“You either die a hero,
or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” – Harvey Dent, The Dark Knight (2008)
On the internet it’s very likely that not even dying
could stop you from becoming a villain these days. “Call-out culture” is now a
part of that digital ecosystem and, in essence, “refers to the tendency among progressives,
radicals, activists, and community organizers to publically name instances or
patterns of oppressive behaviour and language use by others. People can be
called out for statements and actions that are sexist, racist, abeliest, and
[etc.]”[1] There is potential in calling out truly dangerous actions—such as
abuse and assault; “like confronting a rapist, for example”—to hold the
perpetrators accountable and to publically call attention to their behavior in
such a way so as other potential victims know to avoid them; nevertheless, there
are serious problems with call-out culture as a form of “political critique.”[2]
Because calling someone out is a highly public event thanks to the social media
platforms that enable the culture, the act is never private and is tantamount
to “a public performance where people can demonstrate their wit or how pure
their politics are.”[3] There are definitely problems with even a seemingly
justified call-out, but the issue of a “statute of limitations,” say, on
statements of a political nature previously made by a person raises its own
questions.
As the second article quoted above suggests, calling attention
to harmful behaviors and actionable acts of violence is one thing, and making
something potentially hurtful, insensitive, or uninformed someone said years
ago the evidence in a trial of that person’s current politics is another altogether.
Oftentimes, however, this latter type of squabble seems to be the focus of
call-out culture. This is the reason why it can be difficult to answer the
question “Who do we actually like and trust?” (or, “Who is really good?”) when
browsing the tweets or blogs of socially- and politically-conscious people. It
seems everyone has some dirt in their past that eventually gets called out,
forcing us to decide if that person was ever really as “good” as they appeared.
It’s a difficult matter to parse generally. For example, I use the term “good” here
as a last resort. What other, better descriptor is there for the something
about that person that shifts the minute an old tweet or blog post or reblog
emerges from their past? Especially when the material is years old, how much
weight should it carry with regard to our current perceptions of that person?
How much does it actually speak to who that person is now and what they
believe? Is it out of line to expect the person in question to apologize years
after the fact for something they said or thought before? I don’t have an
answer—nor, I suspect, does anyone else. What I do know is that The Dark Knight was more or less right:
You’re only good/a hero until you’re not.
Ultimately, call-out culture is only related to the topic
I actually want to address in this post. I want to talk about the supposed “controversy”
surrounding the news that some incoming freshmen at Duke University refused to
read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (as a
common reading experience book) on moral grounds. My immediate reaction to this
news item was to post to Facebook and mock the fact that it was a news item at
all: “‘Extre extre! Incoming college freshmen tend to bring conservative views
with them!’ (Since when is this news and/or surprising to anyone?)” After
posting that initial response, however, I started to think about how this
non-news could be used to address larger issues of personal and political
expression, knowledge, and certainty. I still think that this individual story
is a virtual non-issue—“some” students objected to the book; “several” declined
to read it; even the sites running a story seem to suspect that there’s nothing
remarkable here given that people object to things like this all the time, and
a student not doing the reading? That’s not breaking news.
What I do think is interesting and noteworthy about this
story is how it lends itself to a larger discussion—namely, whether any of the
names attached to the story who objected to Alison Bechdel’s graphic
novel/memoir Fun Home for its open
discussion and depiction of sexuality (and especially homosexuality) will one
day find the things they said now with such certainty coming back to bite them
in a call-out. Let me say upfront that this isn’t me suggesting that that might be comeuppance
of some kind. My natural inclination to mock aside, I take the issues
surrounding this news story seriously. It raises the important question of at
what point anyone ought to make their personal and/or political views public in
any way.
I was already thinking about this topic because I
recently got a new job and in the process of completing my required training
came across the statement that no one should ever post anything to a social
media platform that they wouldn’t want displayed on a banner. That sounds good
and seems to make a lot of sense, but it also ignores the fact that sometimes
what you would want held high on a standard one day does not inspire the same
confidence days, weeks, months, and especially years later. We are often very
certain about things at various points in our lives only to find that certainty
challenged down the road. Part of being human is learning, growing, and
changing. If we generally agree that our progress is forward toward a
fully-developed human being, then the old ideas or certainties we leave in our
wake may no longer apply to the new model. The problem is that internet culture
preserves (and sometimes resurrects) these old ideas down the road, and what
can we do? It’s true that what we post to the internet stays on the internet
indefinitely somewhere, but, again,
what’s one to do about that? At what point is anyone (college freshman or
otherwise) allowed near a computer? We want our ideals on a banner, and we want
the community that comes with rallying under shared ideals.
