On Censorship and Victimology Again

Tucked into "Why are Scholars Such Snitches," Laura Kipnis's recent (March 17, 2022) essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education detailing Stasi-like persecution of academics deemed by any disgruntled colleague or student to have said or done anything offensive, is the following paragraph:

There are still, it seems, occasional old-school types (often leftists) who persist in thinking that there’s a distinction between quoting James Baldwin or Martin Luther King Jr. in full and hurling an epithet. The college-admissions consultant Hanna Stotland, who specializes in “crisis management,” told me that the snitching impulse is taking hold among younger and younger students. She used to have two such cases a year; she’s had 20 in the last two years. N-word offenses are a cottage industry here too. High schoolers squirrel away incriminating texts, or videos of friends at age 15 singing along with rap lyrics, then forward them to admissions committees when the friend (or frenemy, rather) gets an athletic scholarship or is admitted to an Ivy. Colleges are so quick to act on the intel, says Stotland, that they’ll sometimes retract an offer without even giving the accused student a chance to respond.

(1)  There really is a distinction between quoting in full James Baldwin or Martin Luther King Jr. or Mark Twain or Countee Cullen or Maya Angelou or John Steinbeck or Langston Hughes or plenty of other writers in full and hurling an epithet.

(2) Critical thinking--which supposedly we're all teaching students--is the ability to distinguish either an author's or a text's intention, its style, its tone.  Students who know how to do these things--for example, can distinguish a ballad from a sonnet and a joke from a rant--are too smart to pretend that the sound of "that word" in a classroom injures them personally or that "impact" matters and intention does not. "Performed delicacy"--the term John McWhorter uses to describe this "wounded" behavior--is accurate.

(3) The very first thing students learn about Mark Twain should not be that he uses a word that's become taboo. But a teacher should be aware of her student population. If she's got a group of kids who have only ever heard the word as an insult hurled at them, she's got to take a different approach from the one she'd use with students who have never experienced a racist insult and who would never use the word themselves unless they were reading aloud from a text using it.

(4) Scholars are snitches because everybody's pretending Ibram X. Kendi and Robin diAngelo are not shysters. Oh, and racists too.