Hypersensitive? No, these student activists are right
Students of colour are being hypersensitive about racism on their university campuses, at least according to a troubling slew of recent commentaries.
Last month, the CBC’s Neil Macdonald published a column on the resurgence of student protests against racism on campuses across North America, arguing that these protests are an extreme response to “trivial events.” Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School, has accused students of exaggerating the scope of racism they face and displaying an excessive vulnerability to perceived slights. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, an author and a professor, respectively, have diagnosed university students with the cognitive disorder of “catastrophizing” — in other words, making a big deal out of nothing.
These critics point to a handful of incidents, such as student protests against culturally insensitive costumes, as proof that these movements have arisen as an overreaction to trivial issues.
In fact, the anti-racist student protest movements have emerged in reaction to the very real racism that exists on North American campuses. At the University of Missouri last month, black students were attacked with racial slurs and a swastika was found drawn with human feces in a residence hall. Here in Canada, Mei-Ling, a biracial student at Concordia University, was subjected to racist and sexist slurs by her peers in student government. She commented this year that her experience “reflect(s) a disturbing rape culture and mindset of racism that has no place in a university like Concordia.” The examples are disturbingly abundant.
By targeting the supposedly trivial concerns of particular protests, these critics ignore the reality that blatant racism is still a regular experience for many stu- dents of colour on campus.
Perhaps more troubling still is that the issues they dismiss as trivial are not trivial at all; rather, they are examples of the subtle racism that today is bigotry’s most common form. The donning of turbans, hijabs or dreadlocks for comedic effect on Halloween, for instance — a practice dismissed as harmless by Macdonald — is an act of hurtful insensitivity, a form of racism disguised as good fun. And it’s all too common on Canadian campuses, especially at the expense of indigenous peoples. In 2013, students at the Université de Montréal dressed in redface costumes that mocked native communities. In 2010, McGill’s management students held a tribal-themed frosh with students appearing in costumes and face paint depicting four indigenous tribes. The failure to recognize that indigenous peoples are actual peoples and not caricatures to be adopted for entertainment should be concerning to all.
Nor are the histories that universities choose to commemorate a trivial matter, as some of these critics claim. Princeton students are demanding that Woodrow Wilson’s name be removed from the university’s School of Public Affairs because of his racist policies. At Harvard Law School, students have engaged in vibrant protest against the school’s crest, which was borrowed from a family known to be ruthless slaveholders. Students are right that the racist legacies at the foundation of many institutions of higher learning should be opened up for scrutiny — both in the U.S. and in Canada.
Macdonald writes that Thomas Jeffer- son and George Washington were also slave owners; should the “entire firmament of Western leadership in the past three centuries” then be effaced? The students challenging these legacies are not attempting to erase history but to confront it. Who North American universities choose to glorify must be renegotiated now that the viewpoints of marginalized peoples who were previously excluded from these institutions can finally be heard. Whatever the outcome, the grappling is essential.
Even the most seemingly ridiculous recent case of anti-racist protest — the University of Ottawa student federation’s cancellation of a yoga class on the grounds that the practice is an example of cultural appropriation — is more complicated than it seems. It’s true that yoga is appropriated from Hindu culture. Whether this means that yoga classes should be cancelled or conducted differently is up for legitimate debate. Antiracist student activism may be misdirected at times but that is what university is for — an opportunity to learn and engage in a debate about the boundaries of ideas.
Critics of student activism want students to toughen up. Macdonald asks how students expect to manage in the real world, which he describes as “offensive, noisy, (and) pitiless.” Engaging in activism, however, teaches students to identify racism, call out oppressive comments and behaviour and to advocate for themselves and others. Critics might learn something from the strength of students of colour whose critical sensitivity to discrimination might ensure that an offensive and pitiless world is not the future.
These critics ignore the reality that blatant racism is still a regular experience for many students of colour on campus