To return to the specific case of the Duke students,
however, I think that the college seems to have taken the proper, educational
track with the “controversy.” At least, that seems to be the case based on what
a member of the summer reading book selection committee had to say on the
issue: “I would encourage them [students who disagree with the book] to talk
about why they chose to read it or not.”[4] Although I did see comments on the
story to the effect that the students should be indirectly punished in some way
with a quiz or that they should more or less gut it out, it’s much more
effective to make this a teachable moment rather than mete out some form of
punishment to force them into broadening their perspective whether they like it
or not. Specifically, I think that this is an opportunity to foster critical
thinking. It’s easy to see student responses that accuse Duke of indirectly
peer pressuring people into reading the book, or that suggest the university simply
does not know that students with conservative views exist, as worthy of scorn;
in fact, in a national culture that is becoming increasingly (though only gradually)
more progressive-minded, it’s easy to look at the shock—“I thought to myself, ‘What
kind of school am I going to?’”—and perform something akin to a call-out where
all sorts of liberal and educated minds tee off of these kids in particular and
off the very concept of a sexuality-averse conservative Christian faith at
large by wittily, scornfully suggesting that they need perspective or to wake
up and realize their squeamishness is the result of religious dogma and a
doctrine that’s becoming obsolete even in the religious community.[5] It’s easy
to do that, but it’s also wrong, and that kind of aggressive response tends to
only make people of any creed retreat and go on the defensive rather than feel
like voicing and further exploring their ideas is safe.
While I certainly don’t agree with people who claim that
Christians are oppressed in the United States, I do think we don’t do much to not
support such claims when our response to those familiar-sounding words of Biblical
censure is to mock or insist that they are completely, utterly wrong. Is
religion a crutch? Does it serve only to keep people docile to institutions by
suggesting that the rewards are coming not in this world (that belongs to the institutions) but in the next for all those who
are appropriately penitent? It suffices for the purposes of this argument
simply to acknowledge that religion means a lot to people. For many people
(myself included), it played a key, foundational role in their lives. They’ve
defined themselves by it and shaped their worldviews through it. Demanding that
they just give that up and learn better isn’t a productive use of time—particularly
in an educational setting.
There are certainly folks to the right and left of center
politically who would argue that the purpose of college is to “liberalize”
students (though they would say as much with very different intentions and
intonation). It’s simply true that many freshmen come to college with a more
conservative outlook that doesn’t last all four years. Christian films like God’s Not Dead make the case for the
right that the left (namely liberal atheists) are out to tempt or coerce their
children away from the Truth. That’s simply not the case, though. At least, in
my experience, that’s not the case, nor is the purpose of college to “liberalize.”
Colleges don’t churn out little Judith Butlers and Friedrich Nietzsches. To my
mind the purpose of college is to teach critical thinking and to task students
with answering questions more thoroughly while also asking more questions of
things they take as certainties (of which religion is only one). Now,
uncertainty itself can be a kind of mistaken certainty, but that’s not really
the matter at hand. What is is that
it’s not all that surprising for the new Duke students who object to Bechdel’s
work to do so because it “[conflicts] with their personal and religious
beliefs.”[6] It’s also not the college’s job to take those beliefs away from
them, strictly speaking, but it is its job to suggest that this is only one of
many perspectives on the text and to
ask that the concerned parties get beyond knee-jerk reactions of disgust or
outrage that they were even presented with
this particular work to a point where they can find its literary merits and to
understand why someone else might not object to it or might, in fact, object to
their objection.
In all likelihood, a number of these objecting students
will leave college very different from when they entered it. I speak from
personal experience, and lest anyone so inclined think that I am a godless,
postmodern heathen, I will interject only one personal note here: I definitely
came out of college questioning things that I went in believing, but I have a
greater appreciation for my own conservative Christian background than I did
before because I questioned it and
continue to grapple with and try to reconcile a spiritualism that’s very
personal and dear to me with other ideas. Sometimes Christianity as a religion seems
determined to avoid questions, whereas a belief system like Judaism may embrace
them by “wrestling” with texts and ideas and prizing “the ability to question
freely and without inhibition [and] the valuing of difficult questions.”[7] At
any rate, the ability to question the certainty or least staying power of what
one believes may help prevent one from stitching any banners preemptively.
