Most people understand concepts related to racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry in this way—they focus on intent. If, on the basis of group membership, you dislike people, wish them ill, or intend to do them harm, you are a bigot, even if you say or do something that inadvertently or unintentionally helps members of that group. Conversely, if you accidentally say or do something that a member of a group finds offensive, but harbor no dislike or ill will on the basis of group membership, then you are not a bigot, even if you have said something clumsy or insensitive for which an apology is appropriate. A faux pas does not make someone an evil person or an aggressor.
However, some activists say that bigotry is only about impact (as they define impact); intent is not even necessary. If a member of an identity group feels offended or oppressed by the action of another person, then according to the impact-versus-intent paradigm, that other person is guilty of an act of bigotry. As explained in an essay at EverydayFeminism.com, “In the end, what does the intent of our action really matter if our actions have the impact of furthering the marginalization or oppression of those around us?”21
It is undeniable that some members of various identity groups encounter repeated indignities because of their group membership. Even if none of the offenders harbored a trace of ill will, their clueless or ignorant questions could become burdensome and hard to tolerate. Comedian and diversity educator Karith Foster, a black woman who is married to a white man, had a particularly difficult experience when her husband was taken to the emergency room after a nearly fatal motorcycle accident. As hospital personnel asked him about his medical history, he slipped in and out of consciousness. Foster began to answer for him, but nobody seemed to be listening to her. “For the first time in my life I felt invisible,” she said. She told us that a doctor glanced at her indifferently and finally asked—in a detached tone of voice—what her relationship was to the patient. Then, as they treated her husband, more members of the all-white staff asked her that same question with a similar intonation, until finally Foster was on the brink of tears. “It wasn’t the question,” she told us. “I understand that by law and hospital protocol it needed to be asked. What was so disconcerting was the tone I perceived.” She remembers clearly thinking, “Am I seriously having to deal with this racist bullshit RIGHT NOW? As my husband’s life is on the line?!” She described what happened next:
I wanted so badly to lose it and scream at the hospital staff: “We’re living in the twenty-first century! It’s called a mixed-race marriage!” But I knew my emotions were getting the best of me in this incredibly stressful moment and were leading me to label the doctors and nurses as racists. I was assuming that I knew what they were thinking. But that’s not the way I normally think when I’m not under so much stress. It took everything I had, but I took a deep breath and practiced the C.A.R.E. model22 that I teach: I reminded myself that everyone was doing their best to save my husband’s life, that the stress of the situation might be influencing my interpretations, and that I needed to keep the lines of communication open. Doing that must have shifted how I was coming across, because although I don’t remember acting any differently, it seemed like all of a sudden the doctors began showing me X-rays and explaining the procedures they were doing. One of the attendants even went out and bought me a cup of coffee and refused to let me pay for it. That’s when I had the epiphany that what I had experienced wasn’t racism. No one was being malicious because I was black and my spouse was white. But for them to fully comprehend our relationship, they had to change their default ideas of what a married couple looks like.23
Foster told us that in dealing with hospital personnel’s insensitivity, “without taking a step back, I could have made an awful situation a lot worse.” After the emergency—her husband is doing fine now—Foster made sure to speak with the hospital administration about the insensitivity and lack of awareness she and her husband experienced, and the administrative personnel were receptive and apologetic.
It is crucial to teach incoming students to be thoughtful in their interactions with one another. A portion of what is derided as “political correctness” is just an effort to promote polite and respectful interactions by discouraging the use of terms that are reasonably taken to be demeaning.24 But if you teach students that intention doesn’t matter, and you also encourage students to find more things offensive (leading them to experience more negative impacts), and you also tell them that whoever says or does the things they find offensive are “aggressors” who have committed acts of bigotry against them, then you are probably fostering feelings of victimization, anger, and hopelessness in your students. They will come to see the world—and even their university—as a hostile place where things never seem to get better.
If someone wanted to create an environment of perpetual anger and intergroup conflict, this would be an effective way to do it. Teaching students to use the least generous interpretations possible is likely to engender precisely the feelings of marginalization and oppression that almost everyone wants to eliminate. And, to add injury to insult, this sort of environment is likely to foster an external locus of control. The concept of “locus of control” goes back to behaviorist days, when psychologists noted that animals (including people) could be trained to expect that they could get what they wanted through their own behavior (that is, some control over outcomes was “internal” to themselves). Conversely, animals could be trained to expect that nothing they did mattered (that is, all control of outcomes was “external” to themselves).25 A great deal of research shows that having an internal locus of control leads to greater health, happiness, effort expended, success in school, and success at work.26 An internal locus of control has even been found to make many kinds of adversity less painful.27
Disinvitations and the Ideological Vetting of Speakers
Another way that emotional reasoning manifests itself on college campuses is through the “disinvitation” of guest speakers. The logic typically used is that if a speaker makes some students uncomfortable, upset, or angry, then that is enough to justify banning that speaker from campus entirely because of the “danger” that the speaker poses to those students. In a typical case,28 students pressure the organization that issued the invitation, or petition the college president or relevant deans, demanding that someone rescind the invitation. The threat is made (sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly) that if the speaker comes to campus, there will be loud, disruptive protests in an organized effort to stop the talk from taking place. Strategies include blocking entrances to the building; shouting expletives or “Shame! Shame! Shame!”29 at anyone who tries to attend; banging loudly on doors and windows from outside the room; and filling up the auditorium with protesters, who eventually shout or chant for as long as it takes to prevent the speaker from speaking.
