In this week's episode, guest expert Jessie Daniels, Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and at The Graduate Center, CUNY and founder of Public Scholar Academy, joins us to talk about disrupting white supremacy and advancing racial literacy on campus, the relationship between free speech and hate speech and what role institutions can play when faculty are attacked by the far right. We wrap up with our best tips and advice related to disrupting white supremacy on campus and at the end we'll have an assignment for our listeners- we'll ask you to find out if your institution has an office or committee focused on advancing racial literacy on your campus. See what they're up to and share your story with us on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook and tag us @university_of_venus on IG and @UVenus on Twitter or post it on our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/UVenus/ and we will share, retweet, and amplify! Find University of Venus on Instagram @university_of_venus , Twitter @UVenus , and Facebook http://www.facebook.com/UVenus/
Topics Discussed in this Episode:
Resources Discussed in this Episode:
Music Credits: Magic by Six Umbrellas
Sound Engineer: Ernesto Valencia
View from Venus, Season 2, Episode 5
Mary Churchill: [00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of the View from Venus. My name is Mary Churchill, and on today's episode, I am joined by cohosts Meg Palladino and Lee Skallerup Bessette and guest expert, Jessie Daniels, professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University New York.
[00:00:20] In today's episode, we'll be talking with Jessie about disrupting white supremacy and advancing racial literacy on campus, the relationship between free speech and hate speech and what role institutions can play when faculty are attacked by the far right. You will walk away with our best tips and advice for advancing racial literacy on your campus.
[00:00:39] And as always, at the end of the episode, we'll have a recommended assignment for you. Jessie Daniels is a Faculty Associate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center and a Professor of sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center CUNY. She is an internationally recognized expert in internet expressions of racism.
[00:00:58] In 2019 Daniel's launched a consultancy Public Scholars, LLC, designed to help faculty who aspire to be public scholars achieve their goals and work with university administrators who want to assess and respond to attacks from the far right against their institutions. We asked Jessie to join us on the View from Venus because we wanted to hear more about her work in advancing racial literacy and disrupting white supremacy in academia.
[00:01:24] Meg Palladino: [00:01:24] So. Okay. Today's question is, when you're having a bad day, what do you do to make yourself feel better?
[00:01:30] Mary Churchill: [00:01:30] I eat chocolate and I'm eating chocolate right now. That is my solution to everything. If I'm not, then I'm like, Oh, I'm kind of cranky or what we say in my house is wearing the cranky pants. I am like, I think I need some chocolate. Meg, what do you do?
[00:01:46] Meg Palladino: [00:01:46] I usually call my dad or one of my good friends and whine to them a little bit and go to bed early if I can.
[00:01:55] Lee Skallerup Bessette: [00:01:55] I watch reruns of sitcoms. I watch, you know, I don't want to call it trash TV, but I'll be like, what are some of my favorite comfort food TV shows that I like and depends on what kind of bad day it is will dictate what kind of show that I'm going to watch, but, you know, it's almost like rereading a good book in a certain way too. It's just
[00:02:18] I need to, I need to escape someplace familiar, but not here.
[00:02:22] Jessie Daniels: [00:02:22] Yeah. I have lots of different strategies, but I think most recently what I've done is put on music that reminds me of being with people when we're happy and dancing, that sort of thing.
[00:02:35] And just have my own little dance out party. And my favorite go-to the last few days is a tune from several years ago by Gnarls Barkley called Crazy, which I just love. There's something about the vibe of that song. It's just like, yeah, I'm going to be fine.
[00:02:52] Mary Churchill: [00:02:52] Yeah. Music's a great mood changer. Yes.
[00:02:55] Lee Skallerup Bessette: [00:02:55] That's a good one too. And I love Crazy. The first time I heard that song, I knew there was something special about it.
[00:03:00] Jessie Daniels: [00:03:00] It's got such a great hook.
[00:03:02] Lee Skallerup Bessette: [00:03:02] So great. Yeah. All right. So, transitioning into the more formal question and we'll all keep these strategies in mind perhaps after we have this conversation. But, not to make light, but it is important. So in your work, you write about disrupting white supremacy, and I've always loved that in your writing and, and especially when you're writing online and on Twitter, is that it's about disrupting white supremacy.
[00:03:30] So what does it mean to disrupt white supremacy, and what are some ways to do that effectively within the confines of higher education? And also relatedly, what are some ways of advancing racial literacy on campus and who's doing this well?
[00:03:45] Jessie Daniels: [00:03:45] Yeah. Well, I think that you know, this is such a great question and one that I think about a lot. So thanks for having me on and for asking this question. To me, disrupting white supremacy is really what I've devoted my life to, and it's a very difficult thing to try and do.
