The worst thing about college speech codes is how they incite hyper racial consciousness.
Brendan O'Neill | August 5, 2015
are many mad and worrying things about the speech codes spreading
across campuses like a contagious brain funk. There's their treatment of
even everyday words as "problematic" terms of abuse. There's the
branding of the most anodyne forms of friendly banter as "aggressive"
(apparently it is a microaggression to say to a Latino or Native American,
"We want to know what you think"). And there's the idea that even
static objects can commit acts of violence against students: one
university bemoans "environmental microaggressions," which
can include a college in which all the buildings are "named after white
heterosexual upper class males." What these codes add up to is a demand
that everyone be permanently on edge, constantly reevaluating their
every thought before uttering it. It's an invitation to social
paralysis.
But perhaps the worst thing about these tongue-clamping rules is how
they incite hyper racial-consciousness. Indeed, some college speech
codes chastise students who refuse to think racially, who balk
at the idea that they should always be actively mindful of their own and
everyone else's racial make-up.
The "problematization" of students who refuse to think and behave
racially is best captured in a University of California, Los Angeles
(UCLA) guide to "Recognizing Microaggressions."
In keeping with other campus speech codes, the guide treats as dicey
everything from simple questions (such as asking someone "Where were you
born?") to expressions of faith in meritocracy (like saying "America is
the land of opportunity"). But even more perniciously, it warns
students and faculty members against being non-racial, telling them they
must always "acknowledge" other people's race.
UCLA says "Color Blindness," the idea we shouldn't obsess over
people's race, is a microaggression. If you refuse to treat an
individual as a "racial/cultural being," then
you're being aggressive. This is a profound perversion of what has been
considered the reasoned, liberal approach for decades—that treating
people as "racial/cultural beings" is wrong and dehumanizing.
UCLA offers the following examples as "color blind" utterances that count as microaggressions:
"When I look at you, I don't see color."Apparently such comments deny individuals' "racial and ethnic
"There is only one race: the human race."
"I don't believe in race."
experience." But on a campus like UCLA a few decades ago, refusing to
treat individuals as "cultural beings" would have been the right and
good thing. Now, in an eye-swivelling reversal, the polar opposite is
the case: to demonstrate your politically correct virtue you must
acknowledge the skin color of everyone you meet.
The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point similarly advises that
color blindness is a racial microaggression. It lists "America is a
melting pot" as an aggressive phrase. It brands as problematic any
comment by a white person that suggests he or she "does not want to
acknowledge race." Anyone who claims to be "immune to races"—that is,
who prefers not to think about people as racial beings—is viewed as
aggressive.
At the University of Missouri, the guide to "inclusive terminology" lists
color-blindness as a form of prejudice, even as it recognizes that this
term "originated from civil-rights legislation." Once, color-blindness
was considered cool, but now we know it can be "disempowering for people
whose racial identity is an important part of who they are," says the
school.
And in the University of New Hampshire's (UNH) barmy guide to "bias-free language"—brilliantly mocked by Reason's Robby Soave at The Daily Beast, and now disowned by UNH's president—students
are expected to take account of a person's skin color, age, and
heritage before engaging with them. Whether they're being told that
using "American" to refer to people born in the U.S. is wrong, that they
should call Arabs "Western Asians" (what?), the message to students is
clear: judge your acquaintance's skin color, consider his or her
cultural origins, and then decide what to say. Think racially, always.
Gwendolyn R.Y. Miller, a diversity consultant who advises educational
institutions on how to tackle racial microaggressions, says being color
blind is a "microinvalidation," since
it serves to "exclude, negate, or nullify the psychological thoughts,
feelings, or experiential reality of certain groups." She says the
phrase "We all bleed red when we're cut" is a microaggression. (Perhaps
Shakespeare was being microaggressive to Jews (and others) when he wrote
his great, humanistic line: "If you prick us, do we not bleed?") Miller
says the claim that "character, not color, is what counts with me" is a racial microaggression too.
If that line sounds familiar, that's because it is almost exactly
what Martin Luther King said in his "I have a dream" speech. But
American colleges in the 21st century demonize those who follow the King
approach of judging people by "the content of their character" rather
than by the color of their skin. Today, MLK would be viewed as naive at
best and suspect at worst, conspiring to deny the primacy of our selves
as "racial/cultural beings."
But here's the thing: King—like many other postwar radicals, liberals, and progressives—was challenging the idea that people should be engaged with and judged as "racial / cultural beings." He,
and others, preferred to treat people as people, not as products or
expressions of "culture." Now, 50 years on, the regressive, racial
politics of identity has won out over that old humanistic dream of a
post-race society, to such an extent that anyone who refuses to think of
whites and blacks as different is treated as problematic.
New college speech codes don't only infantilize students and stymie
open, frank discussion. They also point to the creeping re-racialisation
of society, and to the rebranding of universalism itself as a form of
racism. Call me microaggressive all you like but, as a humanist, I will
not treat my fellow citizens as "racial/cultural beings."