As the idea that the mere presence of a speaker on campus can be “dangerous” has spread more widely, efforts to disinvite speakers have become more common. Greg’s organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has been tracking disinvitation attempts going back to 2000; the FIRE disinvitation database currently contains 379 such events. About 46% of the attempts were successful: the speaker was disinvited, or the event was otherwise canceled. Of the events that proceeded, about a third were disrupted by protesters to some degree. For most of the events, the disinvitation effort can be clearly categorized as coming from one side of the political spectrum or the other. As you can see in Figure 2.1, from 2000 through 2009, disinvitation efforts were just as likely to come from the right as from the left.30 But after 2009, a gap opens up, and then widens beginning in 2013, right around the time that Greg began noticing things changing on campus.
Part of this change is because, on some campuses, conservative groups began inviting more provocateurs, especially Milo Yiannopoulos, a master of the art of provoking what he calls “mild rage.” Yiannopoulos describes himself as a “troll” and even named h
is 2017 speaking tour “Milo’s Troll Academy Tour.”31 While trolls have, of course, been around for a long time, the dynamic of troll versus protesters became more common in 2016, and we have used asterisks in Figure 2.1 to show where the line for the left would have been had we not included the seventeen Yiannopoulos disinvitations.32 Many of the speakers who faced disinvitation efforts from the left in 2013 and 2014 were serious thinkers and politicians, including conservative political journalist George Will, and managing director of the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde. Some of them were even clearly left leaning, such as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, comedian Bill Maher, and former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.
Disinvitation Attempts by Year and Source of Criticism
FIGURE 2.1. Disinvitation attempts each year since 2000. Solid line shows efforts initiated by people and groups on the political left; dashed line shows efforts from the right. Asterisks show where the solid line would have been had Milo Yiannopoulos been removed from the dataset. (Source: FIRE.)
Something began changing on many campuses around 2013,33 and the idea that college students should not be exposed to “offensive” ideas is now a majority position on campus. In 2017, 58% of college students said it is “important to be part of a campus community where I am not exposed to intolerant and offensive ideas.”34 This statement was endorsed by 63% of very liberal students, but it’s a view that is not confined to the left; almost half of very conservative students (45%) endorsed that statement, too.
The notion that a university should protect all of its students from ideas that some of them find offensive is a repudiation of the legacy of Socrates, who described himself as the “gadfly” of the Athenian people. He thought it was his job to sting, to disturb, to question, and thereby to provoke his fellow Athenians to think through their current beliefs, and change the ones they could not defend.35
It was in this spirit that Zachary Wood, a left-leaning African American student at Williams College, in Massachusetts, led the “Uncomfortable Learning” series. Like Socrates, Wood wanted to expose students to ideas that they would otherwise not encounter, in order to spur them to better thinking. In October 2015, Wood invited Suzanne Venker,36 a conservative critic of feminism and an advocate of traditional gender roles, to speak as part of the series. Wood’s co-organizer, Matthew Hennessy, explained:
We chose [Venker] because millions of Americans think her viewpoints carry weight, or even agree with her. We think it’s important to get an understanding of why so many Americans do think these really interesting and difficult thoughts, so we can challenge them and better understand our own behaviors and our own thoughts.37
The response from Williams students was so ferocious that ultimately Wood and Hennessy decided they had to cancel the event. One student wrote on a Facebook page:
When you bring a misogynistic, white supremacist men’s rights activist to campus in the name of “dialogue” and “the other side,” you are not only causing actual mental, social, psychological, and physical harm to students, but you are also—paying—for the continued dispersal of violent ideologies that kill our black and brown (trans) femme sisters. . . . Know, you are dipping your hands in their blood, Zach Wood.38
This response clearly illustrates the cognitive distortions of catastrophizing, labeling, overgeneralizing, and dichotomous thinking. It is also a textbook example of emotional reasoning, as Wood himself put it when explaining the decision to cancel the lecture:
When an individual goes so far as to describe someone as having blood on their hands for supporting the idea of bringing a highly controversial speaker to Williams, they are advancing the belief that what offends them should not be allowed on this campus precisely because it offends them and people who agree with them.39
Should a student saying “I am offended” be sufficient reason to cancel a lecture? What if it’s many students? What if members of the faculty are offended, too?
