I’m not convinced by many of the things KC Johnson has to say about campus sexual assault policies, and I’m sure you disagree with him, too. That’s why I’m hoping you’ll come to the event and take him to task. That’s what this is all about. I’m not asking you to come and listen to him so he can change your mind. I’m asking you to come and counterargue as hard as you can.”
When we announced the event, I got nothing but radio silence. There was no uproar. But I still wasn’t sure how the event itself would go. Would there be protests? Silence? Maybe no one would show up at all. As I stood near the podium in front of the lecture hall, chatting with Johnson before the lecture began, I saw several students I’d spoken to and a few from various activist groups on campus enter the room and take their seats near the front. There were students from BSU, the Williams College Feminist Collective, and other minority student groups. By the time the lecture began, the room was mostly full. And I was happy with the turnout.
Johnson’s lecture went smoothly. He was professional, polished, and well prepared. Then came the time for the question-and-answer session. More than a dozen people in the audience challenged him, asking smart, pointed, well-crafted questions. Among the most pointed was a question about how his analysis accounts for the pervasiveness of misogyny and sexism as is clearly manifested in STEM fields.
Johnson was shrewd and perspicacious and answered each question thoughtfully, ramifying and clarifying his answers when necessary. He never folded under the pressure, but students in the audience made him work. Many of his claims were duly challenged, and weaker areas of his argument were clearly exposed. In the end, it was a great debate, with ideas being exchanged, criticized, and complicated in a fruitful way. It was a beautiful thing to see, and I leaned against the door at the back of the room thinking, This is exactly what we need.
If the story ended here, it would seem as though I’d done the impossible and successfully transformed campus culture to be more tolerant and open to free discussion. But I wanted to take on other, more controversial topics, too, so I embraced the challenge of bringing them to the forefront of campus debates.
CHAPTER 11
Evolution
That winter of 2015, all anyone around the country could talk about was the upcoming presidential election. Williams was no exception. We discussed it in class, in the cafeteria, and even at parties.
I was particularly interested to observe and better understand the role that race had played in the campaigns and in the media coverage. It was such a sensitive and complex topic, and I saw that some of the people who cared about race relations in this country the most also thought they understood the subject so well that it was no longer worth discussing. But my life had taught me that confidence, like aggression, could betray my intelligence if I wasn’t cognizant.
In some sense, the issue of race was a lot like evolution. Everyone had some idea of how it works. But when was the last time I’d met someone who could explain the evolution of the human eye? There were a lot of smart people in the world who tried to explain things that they’d never seen or experienced. It was like talking about constellations without understanding the intricacies of how a telescope worked. I saw nothing inherently wrong with this, but I tried to be mindful of the difference between relying on reason and imagination.
I wanted to take on the issue of race the
same way I tackled every issue that was of personal or intellectual interest to me. And that was by hearing as many different perspectives on it as possible to develop a nuanced understanding of why people thought and felt about it the way they did. In my mind, this was the natural next step for Uncomfortable Learning—to invite a speaker with controversial views on race so that we could confront racism head-on.
After the successful event with KC Johnson, who had been last on his docket of speakers, Chris had hopped back off the board of Uncomfortable Learning. Now I was running it on my own with the help of a few peers who had joined after Johnson’s event. They saw that I had faced a lot of criticism and chose to join the club because they believed in its mission and the impact I was trying to make on campus. I enjoyed having them on board and was glad that students had taken an interest in UL.
I remembered hearing about John Derbyshire, a pop-math author and longtime columnist for National Review. He’d been fired a few years before for some writings that were widely believed to be racist. In particular, Derbyshire published the script of a “talk” that he recommended white and Asian parents have with their kids about what made black people different from them and the threats they posed to their own children’s safety. He claimed that 5 percent of black people were “ferociously hostile” to whites and argued that if white and Asian parents warned their children not to stay long or live in predominantly black communities, it might end up saving their lives.
When I decided to invite John Derbyshire to speak at an Uncomfortable Learning event, I understood that backlash was inevitable. As a liberal black Democrat, I knew that I’d be seen as a traitor or a sellout at worst, and as a closeted conservative at best. But I believed in the work that I was doing, and I was ready to take on my critics and fight back effectively to demonstrate that racial controversies could be intellectually engaged in meaningful ways.
After everything I’d experienced that year, my ambitions were clearer to me than ever before. With the kind of change I wanted to make in the world, I could not back down or withdraw. There would always be resistance to what I wanted to do, so I had to learn how to work productively with people of various ideological stripes. And the best way to do this, I saw, was by interacting with them and trying to get a sense of who they were beyond the scope of our respective opinions on controversial issues.
When Randall Kennedy came to speak at Williams the year before, I had tried to find points we disagreed on so that I could understand him better, even though we shared many of the same views. Now I wanted to do the same thing with Derbyshire. I disagreed with him vehemently on most issues, but did we share any commonalities or points of intersection? If so, what were they? How could I use that knowledge to inform the ways in which I engaged with politics and controversy?
I was aware that every major reform ever passed in this country had been grounded in a deep knowledge of people’s circumstances and therefore why they needed realities to change. I didn’t expect that I would be able to persuade someone like Derbyshire, no matter how much information I might have presented to him. But that wasn’t the point. Debating him would better enable me to expose the flaws in his argument, to argue and defend my own position, and, perhaps, if I did that effectively enough, to change the mind of someone in the audience. On many issues, there are always people in the middle who are relatively undecided. I saw intellectual argumentation as a means of persuading those people and of encouraging them to reflect on visions and viewpoints that might be less familiar to them, given their particular backgrounds and experiences.
