polish that silver

I read today the extraordinarily smug letter sent by the dean of students of the University of Chicago to the U's entering undergraduates.  Here is what I think about it.  There's a bit here that you might find hurtful or offensive, and I hope you'll understand it in the context of the events.

When I was a graduate student at the U of C,  I took a seminar about Richard Wright.  It was a pretty good course, but then pretty much any course in which you read the near-entirety of Wright's writings is likely to be pretty good.  I don't remember too much about what we talked about in the class, except that a lot of it was about media and the way Wright used media to frame the way his characters were seen and saw themselves.

I do remember one incident pretty vividly, though.  It was sometime in the middle of the course.  I don't remember what book we were reading at that point, or what the topic of discussion was.  But the professor, whom I'll leave nameless, was making a point about the way people could have multiple images of black people in their heads; could separate and compartmentalize their feelings about one black person from their different feelings about all black people.  He talked about his grandmother, who loved Cab Calloway, listened to him all the time.  And then she would turn around and tell him, "Polish that silver 'til it shines like a nigger's heel."

Well, there it was.  Some of us laughed, I think; I probably laughed.  It was a startling thing to hear.

A few class sessions later, the professor set aside his regular lesson to talk about a complaint that had been lodged against him to the dean by a student in the class.  The complaint was that the story had been told without the appropriate context.  It was told in a humorous way, and people had laughed, and the seriousness of using the word "nigger" wasn't appreciated.  He was both trying to apologize to the student who had complained, and to anyone else offended, and also explain that he hadn't meant that, and also express hurt that the student hadn't come to him directly rather than filing a complaint.  We had a discussion about it.  It wasn't very successful.  We were all guessing about who the student was, and I suspect he - if I recall, he outed himself as the complainant along the way - felt further victimized by the discussion.  I would have felt that way.  I don't think you can successfully hold a discussion that's an apology and a defense and a complaint all in one.  In any case, it was really unsatisfying for everybody, and we went through the rest of the course carrying that with us, and I suspect it was a pretty painful experience for one student in particular.

To be clear, this was a graduate course.  The student in question never struck me as someone in need of protection from difficult ideas.  To be a graduate student in English at the U of Chicago, you had to know your shit, and you had to be able to work, and you had to have a certain willingness to stand your ground.  I don't think he was someone in need of coddling.  And I don't think that was what he was asking for.  It seems to me now that maybe he was just asking for the knowledge that he could engage in rigorous debate, discussions, and even disagreements in an environment of civility and mutual respect.

I suspect, even more than me, that moment was all that he remembered.

How easy it would have been for the professor to have simply said, "My grandmother would tell me -  and I don't want to offend anyone with this language, I'm making a point as honestly as I can ..."  To have used, you know, a trigger warning.  A student might not have felt mocked, and would have learned more.  I would have learned more - at least, more about the stated purposes of the course.  We wouldn't have spent a class in a tortured discussion of race and academic protocol and suspicion and doubt.  We might have been able to get to know each other better and learn more from each others' experiences.  I don't really see what would have been wrong with that.

Then again: the U of C struck me, as I've noted before, as a place where they brought together the smartest people in the world, gave them all the resources in the world, and let them do whatever the hell they wanted without regard for the repercussions.  It's the sort of place you go if you want to invent atom bombs.  So some number of people can be glad that that place still exists.