It depends on what you think is the purpose of education. Hanna Holborn Gray, the president of the University of Chicago from 1978 to 1993, once offered this principle: “Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.”40 This, of course, was Zach Wood’s belief, too, and Gray’s principle allows us to distinguish the provocations of Wood and Socrates from the provocations of Yiannopoulos. Unfortunately, the president of Williams College had a different philosophy, and personally intervened to cancel a later invitation made to another controversial speaker.41 In doing so, he implicitly endorsed Misoponos’s dictum that “uncomfortable learning” is an oxymoron. He might as well have posted a sign on the entry gates to the college: EDUCATION SHOULD NOT BE INTENDED TO MAKE PEOPLE THINK; IT IS MEANT TO MAKE THEM COMFORTABLE.
In Sum
Among the most universal psychological insights in the world’s wisdom traditions is that what really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves but the way in which we think about them, as Epictetus put it.
CBT is a method anyone can learn for identifying common cognitive distortions and then changing their habitual patterns of thinking. CBT helps the rider (controlled processing) to train the elephant (automatic processing), resulting in better critical thinking and mental health.
Emotional reasoning is among the most common of all cognitive distortions; most people would be happier and more effective if they did less of it.
The term “microaggressions” refers to a way of thinking about brief and commonplace indignities and slights communicated to people of color (and others). Small acts of aggression are real, so the term could be useful, but because the definition includes accidental and unintentional offenses, the word “aggression” is misleading. Using the lens of microaggressions may amplify the pain experienced and the conflict that ensues. (On the other hand, there is nothing “micro” about intentional acts of aggression and bigotry.)
By encouraging students to interpret the actions of others in the least generous way possible, schools that teach students about microaggressions may be encouraging students to engage in emotional reasoning and other distortions while setting themselves up for higher levels of distrust and conflict.
Karith Foster offers an example of using empathy to reappraise actions that could be interpreted as microaggressions. When she interpreted those actions as innocent (albeit insensitive) misunderstandings, it led to a better outcome for everyone.
The number of efforts to “disinvite” speakers from giving talks on campus has increased in the last few years; such efforts are often justified by the claim that the speaker in question will cause harm to students. But discomfort is not danger. Students, professors, and administrators should understand the concept of antifragility and keep in mind Hanna Holborn Gray’s principle: “Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.”
CHAPTER 3
The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life Is a Battle Between Good People and Evil People
There is the moral dualism that sees good and evil as instincts within us between which we must choose. But there is also what I will call pathological dualism that sees humanity itself as radically . . . divided into the unimpeachably good and the irredeemably bad. You are either one or the other.
RABBI LORD JONATHAN SACKS, Not in God’s Name1
A protest is always a claim that injustice is being done. When a group forms to protest together, they jointly construct a narrative about what is wrong, who is to blame, and what must be done to make things right. Reality is always more complicated than the narrative, however, and as a result, people are demonized or lionized—often unfairly. One such case happened in October 2015 at Claremont McKenna College, near Los Angeles.
A student named Olivia, whose parents emigrated from Mexico to California before she was born, wrote an essay in a student publication about her feelin
gs of marginalization and exclusion.2 Olivia noticed that Latinos were better represented on the blue-collar staff at CMC (including janitors and gardeners) than among its administrative and professional staff, and she found this realization painful. She wrote that she felt like she had been admitted to fill a racial quota. She suggested that there is a standard or typical person at CMC, and she is not it: “Our campus climate and institutional culture are primarily grounded in western, white, cisheteronormative upper to upper-middle class values.” (“Cisheteronormative” describes a society in which people assume that other people are not transgender and not gay, unless there is information to the contrary.)3
In response to this essay, which Olivia sent in an email to “CMC Staff,” Mary Spellman, the dean of students at CMC, sent her a private email two days later. Here is the entire email:
Olivia—
Thank you for writing and sharing this article with me. We have a lot to do as a college and community. Would you be willing to talk with me sometime about these issues? They are important to me and the [dean of students] staff and we are working on how we can better serve students, especially those who don’t fit our CMC mold.
I would love to talk with you more.
Best,
Dean Spellman4
What do you think about Dean Spellman’s email? Cruel or kind? Most readers can probably see that she was showing concern and reaching out with an offer to listen and help. But Olivia was offended by the dean’s use of the word “mold.” She seemed to interpret it in the least generous way possible: that Spellman was implying that Olivia (and other students of color) do not fit the mold and therefore do not belong at CMC. This was clearly not Spellman’s intent; Olivia herself had asserted that at CMC, there is a prototype or pattern of identities that she does not match, and, as Spellman later explained,5 she used the word “mold” to express her empathy with Olivia, because it’s a word that other CMC students use in conversations with her to describe their sense of not fitting in.
The Coddling of the American Mind Page 6