That, in capsule form, seems to be the state of the humanities in the world of academia, U.S.A. edition, judging from a singularly depressing piece up at New York magazine, “This Is What a Modern-Day Witch Hunt Looks Like” by Jesse Singal, regarding what happened when Rebecca Tuval, assistant professor at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, chose to think a few thoughts out of season in an article she called “In Defense of Transracialism”, which sounds like something I would walk several blocks to avoid reading.
What happened was an explosion of rage on the part of a lot of people who clearly have too much time on their hands,1 fulminating over a wide range of banal and absurd thoughtcrimes. Singal, frankly to her discredit, attempts to prove that Tuval is guiltless of these crimes, but since they aren’t crimes in the first place, there’s no reason to mount a defense. It is perfectly all right for Tuval to “use vocabulary and frameworks not recognized, accepted, or adopted by the conventions of the relevant subfields,” or to “misrepresent leading accounts of belonging to a racial group,” or to do any of the other terrible things she is accused of. Because her real crime here seems to be thinking.
According to Singal, a letter charging Tuval with these thoughtcrimes, and many others, “has racked up hundreds of signatories within the academic community — the top names listed are Elise Springer of Wesleyan University, Alexis Shotwell of Carleton University (who is listed as the point of contact), Dilek Huseyinzadegan of Emory University, Lori Gruen of Wesleyan, and Shannon Winnubst of Ohio State University.” So my spring reading list just got a hell of a lot shorter.
Afterwords
When I say of Tuval that “Because her real crime here seems to be thinking,” I seem to be saying that she is, in some meaning of the word, “correct”. Well, I don’t know that she is. Her argument, according to the abstract available for her paper, is that, since “we all agree” that someone can change their sex, à la Caitlyn Jenner, (which we pretty much do), then it should be okay to change one’s race as well (a bit more dubious). Tuval acknowledges that infamous non-black chick Rachel Dolezal’s infamous attempt to pass herself off as a sister was not a good idea but bravely (all too bravely, one might say) argues that Rachel’s crash and burn shouldn’t necessarily be the last word on the subject. So, definitely something I would walk several blocks to avoid reading, but something that has every right to be in print. Right on, sister!
- And, one suspects, a lot more tenure than they deserve. ↩︎
