NEW: ‘Please, Georgetown. Don’t fire an academic over tweets.’ I didn’t choose the title, but this has been my message in hundreds of cases ever since Twitter became a thing. By @adgo & me. https://t.co/5pURiT4y8R
— Greg Lukianoff (@glukianoff) February 2, 2022
Strom Thurmond had a black wife (or was she a girlfriend?). Either way....
The tweets generated a storm of criticism, including many claims that Shapiro is racist (an odd argument, given that he was advocating the appointment of an Indian American to the Supreme Court). Nevertheless, Shapiro deleted the offending tweets and posted an apology, which began: “I regret my poor choice of words, which undermined my message that nobody should be discriminated against for his or her skin color.”
You know, a "racist" can be a racist about one set of people, and not about another. I've known people who were racists but "had a black friend." This is not an argument. It's a whinge because an academic white man got caught expressing racist ideas on Twitter, where academics are supposed to have freedom.
Which, as the famous phrase goes, stops at the end of my nose.
That was, after all, the point of his message: If the president eliminates any candidate who doesn’t fit a preferred race and gender, he may well miss the “best pick,” which Shapiro considered to be Srinivasan. That’s not a right-wing talking point; an ABC News-Ipsos poll found that 76 percent of respondents (including 54 percent of Democrats surveyed) said the president should consider all nominees, regardless of race or gender.
Which, sorry, is not what Shapiro said. Just to be safe, I went to a news source for the quote, since the tweet has been deleted:
“But alas doesn’t fit into the latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman,” Shapiro wrote in a tweet. “Thank heaven for small favors?”
Shapiro was trying to be clever. He failed, miserably. But he specifically said we'd get "lesser black woman." Why "lesser," and why "black woman"?* Because Biden said it first? Couldn't Shapiro just have said "lesser qualified candidate"? That would be fine. But "lesser Black woman" is not just "inartful." It's crude and offensive and frankly, I'm barely entitled to opine on whether or not it's acceptable, being a white male. Yeah, "identity politics." Deal with it. I read stupid comments on the intertoobs all the time about Texas (land of my birth, birthplace of my wife, my child, my families going back generations, On my wife's side, and so to my daughter as well, back to the Republic of Texas.), and I get to respond as a native Texan. Identity politics? Or not? I understand my privileges as a white male. My daughter has taught me how oblivious I am in the world, being a man and not a young woman. A strong Black woman taught me how privileged my white skin made me. I don't feel their pain, but I understand how much I don't understand. But what I do understand, clearly, is what Shapiro wrote. I also understand I don't get to excuse it as "not racist." To me, a Southerner who grew up in the land before the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act or the universal application of Brown v Board, I know racism when I see it. And I see it real damned clearly in that now deleted tweet. I would think twice and even three times before telling someone who was not white that a comment about another race couldn't have been racist.
All the apologies for Shapiro I read on Twitter come down to the fact he's a white man complaining about a black woman, and he's a tenured professor, so back off! Because, you see, Shapiro is being sanctioned for "ideological reasons."
In FIRE’s Scholars Under Fire database, we document 508 attempts to professionally sanction scholars for ideological reasons since 2015. The worst year was 2020, with 127 attempts, followed closely by 2021, with 103. And this is a nationwide problem: There have been attempts to sanction scholars at 66 percent of the top 100 U.S. News & World Report colleges.
Shapiro’s targeting marks the 10th attempt to get a professor sanctioned for ideological reasons at Georgetown University since 2015. Five attempts have been successful, with sanctions involving investigation, resignation, suspension and termination.
Back to my original question on this issue: if Shapiro's tweet had been differently written and subject to an interpretation that it was anti-semitic, would that be better? Or if he just complained that Biden was trying to seat another woman on the high court? There's a point when this tweet becomes offenseive even to FIRE, and at that point their argument falls apart. "Ideological reasons"? Is that what we're calling racism, now?
In a similar case, as journalist Bari Weiss pointed out, Georgetown rightly defended the rights of another professor, Carol Christine Fair, who tweeted in 2018 that “entitled white men” who defended then-Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh “deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps.” Fair added the suggestion that “we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine.” Her tweets were no less offensive than Shapiro’s; they were just from the other political direction. To her credit, Fair has joined a letter supporting Shapiro.
I will accept that is foul and even incendiary language, and I frankly don't see a lot of "ideology" in opposing it. But race, as the law (!) says, is a pernicious category. Fair's comments are much closer to "fighting words" than racial animus. There is a difference, and it's the difference that got Whoopi Goldberg suspended from "The View" for two weeks.*
Higher education’s credibility rests on the public belief that it is a place where all sides of every argument are subject to robust debate, disputation and discussion. If it becomes clear that these discussions are impossible on campuses, the reputation of higher education — and the shared world of facts it was intended to create — will suffer.
Back to the "perimters of academic freedom" issue. If a professor publishes an offensive book but it's meant to be an academic one, or at least in his field (some of the pop-sci published by science professors is risible stuff as science), that should be covered. But tweets? What if that same professor puts up swastikas and white power symbols on his lawn? Still academic freedom? Still part of "robust debate, disputation, and discussion"? Ever tried to discuss and debate with a sign, or a symbol?
And honestly, when you think it can't get any worse, it does:
Treanor still has a chance to follow through on Georgetown’s promise that “all members” of its community have “the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn.” The university should end this investigation and model what higher education is meant to be: above the culture wars and committed to the unfettered search for truth.
"Culture wars"? That's what he thinks this is about? Donald Trump wants to endorse this guy for public office. "Unfettered search for truth"? Where in that tweet is there any hint of such a thing being sought?
This is the first time I've penetrated behind some of the many tweets I've seen defending Shapiro and criticizing Georgetown. I'm frankly appalled at how paltry the reasoning is, how poor the arguments. What I'm not surprised at is how much squid ink is squirted into the waters, because they've got nothin' substantive in defense of this racist law professor.
*She said, I understand, and more than once, that the Holocaust was not about race. The best public statements to make about the Holocaust are about how horrible it was, and "never again." Beyond that, keep your trap shut, especially if you aren't Jewish. (Oops! Sorry! "Identity politics" again! Which tells you how racist that category is.)
*Belated footnote: in the best tradition of the British Raj, is the African American woman the “lesser black” than the Indian woman? You see what a minefield whites have created for themselves over 500 years. We do much better when we don’t try to defend racism by citing “lesser” racism.
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