[00:04:04] I'm just going to tell one very quick story, which I don't know how many of you know this, but I changed my name, both my first and my last name once I was an adult and sort of between graduate school and writing my first book and realized a couple of things.
[00:04:25] One that my grandfather had been in the Klan, which I didn't know when I first started writing a book and a dissertation on the Klan. And I also began to understand how white women were implicated in white supremacy and I wanted to distance myself from my family's legacy of white supremacy and from my own kind of complicity in the system, so I changed my name. I was born Suzanne Harper and I changed it to Jessie Daniels after Jessie Daniel Ames, who started something called the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. So that said, I mean, I've sort of tell that story to say, you know, this is what I've dedicated my life to and to also say it's a really difficult thing to do. So I changed my name and white supremacy continues unabated by my name change. And part of why it's so difficult, right, is that that white supremacy is this system that automatically ensures that white people get and keep all the advantages in society and are culturally associated with being the best, the smartest, the most attractive, all that stuff is really deeply entrenched.
[00:05:37] And so it's not a thing that you can change overnight just like I changed my name, or with a simple one, two, three step program. It actually takes generational work and we, meaning those of us included in this group called white people are way before the beginning of figuring out how to do this kind of generational work.
[00:05:58] And when it comes to higher education, if you read work-like historian Craig Wilder's, wonderful Ebony and Ivy about race, slavery and the Ivy league schools, you can see how white supremacy is embedded. It's built into the very fabric of our institutions. So just to bring it to really practical terms, for anyone who's listening to this, who's ever sat on an admissions or a hiring committee, you've no doubt witnessed how this operates in conversations about excellence or standards or even cultural fit
[00:06:31] Mary Churchill: [00:06:31] or quality.
[00:06:32] Jessie Daniels: [00:06:32] Yes. Quality. Exactly.
[00:06:34] Mary Churchill: [00:06:34] Favorite one.
[00:06:35] Jessie Daniels: [00:06:35] Right? Whether we're talking about students that we're admitting or faculty that we're hiring, right? Those kinds of terms, that kind of rhetoric. It's used to see how well people are going to help, you know, continue to perpetuate that system. And back to your really good question about what are the effective ways of advancing racial literacy on campus and who's doing this well, I really want to point to someone who's doing fabulous work in this area, and that's Tricia Matthew and her book Written/Unwritten, which is a wonderful edited volume about, you know, what it takes to gain, you know, get hired and gain tenure and promotion in these institutions that are so steeped in white supremacy for faculty of color. And you know, in terms of like how, okay, so there's a book on it. How does that translate to actual institutions of higher ed?
[00:07:29] Here at my institution, at a Hunter College, one of our deans on campus actually assigned that book to a bunch of people on campus, including the chairs of departments, and we had reading circles working through that book in each department. It's not a perfect campus.
[00:07:46] We haven't solved all our problems, but I think that's a really great example, both her book and then the practice of getting together on campuses and reading it and working through it and saying, you know, face to face with each other: how does this play out on our campus? Did this happen here? How can we do better?
[00:08:07] Mary Churchill: [00:08:07] That's excellent. I just recommended that a few others as well, to our EDI committee within our college as they asked for suggestions for readings, and that was my top one. And I haven't read it yet, but I'm like, this is something we all need to read.
[00:08:22] Jessie Daniels: [00:08:22] Yeah. And I should also say we invited Professor Matthew, Tricia, and she's a friend, to come to campus and give a talk. And that was really well received and she's fantastic. And please invite her and assign her books. She's great.
[00:08:37] Mary Churchill: [00:08:37] Great.
[00:08:38] Meg Palladino: [00:08:38] So Jessie, many campuses seem to be struggling with the line between free speech and hate speech, and what are your thoughts on this?
[00:08:45] Jessie Daniels: [00:08:45] Yeah, I appreciate this question and I think it's a bit of a trap, seeing these two as opposed to each other. I mean, in some ways I think it really reflects a very U.S. based idea about what free speech is to see it as on the other end of the continuum from hate speech. And my research, for my second book, I looked at white supremacy online and in doing that work, looked at sort of how white supremacy and hate speech kind of has extended or was at that time beginning to extend globally.
[00:09:23] And what that led me to was really different notions about free speech and hate speech outside the U.S. and in almost every other country, you know, Western, industrialized country, there are very different notions of these things. And there's a way in which people, like, for example, in the EU, see hate speech as something that, um, let me back up.