Case in point: Perhaps you’ve heard of Lexi Kozhevsky,
the nineteen year-old who stood in front of police officers in Ferguson and
(in)famously said she “would rather get hit by something than let it hit them.”[8]
If you haven’t heard of Lexi herself, you’ve probably seen her photoshopped
into various other scenarios where she defends everyone from Voldemort’s Death
Eaters to the entire cast of villainous characters from Dragonball Z. I’m trying to avoid particular partialities of my own here
(that Black Lives Matter, for instance), but I offer up Lexi as so many others have
done, albeit with less derision, as an example of the same sort of certainty on
display in the Duke case. Although I cannot speak for Lexi’s personal
experiences or her background, this is a college-aged kid (someone who would
just be starting college), and her casual certainty—“Look guys, discrimination
is a thing and I get it, but we need to say with the people who protect us and
that’s what I’m doing”—seems like the sort that changes with time and
questioning.[9] Or maybe she won’t change. All I know is that I was once a
freshman in a class of freshmen who argued with a professor that there was
nothing racist about The Lion King,
and today I would tell you that The Lion
King is a very “problematic” piece—that it represents an extension of a
cultural association of evil with darker colors; that the “bad” lions live in
the impoverished area of the wilds; etc. People change and grow (and should change and grow), and whether
they radically alter what they believe or not in college, chances are they will
be better equipped to parse those beliefs on the other side and to at least
offer a more nuanced argument than “I’m certain about this and am shocked that
you aren’t.” The problem is that sometimes those certainties, when publically
aired with confidence, come back to haunt you down the road.
Ultimately, it’s simply impractical to say that no one
should express themselves or their views until they’re of an arbitrary age or ambiguous
level of experience—though there is an argument to be made that entering a new
discourse community requires first acquainting yourself with what the pervading
trends in that community are before making yourself heard (God gave us two ears
but only one mouth, after all). The solution to the particular problem of
things people may have once been certain about being brought up as evidence
against them in the future likely lies with reworking the toxicity of call-out
culture and in questioning at every stage of one’s personal growth the
propriety of posting everything you think at a given time in a place where it
can be found and returned to you when you are older, wiser, and perhaps
justifiably embarrassed to once again see that old, dirty banner you thought
you buried years ago.
Notes:
[1] Ahmad, Asam. “A
Note on Call-Out Culture.” Briarpatch
Magazine. Briarpatch Magazine, 2 Mar. 2015. Web. Accessed 24 Aug. 2015. <http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/a-note-on-call-out-culture>
[2] ourcatastrophe. “On
‘Call-Out Culture’ And Why I’m Not Into It.” browcatastrophe. Tumblr, n.d. Web. Accessed 24 Aug. 2015. <http://mewmewfoucault.tumblr.com/post/7909863121/on-call-out-culture-and-why-im-not-into-it>
[3] Ahmad
[4] Ballentine, Claire.
“Freshmen Skipping ‘Fun Home’ For Moral Reasons.” The Chronicle. Duke Student Publishing Company, 21 Aug. 2015. Web.
Accessed 24 Aug. 2015. <http://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2015/08/freshmen-skipping-fun-home-for-moral-reasons>
[5] Ibid.
[6] TWC News. “Duke
University Summer Reading Sparks Controversy.” Time Warner Cable News. Time Warner Cable Enterprises, 24 Aug.
2015. Web. Accessed 24 Aug. 2015. <http://www.twcnews.com/nc/triangle-sandhills/news/2015/08/24/summer-reading-sparks-controversy.html>
[7] Horowitz, Bethamie.
“A Tradition of Questioning Tradition.” Forward.
The Forward Association, 27 May 2005. Web. Accessed 24 Aug. 2015. <http://forward.com/opinion/3565/a-tradition-of-questioning-tradition/>
[8] “Powerful Photo:
College Student ‘Protects’ Police from Ferguson Protestors.” Fox News Insider. FOX News Network, 11
Aug. 2015. Web. Accessed 24 Aug. 2015. Web. <http://insider.foxnews.com/2015/08/11/college-student-protects-police-ferguson-protesters-powerful-photo>
[9] Ibid.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.