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When a Safe Space Isn't: an encounter that exposes the war on reason and the dangers of the internet [1]

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Date: 2022-09-25

There is a powerful article at The NY Times Magazine:

An argument at Arizona State’s multicultural center spiraled into a disaster for everyone involved. Who was to blame?

The article is written by Sarah Viren; the link above should allow passage through the magazine’s pay wall. The blurb at the bottom of the article has this to say about the author:

Sarah Viren is a contributing writer for the magazine. She’s the author of “Mine” and a forthcoming memoir, “To Name the Bigger Lie,” which draws from an article she wrote for the magazine two years ago about a false accusation.

Viren teaches at Arizona State University. She describes a situation where none of the original participants in what could have been a minor encounter were prepared for what happened after a video of the incident was seized on and blown up after it went viral.

It’s a complex story which among other things documents the people and organizations looking to seize on anything they can use to promote their cause — which as Viren describes it, is an organized effort to delegitimate institutions of higher learning, promote the white grievance narrative, ‘prove’ who the real racists are, and so on. It also shows — once again — how charged race is as an issue, and how both individuals and institutions are finding it difficult to navigate all of the currents within it.

None of the original actors appear to have been setting out to be villains (with the possible exception of the one who refused to talk to Viren.) Lives have been changed; threats were made. Arizona State does not come off looking all that good — depending on your point of view. The original scene of the encounter — a multi-cultural lounge — appears to have had the original intent behind it suppressed.

Viren’s introduction leads to this assessment:

It [ASU] is in many ways the antithesis of where I went to college: a tiny, public liberal arts school called New College of Florida. We had 600 or so students and could invent our own majors. If an incident like this one had happened there, everyone would have been talking about it, processing it, reacting to it. But at A.S.U., in the days and weeks after that clip went viral, its reach was limited: It was brought up at a faculty meeting and after a visiting scholar’s lecture on how we’re losing a “common reality” in this country. Some faculty members and students organized a teach-in to process what had happened, and the university issued a news release chalking it up to a difference of opinions. It was, in other words, one incident among many on the campus. Online, though, that viral video briefly came to represent not just our university in its entirety, but in some interpretations, the state of higher education in this country as a whole. It was a brief drama that was also a metaphor. But watching and rewatching that drama unfold from my computer, I kept asking myself: a metaphor for what?

Multicultural Centers have been made into an issue on their own. Intended to provide a place where people from various groups that who are the targets of discrimination can let their barriers down and interact on an equal footing with others, they’ve also been attacked as ‘proof’ that they are part of a campaign to discriminate against white people — racism in other words.

Most of the time, Patton Davis said, universities like having multicultural centers, if only for the optics. If they do resist, it’s usually for financial reasons: They just don’t prioritize the work that those centers do, she said, often mistaking it for merely social instead of academic. But cultural centers have also become something of a manufactured controversy as of late. According to some critics, these rooms and adjacent projects, like so-called affinity housing, in which students can elect to live in Black or Latino-themed dorms, for instance, are new forms of segregation, because they focus on the lives of minority students instead of the majority, which in most cases is white. None of these spaces exclude white students, but articles about them often imply that they do. “I always talk about this as white people feeling they are being discriminated against because they haven’t been discriminated against,” Patton Davis told me. “It comes from a misunderstanding about how cultural centers came into existence in the first place. It was about exclusion on campuses.”

Two white males entered what they thought was just a study area — most of the people in it were studying. What triggered the confrontation were three things: a sticker on a laptop one of them had saying “Blue Lives Matter”, a t-shirt the other was wearing saying he hadn’t voted for Biden, and a woman of color wearing a “Black Lives Matter” who began to perceive that they were attempting to provoke her. Note that there were other white people in the room and there were no issues with them.

She and eventually two other women came over and told them they were being made uncomfortable in what was supposed to be a place where it was safe for them to be who they wanted to be. One of the women began recording the incident — it was just over 7 minutes long.