[00:09:48] That people in the EU see free speech as certainly an important value in a democracy, but they also see the value of people's human rights to dignity and life and to not being, not being harmed or threatened with harm as also important. So I think for me, the place that I would encourage people on campuses to think about these issues is to begin to think in terms of harm, who's being harmed by the kind of speech and speech events that we invite onto our campus, right? Rather than thinking, is there some abstract principle our very peculiar U.S. notion of free speech is that being harmed if we invite someone to campus or don't invite them, but instead are there people, actual human beings, are students, other faculty, people that work at our colleges and universities. Is there a way that they could be harmed by the kind of speech that we're inviting onto our campuses? So I think it's very possible to imagine a world in which we both value free speech as an important democratic value and value people's human right to dignity, to life, to being free from harm or the threat of harm.
[00:11:02] Mary Churchill: [00:11:02] I love that framework of harm. I think that, we don't put that front and center enough on our campuses, right. It's almost ideas without people.
[00:11:12] Jessie Daniels: [00:11:12] Yeah, exactly. It's very, you know, kind of traditional enlightenment notion of these abstract principles, which, you know, if you read work like David Theo Goldberg's wonderful Racist Culture, you know, that those enlightenment notions carried with them, you know, racialized embodied beings.
[00:11:31] You know, so it's not that that we can just have these abstract discussions minus people's lived experience. We have to put that lived experience into conversation with what our values are.
[00:11:43] Mary Churchill: [00:11:43] And front and center. So I think that the rise of EDI committees, equity, diversity, and inclusion committees on campus has kind of exponentially grown and overall, I think that's a good thing, but I think there are a lot of challenges. I feel like, ironically, but then not because the structures are very white, as we talked about white supremacy, a lot of this work has traditionally been done by white folks on campuses, right? And so there is a, and I wrote kind of in this question, we have seen many of our white colleagues completely screw this up.
[00:12:19] And so, and I've seen that time and time again at different institutions and they're well-meaning folks, but they've really made some major mistakes.
[00:12:29] So, any words of wisdom or advice on this kind of, as we grow these spaces on campus, how to successfully navigate that?
[00:12:38] Jessie Daniels: [00:12:38] Yeah, I mean, I think what's really kind of at the root of this question to my mind is really about the problem of white liberals, because these are the folks that are on those committees, and that's the kind of, you know, your phrase, that's the kind of screw up that we see over and over again.
[00:12:53] It's like, well, I didn't intend any harm, right? But, you caused harm. So, I think that the process is really, I mean, to my mind, it's really the phrase that you used earlier. This idea of racial literacy is really what's needed. And I think that that's such an important shift to talk about racial literacy within this conversation of equity, diversity, inclusion.
[00:13:17] Because I feel like, and I've written a little bit about this in the tech world. But, I mean, you could totally do a find and replace with tech and higher ed, and kind of, what's your domain? You know? But, to me, I think there's a way in which we have gotten sort of stuck in this cul-de-sac I call it, of talking about bias and implicit bias.
[00:13:41] And you know, and there's fabulous work that researchers have been doing for, you know, 20 years now on implicit bias and I respect that research. But I think in terms of transformation, in terms of institutions, industry, organizations, institutions of higher learning, to just stop at the conversation about implicit bias leaves us at a dead end.
[00:14:01] What do you do with that? Once you've figured out that your biases are deeply embedded. You know, some people even use the phrase hard wired. Once you figure that out, you know, people just stop and kind of throw up their hands and go, well, it's hardwired. What can we do? And I think the important shift with racial literacy, that term, and that there's a whole set of scholarship behind that as well, is that it puts the onus on the people who need to have the burden, which is those of us in that category of whiteness and especially white liberals, who need to really educate themselves about what the problem is and what needs to be done. And frankly, part of racial literacy, to my mind, is sometimes about stepping back. You know, white women especially, have been given this message that we need to lean in, a la Sheryl Sandberg and lots of other white feminists like that. But I think that really the thing that has to happen for transformation is for white women and white men to step back, you know, and open space for people of color, of all genders to take the lead at institutions.
[00:15:10] And I think that that's really the difficult challenge. And I think that part of the reason that things don't change is because people don't want to face that reality. And I think that part of racial literacy is kind of, you know, it's a scaffolding. It's a way to get to that conclusion, but I think that's ultimately where it leads is, oh, we've got to step back.
[00:15:31] Mary Churchill: [00:15:31] I agree. It feels like a on and off switch rather than, how do you, you know, like you said, scaffold into it. And I do think that's great. Thank you.
[00:15:42] Jessie Daniels: [00:15:42] Yeah.
[00:15:43] Lee Skallerup Bessette: [00:15:43] You've written, as well that when the far right attacks faculty online and elsewhere, that they're really attacking public higher education, but there are so many attacks on education these days. Why are these types of attacks more egregious and why should we be paying closer attention to them? And, then how should we and our institutions respond to it?
