Forgotten creeds from the summer of 2020
The first time I heard somebody recite a land acknowledgment was at a symposium in Edmonton. The year was 2014. The speaker, one of the literature professors who organized the event, acknowledged the claims of various groups of indigenous people to the land on which the University of Alberta was built. I think he mentioned the Cree, Blackfoot, and Métis nations, among others.
My first thought was: interesting. My second thought, almost simultaneous with the first, was: unserious.
How did I know the speaker wasn’t serious? I didn’t have to investigate what was in his heart. I didn’t have to study the history of the province. It was enough to know this: if he were serious about the claims to the land, he wouldn’t be working at the University of Alberta. And if the university were serious about the claims, it would set up shop somewhere else.
The land acknowledgment was similar to the letter of introduction from the fictional character Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Collins apologizes to the Bennet family for being heir to the estate that the Bennet daughters will therefore not inherit. The unseriousness of his apology is immediately apparent to Elizabeth and her father.
“And what can he mean by apologizing for being next in the entail? -- We cannot suppose he would help it, if he could. Can he be a sensible man, sir?”
“No, my dear; I think not. I have great hopes of finding him quite the reverse. There is a mixture of servility and self-importance in his letter, which promises well.”
Mr. Collins is not seriously acknowledging the claims of the Bennets to the land. “Quite the reverse.” He’s seriously going to inherit and occupy the estate. What does he mean when he apologizes to Mr. Bennet for “being the means of injuring your amiable daughters”? Maybe he wants to accept his inheritance graciously, proving that he is the kind of gentlemanlike man who deserves to inherit an old country house. Or maybe the apology is just cheaper than giving up the inheritance. By the same token, the apology doesn’t look like grace; it looks like “servility and self-importance.”
The statements against the racism of academic departments at Pomona College issued by the same departments in the summer of 2020 were unserious in the same way. If the professors who signed the statements believed what they said about the work to which they had dedicated their lives, they would have chosen different lives. Their actual choices were premised on the idea that teaching linear algebra (for example) to undergrads, even to black undergrads, was not a form of antiblackness.
Let’s review some of the unserious things that were said in the summer of 2020 about the serious subjects of racism and law enforcement.
Typically, the statements listed names of unarmed black people who had been killed by police. Most of the lists included George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery (although Arbery’s murder was not part of a police operation). Some lists included Philando Castile, who was shot by a police officer while attempting to disclose the fact that he was carrying a gun; and Tamir Rice, who was holding a toy. Some included Rayshard Brooks, who was armed with a taser that he had taken from police. Some broadened the category to include Sandra Bland and Freddie Gray, who died in police custody.
Next, faculty were supposed to confess their participation in a system of oppression that led to what the department of physics and astronomy called “an endless pattern of police violence against Black Lives.” This was the most challenging of the statement’s generic requirements. It wasn’t enough just to say that “our department,” in this case, the physics department, “[was] committed to examining the role that we play in this oppression”; they had to provide examples, and finding a relevant example of a professor of astronomy playing a role in police violence was taxing to the imagination.
The computer science department offered: “Computer science inarguably enables the closely related technology industry’s structural assault on Black lives.” And this thesis was genuinely arguable. “Inarguably” may have been an overstatement.
The program in Asian Studies confessed to being tainted by the “colonial legacy” in Asia. The faculty of this program may have been confused when they wrote that “the appropriation of black culture in pop culture in Asia” was “less noticeable, but equally significant.” Probably they intended to say the historical effects of European colonies in Asia were more significant than any cultural appropriation, because the former meant martial conquest, destroying nations, and the latter (whatever one might think of the fairness or unfairness of any instance of cultural exchange) was a peaceful practice.
At concert performances of classical music, the music department said, “audience members feel pressured to conform to secret rules about how to dress or when to applaud,” a mild form of social awkwardness. Which (who knows?) may sometimes feel excruciating. And which may discourage some people from listening to classical music. And which may be systematically connected to racial disparities in the justice system in the U.S.. I mean, it’s arguable!
(If the music department objected to social pressure to conform to secret rules, it is unclear why they focused on behavior at concert performances of classical music rather than the pressure now being exerted to make their colleagues write and sign similar departmental statements.)
The final requirement of the genre was to propose changes to research and teaching. The chemistry professors did not claim to know how to solve the problem of racism. But they were willing to learn: “The Chemistry Department,” they humbly submitted,
is actively committing to a process of self-education and reflection. As one element of this process, the Department is purchasing books on anti-racism and inclusive pedagogy that faculty and staff have committed to read.
Meanwhile, in the sentence immediately preceding the above quotation, they took the extreme step of nominating a scapegoat.
We have called upon the American Chemical Society to address and educate our community about the systemic and underlying biases in our field, which are all too apparent in the peer-reviewed Hudlicky article in Angewandte Chemie.
The chemistry department denounced the journal Angewandte Chemie. Why? For exemplifying unidentified “systemic and underlying biases in our field” by publishing the article “‘Organic Synthesis -- Where Now?’ is thirty years old. A reflection on the current state of affairs” by Tomas Hudlicky, a professor at Brock University.
The chemistry department’s statement includes no information about the contents of Hudlicky’s article, not even the title. Maybe you find the mere accusation of “systemic and underlying biases” convincing. Maybe you are open to being convinced. Maybe you would like to see more evidence before judging the article so harshly. If you are waiting for more evidence, you came to the wrong place. Remember these departmental statements against racism do not practice understatement. They certainly do not practice skepticism. Rather, they tend to exaggerate the certainty of their knowledge, to say more than they can support. So you can assume that you are already seeing the strongest, worst evidence against Hudlicky’s article, and you can assume that the article represents the strongest, worst evidence of systemic racism in the discipline of chemistry. The professors who signed the statement tried to show they were serious -- serious about finding systemic bias, serious about reform. Denouncing Hudlicky’s article for unidentified systemic bias was the best they could do.
