The Bitter Fruit of Identity Politics in Academic Life

Robert Benne on November 16, 2015

Robert Benne is Jordan-Trexler Professor Emeritus and Research Associate at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia.

Since the 1960s, relentless efforts to achieve “social justice” have employed strategies to identify certain minorities and assign them the status of victim groups whose members allegedly view the world the same way. (That’s why conservative black intellectuals are constantly harangued because they “break ranks.”) The perspective of the “oppressed” is then given a special and incontestable view of life, reality, and justice. Contesting it or even having a different view is tantamount to personal assault on members of the protected group.

Meanwhile, members of the majority (white males) who hold power are alleged to be so blinded by their own privileged position that they cannot even recognize their “white privilege.” They supposedly cannot see clearly enough to practice justice. They must bow before the convictions of the oppressed.

This pop-Marxist analysis leads to a balkanization of academic life, something that educational institutions should resist, not promote. Free discussion should be encouraged and protected among individuals, not suppressed by appealing to group identities and ideologies.

Universities — especially elite ones — have been particularly prone to promote identity politics. They cajole, if not require, people to undergo “diversity training,” which sharpens the divisions I noted above. Oddly, however, they don’t include poor whites and cultural or political conservatives in their minority categories, though those folks are real minorities.

The unassailable mantras of “diversity and inclusion” are then used to usher approved minorities into the colleges and universities by affirmative action, though I hasten to add that many of the minority groups get there on their own merit. Schools bend over backwards to invite those minorities into their schools in order to reach their diversity goals.  All faculties that I have been acquainted with also bend over backwards to be welcoming and helpful to members of those minorities. I admit that some indeed bend over too far to accommodate them by relaxing standards.

Enter the “grievance industry,” which hyper-sensitizes the approved victim groups.  As members of such groups, they are viewed as particularly vulnerable to any perceived offense — now called “micro-aggressions” — and must be kept in”“safe places” to protect them from offenses that might “trigger” bad feelings. These “triggers” can simply be ideas with which they disagree. When such happens the aggrieved group and their allies feel free to organize protests to denounce, humiliate, and publicly shame the poor sap who committed the “micro-aggression.”

As a result of these dubious moves, we now have insane protests at the University of Missouri and Yale. Unbelievably sensitive people (who can afford to attend universities like Yale) feel threatened by insults which are unlikely to come from fellow classmates (Missouri) or by a letter from a professor suggesting that students might monitor their own Halloween parties (Yale).  Brute power is used to quiet even those who invite debate about these terrible micro-aggressions.  Such power is used to demand resignations of the President of the University of Missouri, as well as the professor and her husband at Yale.

Some conservatives might rejoice in the chickens coming home to roost in the houses of those who themselves built the edifice of identity politics and the grievance industry. As for me, I’m reluctant to cheer for several reasons. First, such nonsense over minor sleights may well deaden us to real injustice when it happens. This is already happening when people lose their jobs for committing micro-aggressions. Real injustice was the kind of macro-aggressions that were suffered by the first blacks who entered the University of Alabama in the 1960s. The nonsense at Missouri and Yale dull our capacities to recognize real injustice.

Second, it reminds me of the 1960s when — as a young professor in Chicago — I experienced the attacks first-hand, some of them violent,  at universities by militants whose goals were totalitarian. They wanted to squelch any dissent that didn’t conform to their radical agenda through the threat of violence.  There are whiffs of that in both Missouri and Yale; all we need is violence to fill out the picture.

Third, such protests reveal the cowardice of so many in academia who immediately buckle under pressure, apologize as any defendant in a show trial must, and grovel their way out the door.  Many other faculty run for cover. Where are the ones who will stand up for a genuine liberal spirit of robust debate? What an embarrassing picture of the academic world!

The truth is most educational institutions have not gone as far down the road as Missouri and Yale. Most minority students do not participate in mob rule. Some academic leaders resist it. Let’s hope that common sense and true liberalism prevail in the rest of academia, and that these exaggerated charades do not blind us from real oppression in the world, the kind that actually harms people.

There is a good deal of continuity between this anti-liberal hysteria in the universities and the anti-Christian animus in some of the current attacks on religious freedom in society. Indeed, conservative Christian groups on some campuses are the first to be censured — and perhaps banished — for offending the sensibilities of the aggrieved groups.

In the broader society those who have conservative religious beliefs are often subject to the same sorts of humiliation and shaming if they express their religiously-based moral convictions in public. It would take a brave Christian individual or institution in the San Francisco area to stand up publicly for the classic Christian teaching on the nature of marriage.

A conservative Christian college I worked with recently asked me to avoid the hot-button sexuality issues in my lectures since they were fairly close to San Francisco. The intimidation led to self-censure.

The fruits of identity politics have been bitter indeed. On many contested issues in our society there may yet be freedom of speech in our society, but very limited freedom after speech.

  1. Comment by DavidPHart on November 16, 2015 at 6:02 pm

    In the 1960s, the radicals claimed to loathe violence – but then they practiced it.
    Now they claim to loathe bullying – and they practice it to the hilt.

    The SJW has zero ability to see his own hypocrisy. Why aren’t the adults in the universities calling them out on that?

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