[00:16:07] Jessie Daniels: [00:16:07] Yeah. This is such a great question and I really, really appreciate it. To me, this is actually, one of the biggest issues facing higher education right now.
[00:16:17] Both faculty, you know, frontline scholars and academic leaders, deans, provosts, presidents. And I see this as really a great vulnerability that the far right is exploiting, and they're very skillful at exploiting this and it's really part of a decades long campaign to undermine higher education because it's so central to democracy and they see a threat in democracy.
[00:16:45] And so part of what happens is, you know, just to go back to your question, why are these types of attacks more egregious and why should we pay attention? Well, first of all, you know, I was attacked by the far right online in the fall of 2017. And part of what I can tell you about being in that experience is that it's very overwhelming.
[00:17:06] I was able to survive it because I had a lot of social support, good health care. I'm a member of a faculty union at my institution so I knew that I wasn't going to lose my job. But I think that for people who are vulnerable in other ways, either personally or professionally or institutionally, that kind of attack that, and I got thousands of emails over six weeks through multiple email addresses as well as on Twitter as well as on Facebook. It just becomes a trauma. I mean, there's really no other word to describe it, and that kind of trauma is destabilizing individually, like it can harm someone's mental health, but it's also the point of it is to get other people at your institution and society more broadly to sort of question, well, what's the value of higher education? You know, and that's part of a campaign as well. You know, my friend and colleague Tressie McMillan Cottom has written about the shift in higher education from a public good to a commodity. Well, what are we paying all this money for? What are we getting out of this?
[00:18:13] And a lot of the attacks that I got were, what do you get a salary supported by the taxpayers, right? It was really at this, what's the value of what you do kind of attack. And so that to me is what it is part of what I'm saying about why these attacks are so concerning is because it's not just about me or something that I said, it's really about, you know, what's going on with higher education and shouldn't we get rid of it? And that if you look sort of more globally, is one of the first wedges in, you know, fascist or authoritarian regimes. Like first they come first, they come for the sociologist, you know, then the rest of the academics, like all the people with the classes and the books. Right. So I think, so. I think it's a, it's a harbinger of what else is going on.
[00:18:59] Now added to that, we're in this moment where, you know, because of digital technologies, so many of us are kind of public scholars by default. And that brings with it all these kind of unintended consequences that frankly, both faculty and academic leaders are just, you know, caught flat footed about how to deal with.
[00:19:22] You know, because our work is, is more public now, and our information is more public. We just don't have the skills for dealing with that and institutions particularly are not equipped to deal with those. So, for example, when I started getting threats through my email, there was no mechanism on my campus, and my campus is not unusual in this way. But there was no mechanism at my campus for the people who control my email on campus, the IT people, to talk to campus security. There's no conversation between them. So just really quickly, I'm just going to put in a little plug here at the end. I really think that we need to get skilled up on these attacks on faculty, and that's why I'm launching this new venture called Public Scholar Academy, and it's to provide a training both to faculty and to academic leaders in these issues
[00:20:10] Mary Churchill: [00:20:10] Oh, that's excellent.
[00:20:12] Okay, we're going to wrap up because we're almost out of time, but, takeaways related to disrupting white supremacy on campus. I would say mine is get my college to read Tricia Matthew's book and bring here to campus. That's my takeaway.
[00:20:28] Jessie Daniels: [00:20:28] Excellent takeaway.
[00:20:30] Meg Palladino: [00:20:30] I mean, I think my campus has a fair amount to do in this area, but I also know that there are good people working on it. I like what you said about stepping back and letting other people, people of color talk and do things.
[00:20:43] Lee Skallerup Bessette: [00:20:43] I feel really fortunate to work at a place like Georgetown where we are doing this work on reconciliation. Our students just voted on reparations for the descendants of the slaves who were sold in order to save Georgetown. We're doing careful work around this. There's a lot of work obviously to be done, but it's at the forefront of conversations at the
[00:21:08] forefront of the conversations that we're doing in our teaching and learning centers. And so I think that, you know, we all have roles as faculty and staff to keep moving these to, to promote racial literacy and these issues.
[00:21:23] Jessie Daniels: [00:21:23] Sounds great. Thank you so much.
[00:21:25] Mary Churchill: [00:21:25] Thank you so much.
[00:21:27] Okay, listeners, here's this week's assignment. Find out if your institution has an office or committee focused on advancing racial literacy on your campus. See what they're up to and share your story with us on Instagram, twitter or Facebook and tag us @UVenus and we'll retweet, share in our story and post on Facebook.
[00:21:45] As always, thanks for joining us and we'll be back next week with Sherri Spelic talking about listening is a form of resistance.