Confronting racism on campus is not political correctness run amok

“Racist statements and violence are not only alarming; they are deadly. They cause psychological and emotional trauma. These assaults enter bodies like bullets; they ricochet beyond the immediate area of impact. They fracture, they wound, and they scar.”

This is how a Black junior fellow at Massey College described comments by (now former) senior fellow Michael Marrus. On Sept. 26, when the junior fellow and Marrus sat over lunch at the college dining hall, along with the head of the college, Hugh Segal, Marrus said, “You know this is your Master, eh? Do you feel the lash?”

With these words, Marrus referenced Segal’s position as the “Master” of Massey College: a residential institution for graduate students at the University of Toronto. Students had been working to change Segal’s formal designation. In September 2016, junior fellow Anthony Briggs wrote a letter to the college where he explained how the title is “linked to the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, indentureship, torture, and other cruel aspects of our collective world history.”

Following Marrus’s remarks, students wrote to the college’s administration expressing our concerns about both Marrus’s behaviour and the atmosphere where his statement could be comfortably uttered. Twenty-Two Black faculty members sent a letter to Massey College in support. More than 150 faculty members sent a separate letter expressing the same.

While we were adamant that Marrus must be held accountable for his actions, we resisted framing him as an exceptional character. His words were not an isolated incident. Rather, they reflected episodes that racialized students continuously face in academia. In response, the Massey College Fellowship began the challenging work of mapping a path forward.

Commentators predictably cast the responses by Massey College as political correctness run amok. They questioned a lack of due process. They built on tired tropes of universities as places that stifle thought. The National Post’s Chris Selley laments in a Monday editorial that, “Universities aren’t supposed to have ‘positions;’ they’re supposed to be venues for free inquiry. And the notion of ‘safe spaces’ has come to connote precisely the opposite.”

These arguments are the ill-conceived fruit of schoolyard rhymes where sticks and stones can break bones, while violent words are presumed to be harmless. But we know that words are not harmless. We know that the idiom is empty for a child being bullied. It is equally hollow when adults are subjected to systemic racism and further ridiculed for having thin skin.

Words are powerful; they do not just reflect injustice, racism and hate, they produce and reproduce these in the fabric of our everyday life. Plantation economies required a language that dehumanized Black bodies as chattel. Canadian Confederation required the racist framing of Indigenous nations as savage. The racist hounds of Charlottesville were called forth by Trump’s dog whistles to bigots. Grievous harms visited upon racialized bodies require a language that lays the foundations for violent acts. Pundits argue that this understanding of language is tantamount to Orwellian thought control. But, if they hung up their tinfoil hats, they may consider that while our theories of science evolve; so too do our theories concerning language. Improving our words advances how we understand the world. It helps address problematic histories. And it allows us to imagine different futures.

It is deceitful when commentators use “political correctness” as a smear. The phrase obscures factual events and it sidesteps the voices of those wronged. In her 1992 essay, “A Short History of the Term ‘Politically Correct,’ ” MIT professor Ruth Perry explains how discounting universities with the term attacks “the theory and practice of affirmative action . . . defined as the recruitment to an institution of students and faculty who do not conform to what has always constituted the population of academic institutions: usually white, middle-class, straight, male.”

When people critique the “hypersensitivity” of universities, they suggest that those engaged in anti-racist activities have nothing better to do with their time. A Massey fellow explains that “experiencing, responding to, and coping with these racist assaults is injurious and burdensome. It takes an emotional, psychological and physical toll.” These events disrupt and steal time from racialized students who already have heavy workloads associated with their studies, research, teaching and work. The path forward for academic institutions is clear. Recruiting people into a space where they are under-represented needs to be accompanied by broader changes. Taking a stand to ensure that people’s homes and workplaces are free from racism does not demonstrate overbearing political correctness, nor social justice run amok.

Andrew F. Kaufman is a junior fellow at Massey College and a doctoral student in urban and economic geography at the University of Toronto.