Having confessed that white supremacy was embedded in their discipline, faculty might appear to lack the disciplinary authority to solve the problem of racism. Their research, said the department of psychological science, was “complicit in contributing to systemic inequities,” but because of their research, they claimed expertise in repairing the inequities.
We acknowledge, and research in our discipline
(the same discipline whose complicity in inequity they had just proclaimed!)
has confirmed, that much of the harm done is not consciously or intentionally racially motivated and that to focus mainly on rooting out white supremacy or even white privilege would be an evasion of our responsibility to create equity. Therefore, we are committed to actively addressing the cascading consequences of white supremacy and white privilege embedded in our department and larger communities.
How could they know whether their research was creating inequities or repairing them?
A few departments managed to issue statements that did not attack their own authority. The professors who taught in the program in Gender and Women’s Studies did not acknowledge their complicity in white supremacy, so they had no scruples about declaring themselves experts in virtuous action. “We are responsible,” they said, “for righting history.” They had the authority, according to them.
The intercollegiate departments of Chicano/a and Latino/a Studies and Asian American Studies were similar in that they did not see a need to change themselves structurally in order to eliminate antiblackness, although they did acknowledge an obligation to denounce antiblackness if it appeared in their communities. Mostly they made demands:
Substantive, material commitments -- including but not limited to, funding initiatives, faculty and staff hiring, departmental and curricular expansion, and student recruitment and retention -- to begin to address the pervasive culture of anti-Blackness at the Claremont Colleges.
. . .
We urge the administration to create systems of support and appropriate compensation to address the incalculable damages that this systemic dehumanization has on Black faculty, staff, and students at the Claremont Colleges.
“Funding initiatives,” in other words, money. “Appropriate compensation,” in other words, money. To compensate for “incalculable damages,” if payment could be calculated where damage could not.
The economics department made a series of deeply ambiguous promises.
Looking inward, as we move forward with renewed urgency in addressing issues of economic justice, we re-commit ourselves:
• In working with formal models, to make clear that abstractions such as markets and capitalism are embedded in and affected by systems of power, inequality and racism;
• In formulating and interpreting empirical work, to be mindful of hypotheses stemming from analyses centered on systems of power, inequality, and racism;
• In the treatment of our discipline, remember that the focus on positive economics and getting the “objective” facts right can stifle important normative discussions . . .
According to one interpretation, they were promising to change the fundamental practices of their research -- “working with formal models,” “formulating and interpreting empirical work,” “getting the ‘objective’ facts right” -- so they could “move forward with renewed urgency in addressing issues of economic justice.” Possibly they were going to rename themselves “department of economic justice” rather than “economics.” Possibly they were promising to change the very object of their study, to cross out “scarcity” and write “justice.” Or, alternatively, they might have been listing the tradeoffs involved in doing what they had always done, and promising to remember them. For example, when they focused on “getting the ‘objective’ facts right,” they were necessarily electing to “stifle important normative discussions,” because it was more important to get the facts right than to tell people how to be good, because they lacked expertise in how to be good, and because no one wanted to hear from them how to be good.
These statements were forgotten soon afterwards, except by the chemistry department, which posted its statement on its department website. The denunciation of the peer-reviewed article by Professor Tomas Hudlicky of Brock University, which featured prominently in the version of the chemistry department’s statement distributed in June, was removed from the version posted in November. By then, the journal had depublished the article and disciplined the reviewers who recommended acceptance, and several members of the editorial board had resigned.
In this way, the department participated in a process that took place mainly on social media, at the end of which Angewandte Chemie yielded to the pressure of a mob of people who were not necessarily experts in chemistry. For example, Professor Philip, a fiction writer, made a small contribution to this mob action. In a reply sent to the entire Pomona faculty, he wrote: “That’s an appalling document.” He was referring to the article titled “‘Organic Synthesis -- Where Now?’ is thirty years old.” Just as the chemistry department did not identify the “systemic and underlying biases” in the article, Philip did not state what appalled him. “It matters enormously,” he continued, “that we stare such evidence in the face and consider its implications.” His email did not say what the evidence was, what it implied, or what difference our consideration of this evidence would make.
Why would a celebrated literary author write an email like that?
Philip’s email, like the statement from the chemistry department, like all the departmental statements, and like the mass of social media posts that denounced Hudlicky’s article in Angewandte Chemie, might be supposed to communicate virtue. Mainly these statements communicate “a mixture of servility and self-importance,” in Austen’s phrase. They might seem like cost-free gestures; in fact they are destructive to reputations, careers, disciplines, institutions.
Earlier I said these statements were promptly forgotten, but that isn’t quite right. I mean, it’s probably true that no one -- almost no one -- thinks about the wave of departmental statements against racism from the summer of 2020. But everyone remembers the price we paid for issuing those statements.
And the price wasn’t cheap! Think of the price paid by Professor Hudlicky, whose article was depublished, and whose reputation was marred by vague and therefore unanswerable intimations of racism.
Then there’s the price paid by Angewandte Chemie. Everyone knows the editors don’t stand by their authors. They don’t respect the results of peer review. They depublished an article -- not for demonstrated plagiarism or academic fraud, but in response to social pressure.
Philip, too, had to pay a price. He had to watch himself writing that email, and other people had to read it. Anyone who observed him adding his voice to a campaign to pressure an academic journal to depublish a peer-reviewed article might quickly forget his exact words but would be sure to remember how he treated people whose opinions he thought were unpopular.
That is the price paid by all professors who sign such statements. Rather than acquiring a moral authority that no one wants to give us, we confuse ourselves, we gain a reputation for moral confusion, and we pay for it with our actual authority.