Viren begins the article by describing what happened after the video was posted to social media, and exploded.

I first heard about the video from a colleague and friend at my university as we waited in line to pick up our kids after school in late September 2021. One of her students was in the video, and it had gone viral, she said. She’d posted something in support of that student, but then she also started getting attacked. Another professor at our university, Arizona State, would later call the attackers “vultures,” the kind of people who feed off moments of everyday life that morph into spectacle after an article or tweet or video goes viral. But at the time, I didn’t have that analogy. My friend told me she was scared, and I said I was sorry. By that point, she had already taken down her post. Later that night, I watched the video for the first time. It was 7 minutes and 40 seconds, though the excerpt that was then going viral, that would eventually be watched by nearly six million people, was just over two minutes in length and had been posted alongside the descriptor: “This insanity is happening on college campuses.” What follows is intense, but I wouldn’t call it insane. It’s a nonviolent confrontation among several students in A.S.U.’s new multicultural room. What felt insane, if also predictable, was that Fox News reported on the incident, that a U.S. congressman called it an act of “segregation” and threatened my university’s funding, that hundreds of strangers emailed A.S.U. to opine on the video and tens of thousands more weighed in online after watching the brief drama on their own screens.

emphasis added

One of the two men attempted to defuse the situation, warning in a statement that people were misunderstanding the situation and were contributing to the racial divide in America.

He was accused of selling out.

What’s chilling about the article is how Viren describes the people out there — the “vultures” looking for things like this they can use to further their agenda — and how they are part of a conservative ecosystem that thrives on this.

..at least two other incidents at universities followed a similar trajectory: Campus Reform and similar conservative online sites — and there are a number of them — reported on a supposed transgression, Fox News amplified the story and the National Youth Front began targeting individual professors or college administrators, claiming that white people were facing discrimination. More recently, a survey by the American Association of University Professors found a similar trend: namely that Campus Reform articles often result in harassment and attacks. Of the faculty members surveyed, 40 percent of them had received “threats of harm, including physical violence or death” after being named in an article in Campus Reform, which is listed as a public charity in tax documents by the Leadership Institute, a conservative organization that owns the site. The study found that Black faculty members were disproportionally named in the articles themselves; L.G.B.T.Q. faculty were more likely to be harassed after publication; and prominent research institutions tended to be the primary focus of the website’s ire. “Campus Reform’s overwhelming focus on the most prestigious universities suggests that an apparent goal of the website’s coverage is to delegitimize not just higher education generally but specifically those institutions that make the largest share of contributions to research production in the United States,” its authors wrote.

READ THE WHOLE THING

There is much more context in the article than these excerpts can convey. You can also listen to it as a podcast. Viren’s concluding paragraph should give all people of good will pause:

One interpretation of all of this is that it is just noise — words, freedom of speech, perhaps even a valid critique of powerful institutions. Another version might go something like this: There is a concerted campaign afoot to delegitimize academia in the United States, one that too many people seem unwilling to acknowledge and very likely will not respond to in time. Those most hurt by these attacks are not Marxist professors or wealthy elites but students like Beckerman, who for weeks was afraid to leave his house, and Tekola, who still feels abandoned by their university, and colleagues who, like me, keep looking up at the sky, watching for the circling of distant birds.

This story has even more impact if you read Viren’s earlier account of how she and her wife were targeted by anonymous accusations and digital stalking via social media. It’s remarkable that Viren has not retreated from all social interaction given the experiences she has had and that she relates here.

There’s an old saying that “a lie can go halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its boots.” The internet has made it possible for lies to travel at warp speed, while proliferating and mutating like a plague. The phrase “going viral” is actually quite apt. It’s far too easy for even people of good will to fall prey to misunderstanding; it’s far worse now that people of bad intent have weaponized the internet.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/25/2125156/-When-a-Safe-Space-Isn-t-an-encounter-that-exposes-the-war-on-reason-and-the-dangers-of-the-internet

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