For so long, I’d been striving to gain knowledge about topics I was less familiar with. And now I wanted to push myself even more to immerse myself in the complexities of what my opponents thought and felt so that I could use them in service of my own goals. I saw it somewhat like a game of chess. If all I knew going into a challenge was that I detested someone’s views or that I wanted to win, I’d be starting the game with inadequate preparation. But if I knew my opponent well enough to confidently conjecture his moves and lines of reasoning, I could act astutely and respond effectively.
My studies had taught me that there were many ways to create change. Protests and activism were important and meaningful ways of applying social pressure. But I also felt that when we began to fear our ability to bring people to some truth, there was a problem. Yes, there were times when it was sensible to dismiss rank racism and sexism and homophobia and say that a person had not earned a particular platform; yet we still have to acknowledge that person’s individual right to free speech. Engaging with some manner of ideas I felt were obnoxious—as some of Derbyshire’s were—was about believing that they were wrong, and if they were wrong, then that wrongness could be made apparent.
With all that in mind, I posted the invitation to the event. The backlash came swiftly and furiously. People were hurt and confused, but mostly they were angry. Within moments, I was inundated with messages, texts, and comments reading, “Who knew you could be black and a white supremacist?” and, “Zach Wood may look black, but as far as I’m concerned he’s white.”
None of this fazed me, but one afternoon I found a small slip of paper that had been slid underneath my door. “Your blood will be in the leaves,” it read, next to a hand-drawn picture of a tree, with leaves scattered beneath it.
The next day, a blocked number called my cell phone and left a message making implicit threats. I even received a suspicious package that was screened by the Office of Student Life before I could open it. It was from a federal prison and contained a strange letter from a prison inmate.
When I talked to my dad about all this, he said, “You just keep going at it, huh?” He was right. Again, I tried to walk the walk. I sat down to talk to a roomful of black campus activists at Rice House to gain a better understanding of the range of opinions on the issue. The conversation lasted for more than two hours.
“You know what I’m about,” I told them. “You know who I am. What I’m doing with Uncomfortable Learning is trying to use this as a platform to speak to a number of different issues. We can take them on and see them not just as affronts to our humanity but also as opportunities to win. I want you guys to win,” I assured them, “and I want to win with you. But we gain nothing from running and hiding from controversy or pretending that we can censor people we don’t want to hear from.”
Most of the people in the room expressed their dissenting opinions cordially; many were insightful and informative. Toward the end of the discussion, however, emotions rose to the surface. This issue was personal and cut deeply for them. They felt that bringing Derbyshire to campus was an attack on their humanity and black identity. “You may be an intellectual looking for a good debate, Zach,” one person said. “But this isn’t about an argument to me; this is personal. You need to bring a Black Panther or BLM activist and make these white people uncomfortable.”
I understood how painful this issue could be for many black students on campus. Surely, I had my own grievances about racism. And I cared deeply about increasing black success and achievement. But the answer wasn’t to shut down and withdraw. Real change could only come from engaging and getting outside myself by trying to put myself in the shoes of another person whose ideas I could not fathom.
The students in the room were understandably angry, and I appreciated their willingness to sit down and talk with me, but they didn’t really seem interested in sustaining an argument with me. It felt like they wanted to persuade me, to welcome me back into the fold whenever, as they saw it, I came to my senses. I was not able to persuade them, and vice versa. But I listened to everything they had to say and spent some time over the next few days reflecting on how my decisions would impact their experience at Williams.
There were some people on campus, though, who supported what I was doing. Cole, in particular, and several other friends on the basketball, football, and lacrosse teams supported my efforts. Eric als
o had my back to the extent that he was personally offended by the character attacks that were made against me. I appreciated Eric’s loyalty and Walford’s, too. Walford was someone who rarely posted on social media, but when I took on my detractors in the comments section on Facebook, he was there, liking my posts and encouraging me in person to “keep pushing.” He told me, “I wouldn’t do what you’re doing, and I’m not even sure I agree with it, but I know what kind of guy you are, and you have my support, man.”
But my efforts did little good. When my phone rang just two days after I’d posted the invitation and I saw that it was the Williams administration calling, I knew what was about to happen. I didn’t answer, letting it go to voice mail. Adam Falk, the president of Williams, left a message for me saying that he couldn’t allow Derbyshire to speak on campus. He said that he’d be willing to speak with me about his decision (after it had been made), but I saw no need. Minutes later, he sent a campus-wide message to students saying he was canceling the event.
He’d exercised his power, and now it was time for me to exercise mine. The only power I possessed, besides knowledge, was the written word. I wrote an article responding to Falk’s decision, calling it “not merely injudicious, but undemocratic, irresponsible, and, frankly, pathetic.” The Associated Press interviewed me about the article, which had the whole campus talking and led to dozens of interview requests. I was gratified to see that most of the media coverage was critical of Falk’s decision to cancel the event, even if some questioned my motives for inviting Derbyshire in the first place.
Even some of my close friends and mentors saw my invitation to John Derbyshire as a personal betrayal. “Zach, you’re consorting with demons,” one mentor told me. “You’re adding your name to a long list of conservatives who’ve turned their backs on their own race.” I disagreed. How was seeking to come to a more nuanced understanding of race and racism a way of turning my back? The way I saw it, those who refused to discuss issues of race or only discussed them one-sidedly were the ones with their backs turned. I took a stand and did so imperfectly, but I did my best. I was confident in my position, yet it was still painful to lose the respect of mentors and peers.
Uncensored Page 20