We hear a lot about oppression these days, especially at Brown. Listening to the hyperbolic language employed by social justice activists, one might think times are worse now than they were 50 years ago.
These aren’t cases of the boy who cried wolf, as the considerations put forward are not completely baseless, but using the same words to describe vastly different concepts homogenizes our understanding of the concepts themselves. The repeated exaggeration of relatively minor concerns for rhetorical effect trivializes more serious historical and ongoing grievances.
When an Asian woman like Suey Park, the inventor of “#CancelColbert,” describes herself as a “person of color” who faces discrimination to construct a platform from which she can criticize stop-and-frisk, it trivializes the suffering of those who are the actual targets of the policy — young black men.
When a drunk married couple agrees to have sex and we describe it as “rape” — asymmetrically blaming the men in the relationships, calling them “rapists,” and idolizing the women, calling them “survivors” — it trivializes the immorality of perpetrators and the trauma of victims involved in serious, physically violent sexual assault.
The slightest perceived injustice is now termed “oppression” at the malicious hands of the heteronormative, racist patriarchy. Oppression used to mean something. Now it can mean nothing more than encountering disagreement from a straight white male.
Social justice activists look for any excuse to be offended because ultra-liberal society socially rewards these winners of the oppression Olympics. The specious logic is that if one so much as feels oppressed, one actually is oppressed, and is therefore in the right with regard to the debate at hand.
In 1999, Amelia Rideau, then-vice president of the Black Student Union at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, brought a complaint before the faculty senate regarding the use of the word “niggardly” in her English class. Her professor was explaining Geoffrey Chaucer’s use of the term — meaning “stingy” — in “The Canterbury Tales.” Rideau said she “was in tears, shaking. … It’s not up to the rest of the class to decide whether my feelings are valid.” The term has no etymological connection to the racial slur.
With respect to an incident the previous week involving the use of the same word, Julian Bond, then-chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said, “You hate to think you have to censor your language to meet other people’s lack of understanding. … Order dictionaries issued to all … who need them. … We have a hair-trigger sensibility, and I think that is particularly true of racial minorities.”
Post-traumatic stress disorder is a serious disease that is increasingly trivialized by these complaints of “triggering language” — language that makes people uncomfortable. Unless one has a genuine psychiatric condition, learning how to deal with mental discomfort is a standard part of intellectual maturation. The vast majority of life takes place outside the padded cribs into which we were born.
That’s not to say we should encourage the unnecessary use of “triggering language,” but the pursuit of truth is our priority here at Brown. As former President Ruth Simmons said in her 2001 convocation address, “We expect that you will not be reckless or deliberately assault, intimidate, harass or harm others under the guise of free speech. … However, don’t be fooled by these admonitions. They should not interfere with the confidence you feel as a learner to be … uncompromising in the expression of your opinion. … I won’t ask you to embrace someone who offends your humanity. … But I would ask you to understand that the price of your own freedom is permitting the expression of such opinions. … The process of discovery need not make us feel good and secure.”
Brown students often aren’t interested in having these uncomfortable conversations. I was informed by an anonymous Internet commentator on a previous column of mine that “debating upper-class entitled provocateurs like Andrew Powers isn’t a good use of anyone’s time.”
Let’s pretend that unfounded appeals to authority and ad hominem attacks by social justice activists are sound. Let’s imagine that “oppressed” individuals are experts on the absolute truths of morality and that straight white men aren’t entitled to any opinion regarding such issues — a view Park and like-minded activists advocate. I’ll grant these premises as true for the sake of argument.
Fortunately, there are always those who are considered disenfranchised enough to have a “legitimate” opinion and who don’t buy into the overblown rhetoric — Bond and Simmons are two of them in the above cases. Both grew up during the ’50s and ’60s and can attest to the government-sponsored oppression under Jim Crow laws that characterized that period of American history. We can condemn “privileged” individuals all we want, but this will do nothing to derail the force of their arguments, even under the outrageous epistemic framework I granted.
But we don’t need to make unwarranted references to “expert opinion” regarding these questions anyway. We’re all smart enough to think for ourselves at Brown. Getting at the truth necessitates engaging an individual’s reasoning, not engaging the individual himself. Let’s criticize arguments on the basis of their flawed logic, not on the basis of who supports them.
Andrew Powers ’15 can be reached at andrew_powers@brown.edu.
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