DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell.
In a recent book, John McWhorter asserts that anti-racism is a new religion. It was an idea I quickly dismissed. Last summer, I found anti-racism to be a perversion of religion: I found a cult. From Wild Wild Country to the Nxivm shows to Scientology exposés, the features of cults have become familiar in popular culture. There is sleep deprivation. Ties to the outside world are severed. The sense of time collapses, with everything cult-related feeling extremely urgent. Participants are emotionally battered. In this weakened state, participants learn about and cling to dogmatic beliefs. Any outsider becomes a threat.
The dozen participants in this summer program were spending almost every hour of every day together, I was almost the only outsider they were encountering, and I was marked as a threat.
The feature of a cult that seems to be missing from this story is a charismatic leader, enforcing the separation of followers from the world, creating emotional vulnerability, and implanting dogma. Enter Keisha. A recent graduate of an Ivy League university, mentored by a television-celebrity black intellectual, Keisha introduced herself as a black woman who grew up poor and “housing vulnerable,” whose grandmother’s limbs had been broken by white supremacists, and who had just spent four years of college teaching in prisons and advocating for prison abolition. She told the class that she had majored in black studies, had been nurtured by black feminists (though her famous mentor is a man), and she was planning to devote her life to transforming the academy in the direction of black justice.
Keisha was tasked by Telluride with serving as a teaching assistant in my class and organizing workshops for the students in the afternoon. I welcomed Keisha into the class, suggesting that we find some days when she could lead discussion or share her own research. Instead, she largely remained silent during class for the first three weeks, counter-programming the seminar in the afternoons. During a week on the racist background of the US immigration system, Keisha found one of our texts, the foundational Asian-American memoir Nisei Daughter, insufficiently radical, so she lectured to the students that afternoon about the supposedly more radical Yuri Kochiyama. Keisha was frustrated that our week on incarceration began with George Jackson and not a black feminist, so she lectured on Angela Davis that afternoon. I talked at length with both Keisha and the class about learning unfolding over time, about the need to wrestle with an idea before moving on to the next one, and about the overall direction of the course, but for her (and soon for the students), everything had to happen now.
Keisha and I were supposed to meet weekly, but she told me she couldn’t schedule in advance, and she would let me know when she had availability. She never did. But Keisha did find time to intervene when a student was “harmed.” During one class, when we discussed Brown v. Board of Education, my co-instructor explained what the “doll test” was that provided a psychological basis for the Supreme Court’s decision: It involved showing children black and white dolls and asking what language they would use to describe them, “colored,” “white,” or “negro.” During the seminar break, a student had reported this to Keisha, and she rushed in to tell us that a student had been harmed by hearing the word “negro.”
She’d get the vapors reading the late Stanley Crouch. Or watching Pulp Fiction.